The 2009 John C. Burnham Award Committee is delighted to award this year's prize to Stéphanie Dupouy for her essay “Darwin, Observer of Expressions.” In her persuasive, original, and clearly argued essay she presents a nuanced picture of Darwin’s strategy in his 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, challenging the received wisdom that Darwin’s book constitutes an evolutional ‘break’ in the study of emotional expression. Dupouy notes that this conventional interpretation is not only complicated by Darwin’s lack of discussion of natural selection, but more pointedly argues that Darwin’s originality lies in his rejection of a sentimentalist account of expression. This sentimentalist view, common to much nineteenth century scientific writing on the emotions, understood expression as the privileged and uniquely human manifestation of the interior or intimate self. For Darwin, however, sublime or elevated human emotions were either not conveyed in expressive gestures, or were, as Dupouy puts it, “ironic remnants of our animal origins.” Dupouy also sees Darwin’s treatise as marking a methodological break from his forebears in his reliance on particular observations for study, his use of photographic evidence, and his rejection of imagination, memory, and sympathy for the scientific study of emotions. Dupouy reads Darwin’s private notebooks in concert with the published text of the Expression of the Emotions, and places Darwin’s work within the rich context of early nineteenth century scientific and aesthetic writings on the expression of the emotions, including the work of anatomists Louis-Jacques Moreau de la Sarthe, Charles Bell, and Louis-Pierre Gratiolet. Dupouy’s close reading, comprehensive engagement with the historiography, and compelling presentation of her analysis made this essay a pleasure to read.
Stéphanie Dupouy is Instructor, Department of Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
2009 Burnham committee: Susan Lanzoni (chair), Daniela Barberis, Mark Solovey