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Events

Our Container Lab

Mission 1: Palm Leaf Profilers

Taking a look behind the scenes of a multi-layered scientific endeavour: ‘Our Container Lab. Mission 1: Palm Leaf Profilers’ follows the laboratory containers and our researchers on their journey to India, where they want to figure out the provenance of the historic manuscripts of Tamil Nadu.

Photo: Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson

Logbook: The CSMC Blog

‘We Exist in the Gaps Between these Fixed Identities’

In the medium of writing, language takes on a visual, rule-based form. Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson’s calligraphic art defies these rules and questions the boundaries between different kinds of script – and with them the self-image of their users. In early 2025, she is Artist in Residence at the CSMC.

Artefact of the Month

‘Then We Entered a House of Glass, and in it was a Garden.’

An Account of the Emir of Katsina’s Visit to Kew Gardens

The Miscellaneous Collection Reports (MCR) in the Library & Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, west of London, consist of almost every kind of archival document imaginable. Among them is an extraordinary single-leaf letter of only 13 lines that bears witness to the unlikely association of two very different botanic traditions.

Photo: Library & Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens

CSMC Film

What does it mean to do research on written artefacts? Employing concrete examples, this video gives an introduction to the work of scholars and scientists at CSMC.