Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (RBS-Mellon Conference)

Date: 2 June 2015
Time: 9:15 a.m.–6:30 p.m.
Location: The Royal Society, London
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, Brill Academic Publishing, the British Society for the History of Science, the University of Iowa, the University of Lincoln, the University of Oregon, and the Royal Society.

This international conference explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. If early modern natural philosophers claimed all knowledge as their province, theirs was a paper empire. This conference analyses how did these (often) disorderly collections of paper come to be ‘the archives of the Scientific Revolution’. To what extent did the histories unearthed serve as an index of the cultural position of scientific activity since the early modern period? Exploring the posthumous scientific and medical archive also lets us consider the genealogies of scientific influence, and the creation and management of scientific genius as a posthumous project. Scientific activity, then, as now, is a collective endeavour in which scribes, archives and library keepers, editors, digital humanists and naturalists’ surviving friends and family members had a stake.

The conference is organized by Dr. Vera Keller, Dr. Anna Marie Roos, and Dr. Beth Yale, with sponsorship from the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, Brill Academic Publishing, the British Society for the History of Science, the University of Iowa, the University of Lincoln, the University of Oregon, and the Royal Society.

Speakers and chairs include: Dr. Anne Goldgar, Dr. Felicity Henderson, Dr. Vera Keller, Dr. Arnold Hunt, Professor Michael Hunter, Dr. Lauren Kassell, Dr. Leigh Penman, Dr. Anna Marie Roos, Dr. Richard Serjeantson, Ms. Victoria Sloyan, Ms. Alison Walker, and Dr. Beth Yale.

Registration is required; see the event website for full details. A full program is also available [PDF].