Writing about Lives in Science

(Auto)Biography, Gender, and Genre

Paola Govoni, Zelda Alice Franceschi

• Publisher: V&R unipress
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783847002635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History Reference
• Index: History

Following discussions on scientific biography carried out over the past few decades, this book proposes a kaleidoscopic survey of the uses of biography as a tool to understand science and its context. It offers food for thought on the role played by the gender of the biographer and the biographee in the process of writing. To provide orientation in such a challenging field, some of the authors have accepted to write about their own professional experience while reflecting on the case studies they have been working on. Focusing on (auto)biography may help us to build bridges between different approaches to men and women's lives in science. The authors belong to a variety of academic and professional fields, including the history of science, anthropology, literary studies, and science journalism. The period covered spans from 1732, when Laura Bassi was the first woman to get a tenured professorship of physics, to 2009, when Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider were the first women's team to have won a Nobel Prize in science.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Body
• Paola Govoni: Crafting Scientific (Auto)‌Biographies
• Part I Between Biography and Autobiography
• Evelyn Fox Keller: Pot-holes Everywhere: How (not) to Read my Biography of Barbara McClintock
• Londa Schiebinger: Following the Story: From The Mind Has No Sex? to Gendered Innovations
• Georgina Ferry: Telling Stories or Making History? Two Lives in X-ray Crystallography
• Part II Shaping Biographies
• Marta Cavazza: The Biographies of Laura Bassi
• Paula Findlen: Listening to the Archives: Searching for the Eighteenth-Century Women of Science
• Massimo Mazzotti: Rethinking Scientific Biography: The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi
• Part III Networking
• Vita Fortunati: Mirror Shards: Conflicting Images between Marie Curie's Autobiography and her Biographies
• Zelda Alice Franceschi: Women in the Field: Writing the History. Genealogies and Science in Margaret Mead's Autobiographical Writings
• Paola Govoni: The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the `Two Cultures' Home Laboratory
• Pnina G. Abir-Am: Women Scientists of the 1970s: An Ego-Histoire of a Lost Generation
• Afterword
• Zelda Alice Franceschi: On the Margins of the Margins: Awareness and Delay
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments