MACMILLAN Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations

This book investigates the historical construction of scholarly personae by integrating a spectrum of recent perspectives from the history and cultural studies of knowledge and institutions. Focusing on gender and embodiment, the contributors analyse the situated performance of scholarly identity and its social and intellectual contexts and consequences. Disciplinary cultures, scholarly practices, personal habits, and a range of social, economic, and political circumstances shape the people and formations of modern scholarship.  Featuring  a foreword by Ludmilla Jordanova,  G ender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations is of interest to historians, sociologists, media and culture scholars, and all those with a stake in the personal dimensions of scholarship. An international group of scholars present original examinations of travel, globalisation, exchange, training, evaluation, self-representation, institution-building, norm-setting, virtue-defining, myth-making, and other gendered and embodied modes and mechanisms of scholarly persona-work. These accounts nuance and challenge existing understandings of the relationship between knowledge and identity. Review “Being a scholar or scientist has always been a way of being in the world, never just a job. This highly readable collection of essays explores how (and how not) to become the very model of a mathematician or a historian or a naturalist. Forget white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses: as this book shows in vivid detail, assuming a learned persona can shape bodies as well as minds, characters as well as costumes.” ― Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany From the Back Cover This book investigates the historical construction of scholarly personae by integrating a spectrum of recent perspectives from the history and cultural studies of knowledge and institutions. Focusing on gender and embodiment, the contributors analyse the situated performance of scholarly identity and its social and intellectual contexts and consequences. Disciplinary cultures, scholarly practices, personal habits, and a range of social, economic, and political circumstances shape the people and formations of modern scholarship.  G ender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations is of interest to historians, sociologists, media and culture scholars, and all those with a stake in the personal dimensions of scholarship. An international group of scholars present original examinations of travel, globalisation, exchange, training, evaluation, self-representation, institution-building, norm-setting, virtue-defining, myth-making, and other gendered and embodied modes and mechanisms of scholarly persona-work. These accounts nuance and challenge existing understandings of the relationship between knowledge and identity. About the Author Kirsti Niskanen is Professor Emeritus of History in the Department of History at Stockholm University, Sweden, and principal investigator of the Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters project.  Michael J. Barany is Lecturer in the History of Science in the Science, Technology & Innovation Studies subject group at the University of Edinburgh, UK.