After receiving his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton, Rick Wright was Assistant Professor of German at the University of Illinois, Reader in Art and Archeology at Princeton, and Associate Professor of Medieval Studies at Fordham. He was an editor for the American Birding Association’s magazine, Birding, and then the editor of its newsletter, Winging It. His many articles and book reviews have appeared in both publications and in numerous others. From 2008 to 2010, he was managing director of the bird tour company WINGS and has long been a senior leader for the company, guiding trips in North America and Europe, many of which focus on art and history as well as birds. He writes of his talk, “At the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris, Napoleon III and Eugenie paid the jeweler Leon Rouvenat more than 25,000 francs for a hummingbird brooch of emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds. Soon every wealthy lady was wearing hummingbird jewelry, either crafted of precious metals and jewels or made from bits and pieces of the real thing. This act of imperial extravagance stands in a long Gallic tradition of fascination with hummingbirds, starting in the sixteenth century and continuing through the end of the nineteenth, when Parisian dealers imported and sold Trochilid skins by the hundreds of thousands. I will explore the social, political, and scientific meanings of hummingbirds in French culture over the ages, venturing some surprising insights into how, as Elliott Coues put it, these New World birds came ‘to suit the national genius’ and to provide ‘objects of study peculiarly agreeable to French ornithologists’ and emperors alike.”
