On the 6 March 2015 Professor Graeme Gooday will give a public lecture entitled ‘Why Did Scientists Come to Write Autobiographies?’
The celebrity scientist publishing a best-selling autobiography is really rather a recent thing. Respectable Victorians like Charles Darwin did not publish about themselves: if they wrote personal testimony, it was usually only for their immediate family. In fact by convention a truly successful scientist would not waste time while alive drawing public attention to themselves by self-centred memoirs: rather they would wait for a devoted child, colleague or spouse to write a reverential if modestly candid posthumous “Life and Letters”.

Oliver Lodge, Past Years (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1931). Image from the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
This lecture will be held in the Henry Moore Room, Leeds Art Gallery, 6 March 2015. It is free and open to all. To book a place, please email oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com.
You can also download the poster here (pdf).
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