25 October 2018
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Fabianinkatu 24, 3rd floor
12.00 – 13.00 h
key note lecture
Elise Garritzen(University of Helsinki)
Quest for a Heroic Historian: Masculinities and Founding an Academic Profession c. 1820-1914
This paper focuses on nineteenth-century historians’ strategies to cope with the changes that modernity and the professionalization of academia wrought. The formation of history as a professional discipline, the increasingly competitive academic work market, and the growing demands for expanding women’s education pushed historians to reassess their scholarly and public roles and to fashion scholarly personae that corresponded with the new intellectual, methodological, social, and cultural demands of their discipline. I will show in this paper how historians forged an image of a heroic masculine scholar as a response to their altering disciplinary status and how they assigned gendered meanings to their daily research practices and scholarly spaces they occupied in order to achieve this goal. Yet, this project was challenged by competing masculine ideals and unclarity about the proper “manly style” a historian was expected to adapt. Should a professional historian cultivate the virtues of domesticated, intellectual masculinity or to cherish the more robust and muscular masculinity that gained popularity as the century progressed?