Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Edited by
Kirsti Niskanen · Michael J. Barany
Gender, Embodiment, and the History
of the Scholarly Persona
“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
“This is a book we have been waiting for, especially scholars who are concerned
with the historical field of scholarly and scientific persona studies. The spec-
trum of case studies excavate how scholarly personae are embodied in gendered
behaviours and performances on individual and institutional levels, in scholarly
practices, academic cultures, self-representations, and in habits of living. With its
conceptual coherence, thematic variation, and focus on gender and masculinities,
this is a book that we have missed in the international research literature, and it
will undoubtedly be a standard reference in the field.”
—Mineke Bosch, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
“Through its authors’ and editors’ rich, varied and intersecting research, this is
a remarkable historical inquiry into scholarly persona. The various case studies in
each chapter reveal the often nationalized and gendered embodiment of scholarly
and scientific identity and its formation of public display in the nineteenth and
twentieth century. It is a valuable contribution to persona studies more widely
and scientific persona directly.”
—David Marshall, Deakin University, Australia
Kirsti Niskanen · Michael J. Barany
Editors
Gender, Embodiment,
and the History
of the Scholarly
Persona
Incarnations and Contestations
Editors
Kirsti Niskanen Michael J. Barany
Department of History Science, Technology
Stockholm University and Innovation Studies
Stockholm, Sweden University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Foreword: Persona’s Potential
v
vi FOREWORD: PERSONA’S POTENTIAL
Ludmilla Jordanova
Durham University
Durham, UK
Acknowledgements
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
space to undertake the final editorial stages for this book. The corre-
sponding phases of Michael Barany’s editing included time at the Franke
Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago.
Special thanks are due to Rebecca Ahlfeldt and Sophie Buijsen for their
attentive and perceptive work on the index and chapter editing.
Contents
xi
xii CONTENTS
Index 349
Notes on Contributors
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES
Incarnating Scholarship
That scholars are people and ‘scholar’ is an identity rank among the most
simultaneously banal and profound observations one can make about
modern scholarship. Large, resource-intensive, multi-layered systems of
national and international education and accreditation have combined
across modern history to fashion particular kinds of people for scholar-
ship’s particular activities and roles. Making a scholar is both an individual
project, entailing training and discipline, and a cultural and institutional
project shaping a field of behaviours and socialities that define the condi-
tions of knowledge production and the reach, credibility, and meaning of
the knowledge so produced. The personal and sociocultural embedding of
scholarship become, in this view, elements of a theory of knowledge and
K. Niskanen (B)
Department of History, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: kirsti.niskanen@historia.su.se
M. J. Barany
Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, UK
e-mail: michael@mbarany.com
society, connecting who one is to what and how one knows in intricate
and far-reaching configurations.
Several decades into the so-called cultural turn, attention to the
imbrication of social and scientific contexts and associated questions
about identity formation, scholarly communities, public engagements,
and research practices continue to repay the attention of historians of
science and knowledge. Gender, race, class, and other signifiers of iden-
tity and social order have been shown indispensable to accounts of the
production, acceptance, and mobilization of knowledge claims in and
beyond traditional settings of scholarship.1 Historians have both partic-
ularized the operation of identity and culture in scholarship through
concrete studies of specific contexts and traced such operations across
contexts to understand broader patterns and structures in the social
production of knowledge.
Such research operates in the maw of an apparent paradox, that
scholarship and knowledge production are precisely processes of system-
atic disembodiment, depersonification, and universalization of locally and
personally produced articulations. Scholars work deliberately and persis-
tently to develop understandings that add to an edifice of knowledge that
in principle stands on its own. Reading personae back into knowledge
would seem, therefore, to deny the very essence of what scholarship is,
even to deny the possibility of scholarly (as opposed to situated, personal)
knowledge. This volume takes that challenge to heart, finding in the
embodied and gendered cultural matrix of scholarship not its immanent
undoing but its very conditions of possibility, in all their paradoxical rich-
ness. Here, we join a rich tradition of feminist scholarship that locates
critical potential in the situated identities of knowledge producers.2
We take special heed of the multifarious mediation of personae between
individual lives and scholarly and scientific institutions. Personae are
performed, lived, felt, and validated in such interstices, expressed in iden-
tities like ‘scientist’, ‘historian’, ‘mathematician’, ‘doctor’, ‘mentor’, or
‘student’. This bond between personae and identification underwrites
Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum’s 2003 definition of a scientific (or
scholarly) persona as “a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the
individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and
recognizable physiognomy”.3 Daston and Sibum resisted a comprehen-
sive conceptualization of the term but emphasized that a persona—even
when it is studied on an individual level—is something distinct from
an individual biography, occupying social scales and connecting people
1 INTRODUCTION: THE SCHOLAR INCARNATE 3
far beyond the individual under inquiry. They compared the study of
the personal element in science with the work of botanists, as “piecing
together a type specimen that represents a class rather than any particular
individual”.4 Such typification and its recognition, crucially, happens both
in contexts of personification themselves and in analytic settings such as
Daston’s, Sibum’s, and ours where they are studied. Persona studies, like
persona constructions, are acts of situated (critical) reproduction.
To produce scholarship is necessarily to be, in some fashion, a scholar.
Conversely, scholarly productions hinge on the production of scholarly
selves. Building on Steven Shapin’s discussions linking researchers’ iden-
tity and the social credit accorded to their scientific claims, Mineke Bosch
has defined the scholarly persona as the creation of a credible and reli-
able scholarly identity based on existing repertoires and discourses of
knowledge production.5 In A Social History of Truth, Shapin analysed
conditions that lead a society to accept statements as truths and showed
how constructions of scientific truths irreducibly depend on systems of
trust embedded in prevailing social structures and the individual identities
they make possible and meaningful. For Shapin, the identity of ‘gentle-
man’ crucially underwrote the truth claims of early members of the Royal
Society of London, positioning them as neutral and objective arbiters of
universal facts from within the tightly controlled, exclusive, and socially
regimented sphere of upper-class English sociability.6
Based on Shapin’s analysis of Robert Boyle’s biography and literary
scholar Elisabeth Wesseling´s discussion of the American psychologist
Judith Rich Harris’s scientific persona, Bosch asked: What is the rela-
tionship between the creation of scientific knowledge and the bearer of
knowledge, and how is recognition as a legitimate and credible scholar
embedded in social categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, and reli-
gious affiliation?7 Since knowledge is borne by people of flesh and blood,
the credibility of scientific statements depends on the credibility that the
individual manages to incorporate into his or her person, situated in time
and space. To acquire and inhabit a persona is a performative act, Bosch
notes, invoking the microsociological framings of Erving Goffman and
critical gender studies of Judith Butler.8 Bodies are necessary to such
performance, both constraining and opening possibilities, but they do
not determine the performance in themselves. In order to gain and retain
recognition, the individual scholar must repeatedly present him- or herself
as a credible and reliable member of the scholarly community.9 It is
not enough to be a knowing body, one must make oneself legible as
4 K. NISKANEN AND M. J. BARANY
such, often changing in the process the terms of one’s own embodiment
and corporeal experience. This view of persona and performance can be
turned back outward to the stage of institutions, with collective cultural
images and situated personal legibilities granting analytic purchase on the
co-construction of institutions and personae.10
If one instead emphasizes identity in the contexts of disciplinarity
and historical epistemology, a related but distinct orientation to schol-
arly personae connects practices of disciplined scholarly selves to scholarly
validation and contestation. Herman Paul has, thus, asked “what does
it take to be scholar”—in his case a historian—and developed a more
specific understanding of the concept ‘scholarly persona’ or ‘scholarly self’
as a set of discipline-specific virtues and skills that disciplinary formations
enact as necessary for one to work and to be recognized as an academic
historian.11 In a recent publication, Paul conceptualizes the persona on
three levels: at an individual level (as a performance), a collective level
(as shared templates), and an intermediate level linking the two.12 This
“middle-range position between the biographical and the social” permits
Paul to treat the persona as a hermeneutic concept to ask what a scholar
should be, in specific disciplinary contexts, to produce reliable knowl-
edge.13 Besides epistemic virtues and skills, the persona in this light
includes the scholar’s behaviour, habits, talents, and character. Different
persona models have been created in varying scholarly and disciplinary
contexts, and these models have been challenged, modified, and adopted,
with different ideological and sociocultural factors influencing the shaping
of scholarly personae.
Within a wide field of research on historical identities and the history
of knowledge and practice, in conversation with contemporary cultural
studies of science, we see the history of scholarly personae as occupying a
vital space in cultural theories of science and scholarship. To understand
scholarship as a distinctive human product achieved through distinctive
social forms, we find it necessary and instructive to trace the embedded
and embodied identities that make scholarship possible and powerful as
such. Scientific and scholarly personae demand our attention as regula-
tory ideals, models, performances, and regimes of action by mediating
practices of knowledge that suppress or deny their intrinsic dependence
on both personal selves and collective organizations. These characteristic
specimens of modernity show us what it means to be and to know.
1 INTRODUCTION: THE SCHOLAR INCARNATE 5
skills to create a persona was, however, not open to all: it was built on
inclusions and exclusions of individuals and groups, based on categories
such as gender and race.
kultusza
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Language: Hungarian
A KONTÁRSÁG KULTUSZA
BUDAPEST, 1919
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT
MAGYAR IROD. INTÉZET ÉS KÖNYVNYOMDA
KIADÁSA
A KONTÁRSÁG KULTUSZA
ÍRTA
FAGUET EMIL
Í É É
FORDÍTOTTA ÉS JEGYZETEKKEL KISÉRTE
Dr SZÁNTHÓ GYULA
BUDAPEST, 1919
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT
MAGYAR IROD. INTÉZET ÉS KÖNYVNYOMDA
KIADÁSA
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT NYOMDÁJA.
A FORDÍTÓ ELŐSZAVA.
A KORMÁNYFORMÁK ALAPELVEI.