Description

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The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century. 

About the Author

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Bernard Lightman is distinguished research professor in the Humanities Department at York University and past president of the History of Science Society. He is the editor of Rethinking History and Science and Religion and coeditor of Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Identity in a Secular Age. He also serves as a general editor for The Correspondence of John Tyndall and the Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series at the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

Efram Sera-Shriar is a historical anthropologist who specializes in Victorian science. He is associate professor in English studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he teaches the history and culture of the English-speaking world. Sera-Shriar is the author of Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age and The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871 and senior editor for The Correspondence of John Tyndall series. 

Praise For…

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“From our twenty-first century vantage point, it may appear that the Victorians drew up and abided by the firm disciplinary boundaries that we work within today. But the close and nuanced reading in this volume reveals a messier, mobile, and more interesting nineteenth-century ecology of Western knowledge. Exploring both consensus and contest, Lightman and Sera-Shriar have assembled a cadre of leading and emerging scholars to unpack interdisciplinary ways of knowing via a range of scientists, sites, and media. At times surprising and otherwise challenging, Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences is always engaging.” 

—Samuel Alberti, National Museums Scotland 

“This collection of essays provides a comprehensive, varied, and highly readable account of how the nascent disciplines of nineteenth-century science were regularly brought together into new intellectual configurations. As such, the volume provides a welcome corrective to the customary emphasis on the academic specialization that seemed to otherwise characterize the period.” 

—Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester