Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences: Rethinking the Specialization Thesis (Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822948141 ISBN 13: 9780822948148

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

Synopsis

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 this title

About the Author

Bernard Lightman is professor of humanities at York University and president of the History of Science Society. Among his most recent publications are the edited collections Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a Brit

Efram Sera-Shriar is research grants manager and museum research fellow for the Science Museum Group in London. He has published extensively on the history of the human sciences, including his book The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871</

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822948141
• ISBN 13: 9780822948148
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Lightman Bernard, Sera-Shriar Efram