Conference announcement:

THE POETICS OF BIOGRAPHY IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND MEDICINE

May 23-25, 2002.
Copenhagen, Denmark

An international workshop on THE POETICS OF BIOGRAPHY IN SCIENCE,
TECHNOLOGY, AND MEDICINE will take place close to Copenhagen, Denmark, May
23-25, 2002.

The impetus for the meeting is that biography has returned, after decades on
the margins, to the limelight of studies of science, technology, and
medicine. The last decade has seen many high-quality biographies of
scientists, engineers, and medical men and women. The genre has also become
the topic of reflexive attention, for example in Michael Shortland and
Richard Yeo's collection _Telling Lives: Essays on Scientific Biography_
(Cambridge University Press, 1996) and a thematic issue of the _Canadian
Bulletin of Medical History_ (vol.13, no.1, 1996).

The purpose of the three-day workshop is to bring together authors of
biographies, scholars who have reflected on the genre of biographical
writing, and scholars in adjacent areas, such as literary, philosophical,
musical, and art biography. Our hope is to address not only the writing of
biography but also how this genre stands (and has stood) in the history of
science, technology and medicine and in science studies.

The meeting will address topics such as:
+  the poetics of life writing: composition, style and rhetoric in
biographical narratives.
+  who reads scientific biography and why?
+  fiction and creative writing in biography
+  biography in the interplay between individuality and culture.
+  the place of 'personality', 'role', or 'vocation' in the history of
science, technology, and medicine.
+  the interaction between author and subject.
+  problems of autobiography and the self-construction of the subject.
+  the problem of balance between technical content and narrative flow.
+  biography and role-models: the challenge of the new virtue ethics for
telling the lives of scientists.
+  the role of eulogy, panegyrics, and commemoration in the history of
science and medicine; the cult of celebrity.
+  womens' life writing.
+  writing lives in the popular understanding of science.
+  biographical formats, e.g., obituaries, biographical dictionaries, and
monographs.
+  lives in pictures: visual representions.

We are striving to keep the meeting as informal, relaxed and varied as
possible. The total number of participants is therefore restricted to 25 and
there will be ample room for discussions after each oral presentation.

The preliminary list of speakers include: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (U
Paris), Mario Biagioli (Harvard U), Michael Bliss (U Toronto), Janet Browne
(U Coll London), Geoffrey Cantor (U Leeds), Gale E. Christianson (Indiana
State U), Jacalyn Duffin (Queen's U), Patricia Fara (Cambridge U), Christoph
Gradmann (U Heidelberg), Thomas L. Hankins (U Washington), Signe Lindskov
Hansen (U Copenhagen), Helge Kragh (Aarhus U), Ray Monk (U Southampton),
Paolo Palladino (U Lancaster), V. Betty Smocovitis (U Florida), Margit
Szöllösi-Janze (U München), Thomas Söderqvist (U Copenhagen), and Richard
Yeo (Griffith U),

We are inviting another 5-10 participants to send in paper proposals for
consideration. We are especially interested in proposals from scholars at
the postgraduate/postdoc level.

A 500 word abstract should be sent before 15 August 2001 to:

Thomas Söderqvist
Department of History of Medicine, University of Copenhagen
Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen, Denmark
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Accepted participants will be notified before the end of October 2001. Full
accomodation will be provided for all participants. In addition we will be
able to provide travel stipends to cover part of the costs for economy
travel for those participants who cannot obtain funds from their own
institutions.

Accepted participants will be asked to write a draft paper (2000-5000 words)
to be sent in before 15 March 2002 to allow precirculation among the
participants before the meeting.

Program Committee:

Janet Browne
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
University College London, UK

Geoffrey Cantor
Division of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Leeds, UK

Thomas Söderqvist
Department of History of Medicine
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Richard Yeo
School of Humanities,
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia