Innes Lecture 2026

The Innes Lecture series consists of an annual talk on the history of science, with themes that have synergies with John Innes Centre research past and present. These evening lectures are open to the public, and accompanied by a display of related items from the John Innes Historic Collections.

This year's speaker is food historian Professor Rebecca Earle from the University of Warwick who will be talking about her research into the potato. There will also be a chance to learn about related science happening at the John Innes Centre.

This is a public lecture open to all.

‘The Potato: between science and peasant knowledge’

"The peasant is characterised by a deep-rooted inertia; he accepts progress only when someone has forced him out of his inaction by demonstrating the improvement to him dozens of times. Only then will he risk trying it himself. His limited vision inclines him to exaggerate the merits of plants that he has cultivated successfully in the past."

So opined the French physician and journalist Amédée Dechambre in 1877. His portrait of the peasant farmer as a hopeless conservative, suspicious of new crops and hopelessly wedded to archaic agricultural practices, reflects an enduring perception.

This talk challenges that perception, drawing together both historical and more recent evidence that peasant farmers have in fact been an important source of agronomic innovation, using the history of the potato as a red thread. It advocates both the importance of paying attention to historical evidence of peasant contributions to agricultural innovation when considering today’s concerns about biodiversity and food security, and the applicability of modern knowledge about the behaviour of small farmers to our analysis of the past.

Professor Rebecca Earle

Rebecca Earle teaches history at the University of Warwick. She is currently writing about what we can learn from cookbooks (other than how to cook), as well as researching the surprising and consequential last voyage of the Santiago Apostol, a Spanish ship captured (twice) in 1793. A further project explores the circulation around early-modern Europe of artworks from colonial Spanish America.

Tea and biscuits 18:00, lecture begins at 18:30.