Persona and the Performance of Identity Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative

Bosch, Mineke

doi:10.7767/lhomme.2013.24.2.11

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…My understanding of persona is slightly different, as I use it in the context of biography. In this, I follow historians of science such as Mineke Bosch and Elisabeth Wesseling, who foregrounded the role of gender and other categories of difference in constituting a scientific or scholarly persona (Bosch 2013;Bosch 2016;Wesseling 2003). I am similarly inspired by the work of Steven Shapin (1994), who argued that the performance of a dependable scientific self was a matter of bricolage involving many different roles and repertoires from both inside as well as outside academia.…”

Section: Scholarly Personamentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

Wal

2018

Pers Stud

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British medieval historian Eileen Power (1889-1940) was one of Britain's most eminent female historians of the first half of the twentieth century. Becoming professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in 1931, Power gained academic recognition to a degree that was difficult for women to obtain in this period. Numerous writings on Power discuss 1920-1921, when she travelled around the world as an Albert-Kahn fellow, as a formative year in her career indicating the importance of travel for achieving scholarly success. In contrast, no attention has been paid to the significance of Power's first academic journey in 1910-1911, when she spent a year in Paris. This stay abroad would however be equally decisive since it was then that she decided to pursue a career in history and become a professional scholar in the medieval discipline. However, at this time, women were not self-evident scholars but rather considered amateurs, even if they had an academic degree. Therefore, the main question in this article is whether and how Power started to build up her scholarly persona while in Paris, trying to overcome her amateur status, to be seen and recognized as a credible, trustworthy scholar. To do so, I analyse two types of personal writing namely Power's diary and letters to her close friend Margery Garrett. Employing the concept of 'autobiographical performativity', I consider these writings as performative acts that help us gain valuable insight into Eileen Power's persona formation during the early stages of her career.

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Section: Scholarly Personamentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

Wal

2018

Pers Stud

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“…Research on the histories of scholarly personas has given us exciting insights into how culturally and socially bound expectations affect who could participate in research and academic debate and the consequences this selection of participants has had on what knowledge is produced and accepted as relevant and true (Daston & Sibum 2003;Paul 2016;Bosch 2013). The aim of this article is to contribute to these discussions by asking how objects of study were used in persona formation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing a folklorist’s persona in the field: How defining the object of study defines the scholar

Svanfeldt-Winter

2018

Pers Stud

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In this article, I approach negotiations of belonging by studying the relationship between folklorists and their informants. I examine how young Finnish folklorists on their first collection journeys in the early 1920s positioned themselves as scholars by stressing both their identification with and their differences from the informants. The discipline's high status as a "national science" required the collectors to approach the locals as carriers of a national heritage shared between the collectors and informants On the other hand, the pursuit of scholarly acknowledgement urged the scholars to emphasize their position as experts who could evaluate the authenticity and academic relevance of the information offered by the locals. One effective way to do so was to highlight a temporal distance between the describer and the described, placing the informants in an earlier time of lower social and cultural development than the scholar. I discuss how the alternation between identification and difference can be interpreted as a means for the scholars to negotiate their places in their academic community and to form feasible scholarly personae within it. The article places special focus on how the young collectors performed this negotiation by describing informants in their correspondences with student friends and cooperating to find shared ways of approaching the informants in acceptable ways according to their discipline.

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“…5 Researchers were slow to focus more attention on the gendered character of the scientific or scholarly persona, although some did point out its affinity to feminist theories on the construction of gendered identities, which have been elaborated since the 1980s. 6 That said, the persona concept appears to be a useful tool in understanding the gender regimes of academic life. The concept helps to reveal implicit and explicit norms and templates of certain academic communities and allows us to analyse otherwise hidden forms of inclusion and exclusion.…”

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confidence: 99%

Introduction: Knowledge Making, Everyday Life, and Gendered Scientific/Scholarly Personae

Gehmacher¹,

Niskanen²,

Prager³

2022

EJLW

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Building on the growing literature on academic households and creative couples, this special issue aims to contribute to these discussions by taking a closer look at the connection between knowledge production, everyday life, and scientific and scholarly personae. This introductory article explains the concept of persona as a mediating link between individual biographies and social institutions and contextualizes the issue of academic and non-academic support for scientists and scholars. The chapter also introduces the five articles in the special issue that examine and discuss the lives and collaborative work of creative individuals from the late 19th to the late 20th century.

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Persona and the Performance of Identity Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power's early career persona formation and her year in Paris, 1910-1911

Writing a folklorist’s persona in the field: How defining the object of study defines the scholar

Introduction: Knowledge Making, Everyday Life, and Gendered Scientific/Scholarly Personae

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