An upstairs room in the Study Centre, formerly used as part of the Master’s flat, has been repurposed to house a dedicated collection of Darwin publications.
The room brings together the works of Sir Charles Darwin and his descendants, as well as books on Darwin and the wider family.
It centres around the Burkhardt Collection, donated to the College by Honorary Fellow Professor Janet Browne, Darwin biographer and Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. Dr Frederick Burkhardt and his wife, Anne Schlabach Burkhardt, conceived the Darwin Correspondence Project in 1974. Over the next 40 years the couple located all the letters written to and by Charles Darwin on a global scale, and published complete transcripts in chronological order.
After Anne’s death in 2012 the Burkhardt Collection was donated to the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. In 2023, on Professor Browne’s retirement and with the support of the Burkhardt family, it was agreed that the donation should be transferred to Darwin College, as a valuable reference library for scholars of Darwin and Victorian science more broadly.
Books from the Burkhardt Collection may be consulted by appointment with the library.
