biography

I’m participating with a paper titled “The material life-course of a scientist” at workshop ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ to be held at Science Museum, London, on 18 July. There are many things I would like to take issue with in this call for papers: Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of […]

I’ve had this call for papers for the ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ workshop at Science Museum on 18 July laying on my desktop for months: The lived life serves as an organising principle across disciplines. We talk of the biographies of things and places, and we use personal narratives […]

Why write about the life and work of contemporary biomedical and life scientists? What is the use of the genre of biography for understanding contemporary biomedicine? Is it just history by other means, or does biography writing have other uses as well? In an article titled “The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of Bioi of Contemporary Life […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit’s essay on the distinction between discovery and understanding as two separate modes of scientific work, which, he suggested, are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course — young researchers are impatient to discover something new, whereas older scientists are more interested in getting insight, he suggested. Even more interesting, in […]

I just received a call for papers from Craig Howes — the indefatigable promoter of all-things-biographical at the University of Hawaii — for an international conference on ‘Aesthetic Lives’ at the Université Montpellier, 23-24 September 2011. The preamble is alluring: In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: ‘They are great and […]

Last winter, I was invited to contribute to a thematic issue (edited by Oren Harman) on scientific biography for the Journal of the History of Biology.  I decided to revisit and revise a genre analysis I had written a couple of years earlier and the result is an article titled ‘The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of bioi of contemporary […]

Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector? Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the […]

I think first-person accounts — that is, acccounts about oneself and one’s relation to the world told in ‘I’-form, as opposed to accounts of ‘you’, ‘he/she’ or ‘they’ — are fascinating. Such accounts tell something about the people who produce them and they also reveal much about their authors’ relations to others and the culture and environment they live in. […]

A new book titled Transnational Lives (eds., Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) discusses how the transnationalism of lives “threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography”. As the editors point out in the blurb, nationality has been determined by “complex combinations of birthplace, […]

Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London. The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and […]