The Gwillim Project, based at McGill University Library in Montreal, Canada, brought together an international multidisciplinary network to examine the works of two English sisters who arrived in Madras in 1801. Elizabeth Gwillim (1763-1807) and her sister Mary Symonds (1772-1854) produced over two hundred watercolours depicting birds, fish, flowers, people, and landscapes around Madras (now Chennai) as well as four volumes of descriptive letters. Beginning in 2019, scholars, students, librarians, archivists, scientists, and curators read the sisters’ letters, examined their paintings, and engaged in animated online and in person conversations about natural history, art, food, fashion, and colonialism. The book Women, Environment and Networks of Empire, Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds in Madras, published by McGill Queens University Press in 2023, grew out of these conversations. The success of the project is directly attributable to the generosity of the members of the research network who worked together to understand our relationships with each other and with the natural world.
Victoria Dickenson PhD FCMA FLS (top right) is a retired museum director and curator. She has a PhD in the history of science (Carleton 1995) and has published extensively in the history of natural history, in natural and cultural histories of animals and plants, and in material culture. She is currently Professor of Practice, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill Library, and the Principal Investigator for the Gwillim Project (2019-2023).
Anna Winterbottom PhD works on the history of medicine, science, and environment with a focus on the early modern Indian Ocean region and the European colonial presence there. She is the author of Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (2016) and co-editor of Histories of Medicine in the Indian Ocean World (2015), The East India Company and the Natural World (2014), and Women, Environment and Networks of Empire (2023). She is the Research Associate for the Gwillim Project, and principal editor for Women, Environment and Networks of Empire.
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