A visit today to Kathleen Quillian’s studio, where she’s prepping her materials for an animation based on the writings and travels of Mary Kingsley. Kingsley is one of my favorites of these Victorian women – she had an insatiable hunger for knowledge, and besides discovering a bunch of new West African fish species (yeah, I’m actually a lapsed ichthyologist), she was a self-styled ethnographer (and also a lapsed ethnomusicologist), and wrote eloquently of the need for Westerners to learn about and understand the customs of native people on their own terms.