Call for Papers: The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies

Organiser: Dr Boris Jardine (Science Museum, Curator of History of

Science)

Commentator: Prof. Ludmilla Jordanova (Chair in Modern History, King's

College London)

Date: 18 July 2013

Location: The Science Museum, London, United Kingdom

To coincide with the close of the biographical exhibition Codebreaker:

Alan Turing's Life and Legacy, the Science Museum invites participation

in a one-day workshop on the role of biography in science studies.

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?

We invite contributions on, but not limited to, the following:

*Literary techniques in biographical narrative

*Non-human biographies (buildings, objects, ideas)

*Autobiography

*Fictional biography

*The importance of scientific heroes in science communication

*The role of biography in collaborative and 'big' science

*Biographies as archetypes: the life scientific

*Discontinuities in working and intellectual lives

*The role of 'industries' (Darwin, Newton etc)

*The relation of named archives to historical projects.

Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2013.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, for a talk of 20

minutes, as an e-mail attachment along with your name, institutional

affiliation and email address to research@sciencemuseum.ac.uk. All

enquiries should also be sent to this address.

Conecta.