(Call for Papers for a thematic section in Studia Historiae Scientiarum 2018, guest edited by Iwona Dadej and Jan Surman)
At least from the moment Pierre Bourdieu criticized the „biographical illusion” as the underlying facet of the genre, writing of biography took a new turn trying to underscore the narrativity of the genre. Researchers from various disciplines scrutinized the idea of biography, concentrating on various ways of constructing stories, gendered, defined by social or cultural status, situated. On the other hand biographical turn claimed biography as a privileged way of describing knots of different power relations, using methods borrowed from microhistory.
History of science has a complex relationship with biographies, since the beginning of the discipline grounds in the research on famous (male, white) scholars. With this epoch gone, biographical research remains at the core of HPS, from biographies of (famous, but now both male and female) scholars, biographies of couples, or even spaces like laboratories or empires. Biographies of single scholars has been a privileged field to discuss and question the hierarchies in situ, in places of knowledge making. Couples biographies sensibilized us to how much this process was shaped by gender roles, be they rigid or subverted. Collective biographies showed generational commonalities, or complexities of work in institutions. In short, the biographical turn has proven its utmost productivity, if combined with questions of power, gender roles and relations, etc.
Our special section inquiries into different connections between biographies and history of scientific knowledge in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, from the onset of scholarly professionalization up to nowadays. We encourage especially submissions discussing the peculiarities of scholarly biographies the region as well as comparative studies. We are particularly interested in biographies of scholarly couples, parallel and comparative biographies, collective biographies as well as biographies of scholars considered on a fringe, socially-, culturally-, gender- etc. wise.
We invite the submission of abstracts on the questions and topics raised above. Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical sketch to jan.surman@gmail.com and Iwona.Dadej@web.de.
The editors will ask the authors of selected papers to submit their final articles no later than September 1. 2019. The articles will be published after a peer-review process.
Studia Historiae Scientiarum is a peer-reviewed, diamond open access journal devoted to the history of science. For more information visit: http://www.ejournals.eu/Studia-Historiae-Scientiarum/ .
The deadline for the submission of abstracts: March 31th 2019.