Joanna Picciotto is writing a dissertation that focuses on the rise of a new literary type: the professional observer. Picciotto, a graduate student in English, entitles her study Literary and Scientific Experimentalism in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England. She argues that the construction of the observer was part of a wider cultural movement that she calls “experimentalism” and that the latter represents the appropriation of rituals governing experimental observation— microscopy and dissection particularly— in order to lay claim to an experimental space from which both nature and the contemporary scene could be seen anew.