This article analyses an unpublished (auto)biographical account by Astri Runnström, wife of the internationally renowned Swedish zoologist John Runnström (1888-1971). Runnström pioneered his research area in Sweden, experimental zoology and cellular physiology. His research was based on long, recurring stays at marine biological stations in Sweden and abroad. Astri Runnström (1897-1978) accompanied her husband on these stays and worked as an assistant in his laboratory, without compensation and without ever gaining recognition in the creation of his successful career. I argue that Astri Runnström’s biography on John can be read as an autobiographical narrative, with the aim of negotiating Astri a place in her husband’s scientific legacy. Astri Runnström’s textual strategy was to create a joint scientific persona for the two of them and present marriage as an epistemic relationship, without which John Runnström’s scientific achievements would not have been possible to carry out.

This book investigates the historical construction of scholarly personae by integrating a spectrum of recent perspectives from the history and cultural studies of knowledge and institutions. Focusing on gender and embodiment, the contributors analyse the situated performance of scholarly identity and its social and intellectual contexts and consequences. Disciplinary cultures, scholarly practices, personal habits, and a range of social, economic, and political circumstances shape the people and formations of modern scholarship. Featuring a foreword by Ludmilla Jordanova, Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations is of interest to historians, sociologists, media and culture scholars, and all those with a stake in the personal dimensions of scholarship. An international group of scholars present original examinations of travel, globalisation, exchange, training, evaluation, self-representation, institution-building, norm-setting, virtue-defining, myth-making, and other gendered and embodied modes and mechanisms of scholarly persona-work. These accounts nuance and challenge existing understandings of the relationship between knowledge and identity.

After introducing the volume’s animating questions about identity and scholarship, the editors situate the volume’s contributions in recent efforts to define and understand the scholarly persona. This volume emphasizes gender and corporeality in such analyses, with each part of the volume considering these themes from a different perspective. The first part focuses on the role of funding bodies, transnational mobilizations and institutions in the creation of gendered scholarly personae. The second examines corporeal and incorporeal elements’ manifestations (and absences) of bodies in academic self-conceptions and presentations. The third treats co-constructions of scholarly personae and academic masculinities in various disciplinary contexts. The editors conclude by suggesting new dimensions to historical studies of scholarly personae opened up or reimagined by this volume’s approach. These include the role of the go-betweens of the post-postcolonial global studies in the study of knowledge circulation and academic self-conceptions, scholarly personae and the power of the professorial voice, and the role that new forms of subjectivity, embodiment and contested masculinities played in the shaping of new academic disciplines during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This article uses the career of an individual scholar as a platform to explore the complex relationship between knowledge and the persona of the knower. During his career between the 1920s and the 1940s, the Swedish philosopher Einar Tegen (1884–1965) shifted the trajectory of his academic life from a solitary thinker, focused on seclusion, introspection, and detachment from the outer world, to a pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship and an academic public intellectual. The article analyses the masculinity constructions that were associated to these knowledge positions, how the gendered relationships of private life modified Tegen’s scholarly persona, and the role of travel and international exchanges in the shaping of scholarly self-conceptions.

American private foundations played a special role in the internationalization of European social science research during the inter-war years. Especially the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) brought forward its reform-oriented vision of the social sciences by awarding large grants to centers of excellence in Europe, among them Socialforskningsinstitutet in Stockholm. This article studies a specific, in-academic aspect of this form of internationalization, namely the foundation’s evaluative culture and how the funding helped to create opportunities for academic advancement. Excellence and impersonality were the key features in the foundation’s cultural script in the selection of fellows. The assessment criteria were pragmatic: researchers would have a good position to return to after the scholarship stays, be able to present recommendations from leading senior researchers and commit to returning to their home departments. The evaluation process had some resemblance of peer review, although evaluations were made internally, without collegial assessment by external experts. By long-standing and close contacts with trusted scholars, the aim was to create a basis for informed assessments of the quality of the various research environments and the researchers involved in them. The funding helped to open and widen the contact surfaces with international research and to the creation of transnational research communities where stays abroad, international contacts and networks served as an academic qualification. The funding thus contributed to the homogenization of social science research. The foundation’s outwardly friendly but practically dismissive attitude to women as scholars, based on a traditional view of the relationship between women and men, strengthened the already skewed gender structures in academia.

The concept of scientific persona was developed by historians of science at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin fifteen years ago in order to understand how science works and how it can be conducted in a credible way. The Latin word persona means mask and the discussions of the term were elaborations of Marcel Mauss´s introduction of the concept in an article published in 1938 (Mauss 1938). In Mauss´s conceptualisation, persona was a feature that characterized societies in an evolutionary stage—a stage where members of the society had started to perceive themselves as individuals, but were still expected to fulfill certain, culturally defined roles. In such contexts, persona was not mask to cover the ‘real’ self of the performer, but a mask that enhanced certain features of the person. Transferring Mauss’s approach to the scientific world, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum (2003) defined, in an often cited article in Science in Context, scientific persona as an intermediate between individual biography and social (scientific) institution: it is a cultural identity that forms the individual in body and mind, and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy (ways to be and to behave). Daston and Sibum characterized scientific personas as templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts and used the concept to investigate the creation of certain types of scientists: when, how and why have distinct “scientific personae” emerged?

The concept of scientific persona was developed by historians of science at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin fifteen years ago in order to understand how science works and how it can be conducted in a credible way. The Latin word persona means mask and the discussions of the term were elaborations of Marcel Mauss´s introduction of the concept in an article published in 1938 (Mauss 1938). In Mauss´s conceptualisation, persona was a feature that characterized societies in an evolutionary stage—a stage where members of the society had started to perceive themselves as individuals, but were still expected to fulfill certain, culturally defined roles. In such contexts, persona was not mask to cover the ‘real’ self of the performer, but a mask that enhanced certain features of the person. Transferring Mauss’s approach to the scientific world, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum (2003) defined, in an often cited article in Science in Context, scientific persona as an intermediate between individual biography and social (scientific) institution: it is a cultural identity that forms the individual in body and mind, and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy (ways to be and to behave). Daston and Sibum characterized scientific personas as templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts and used the concept to investigate the creation of certain types of scientists: when, how and why have distinct “scientific personae” emerged?