The material life-course of a scientist: are biographical exhibitions possible?

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 to give shape to history. Biography is central to historians’ work but often unacknowledged and untheorised: it is used to inspire and to set examples, and to order our thinking about the world, but is a primarily a literary mode; biographies written for popular audiences provide material for the most abstruse work across disciplines; and the canon of well-known lives dictates fashions in research. For historians of science, technology and medicine this is a particularly pressing issue: their discipline is founded on the ‘great men’ account of discovery and advance, and, though that has long since been discarded, the role of the individual in historical narratives has not diminished, and heroic tales have themselves become a legitimate subject of inquiry. For writers and researchers in other fields, the question remains: how do the lives of individuals intersect with cultural trends and collective enterprise? It has been laying there since November because there are so many different things in it I would like to take issue with: - Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of biography long overdue? - Does the notion of ‘bi...
Source: Biomedicine on Display - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Tags: biography draft papers etc individuality seminars Source Type: blogs