Eminent Men Research Articles

The Violent ‘Trojan Horse’: a Comparative, Transnational Reading of Two Paralysis Narratives

This article proposes a comparative analysis of two ALS narratives: one written in 2017 by the Spanish businessman and author Francisco Luzón, El Viaje es la recompensa (The Trip is the Reward) and the other published in 1999 by American sociologist Albert B. Robillard, Meaning of a Disability: The Lived Experience of Paralysis. Both ‘autopathographies’ present detailed testimonies of the increasing emotional crisis, stigmatization, and feeling of helplessness of two powerful and eminent men left paralyzed in mid-life by a cruel illness. The European and the American outlook on this perverse malady, as experienced on two different continents, will enable us to explore issues related to wasted bodies, the daily struggle against a body and a mind bent on destroying themselves, the battle against fear and anger, the memories of an intense life and of a life journey worth travelling, even when narrated from ‘the kingdom of the ill.’

Professor Mieczysław Chorąży and His Works.

This essay is in memoriam of Professor Mieczysław Chorąży (1925 - 2021). Eminent Man, outstanding scientist, soldier of the Warsaw Uprising, moral authority for generations of fellow researchers and an exceptionally warm person. His character and life works are recalled here against the background of the times he lived in.

Rethinking the Regional in Rājamatī’s World: Placemaking, Patronage and the Performance of Polity in Chanderi, c. 1479

A bilingual inscription on a stepwell built in 1479 on the suburbs of Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh presents a rare biography of its patron Rājamatī, a female entertainer (bhāṭiṇi), who is said to have received extraordinary largesse from the Sultans of the seven regions of her time. In this gift economy, Rājamatī is not only the beneficiary of generous rewards but herself the benefactor of eminent men arriving from different regions. The rhetoric turns on her patronage of a water facility for travellers, portrayed as an honourable act of public piety (dānadharma) but also as an act of political performance (rājadharma), thus inscribing the influence of a provincial woman in the Persianate world of Hindustan. While such inscriptions constitute valuable documents of social history, they tend to be viewed as philological texts filtered for “credible facts” and “fantastic claims”. Instead, by reading the epigraph in its architectural landscape, I show how this discursive text shaped, and was shaped by, everyday places of interaction, a perspective that affords new insights into the practices of placemaking, patronage and performance through which a female entertainer acquired prestige and visibility in the broader cultural landscape of fifteenth-century North India.

Zum Nachweis von Kants Fontenelle-Zitat: „Vor einem Vornehmen bücke ich mich […

Abstract It is shown that the famous quote from Fontenelle in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, “I bow before an eminent man, but my spirit does not bow,” comes from the book On Principles of Morality, written by Abbé Mably. The Fontenelle quote is found in a review of this very book in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung (No. 21, 1785). This review should further be considered Kant’s source.

‘I can’t draw, sing or dance to save my life!’: Educator and parent implicit theories of creativity

Creativity is recognised as a key facet of the suite of 21st century skills driving education worldwide. Understanding its existence outside of The Arts is vital for recognising young children’s creativity. However, what constitutes creativity and what it ‘looks like’ is not always clear. As a result, inconsistency and lack of efficacy when educators and parents attempt to encourage the development of young children’s creativity is possible. To investigate implicit theories of creativity relating to what creativity is and who is considered creative, parents and educators of four to eight-year-old children in four early learning contexts in Perth, Western Australia, were invited to complete a questionnaire. Findings suggest there may not be a strong tendency towards recognising creativity in The Arts but there may be an inclination to recognise eminent men’s creativity more than women’s. Additionally, there appears to be a lack of recognition of ‘daring’ as a creative behaviour.

Devices of future excellence: Detaching excellence recognition from ‘eminent men’

Abstract The global diffusion of the graduate school organizational model has shifted the way future academic excellence is identified from a paternalistic master–disciple relationship to a collective organizational decision. ‘Eminent men’ used to recruit PhD students on the firm belief that they could identify excellence and integrate it in their own scientific endeavor. Graduate schools formalize such judgments and transform them into an organizational decision. They establish admission devices to assure criteria-based collective decisions. To understand this shift, the article draws on the example of two German graduate schools that proclaim to search for outstanding doctoral candidates. As a latecomer in the transformation to graduate schools, the German case allows to observe the shift in statu nascendi. The article highlights the distinct role multi-site admission devices play. In both cases, they redistribute agency and excellence through the construction of competitive social fields. Documents, grades, committee deliberations, interviews, and excel files mobilize a social space in which applicants are qualified as acting holistically and competitively against each other in order to identify those most likely of future excellence. Admission is not predefined but the result of a cascade of socio-material fielding practices that purify a comparative social space, qualify applicants competitively, and infuse them with site-specific agency that increasingly authenticates them as field actors. Building on the work of Michel Callon and colleagues, we understand such formatting of future excellence as field agencements.

Dietary Calendars in the Slavic Middle Ages: A Case Study

Thе article attempts to delineate the boundaries of dissemination of dietary calendars in the Balkan Slavic cultural area through the evidence that can be obtained from the names, places, and very rarely patrons, found in the manuscripts that contain them. Special attention is paid to the most eminent men of letters who included dieteticons in their miscellanies – the Moldavian copyist Gavriil Urik, the Serbian monks Gavriil of Mount Athos and Gavrilo Trojičanin, and the Bulgarian priest Avram Dimitrievič. The analysis of the dissemination of dietary calendars in mediaeval South Slavic and Slavic-Moldavian literatures shows that the trajectory of this marginal genre started from royal codices, ran through manuscripts commissioned by rich patrons and produced in scriptoria, and ended in the miscellanies of ordinary priests and laypersons. Whatever their hierarchical dynamics may be in Slavic literatures, they, as a whole, remain outside the context of properly medical knowledge, gravitating around miscellanies of divinatory and astrological works, erotapokriseis and apocrypha.

Peter Sleight: visionary cardiologist and inspiring leader

Photo credit: Mervyn George Bishop/Fairfax Media/Getty Images Peter Sleight, a professor at Oxford University, helped to transform heart attack treatment and prevent cardiovascular disease with angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors and...

Regulars - Columnist: The Eccentric Engineer. Electricity. That light-bulb moment for an eminent man of electrical science.

Regulars - Columnist: The Eccentric Engineer. Electricity. That light-bulb moment for an eminent man of electrical science.

My Life Around Hawthorne

My Life Around Hawthorne

Whither musicology? Amateur musicologists and music writing in Bengal

ABSTRACTThis article examines amateur writing on music in nineteenth-century Bengal, focusing on two men of musical eminence, Sourindro Mohun Tagore and Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay. While existing research has given disproportionate attention to Tagore, little effort has been made to locate him or his contemporaries in a network of knowledge-practices. This article explores Tagore’s imperatives of writing about music and reform through its linkages with sociality, musical practice and patronage. The article challenges both assumptions of his uniqueness and marginality, and contrasts his musicological career with that of Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay to bring out their internal differences. Interrogating Krishnadhan’s subjectivity, I approach alternative registers of music writing—linguistic, formal and social—as part of ongoing processes of print and public modernity. Through this, I engage a larger debate on Indian musicology informing theory and practice, reflecting in turn on the regional formation of musical publics.

La contribución de Philipp Melanchthon, praeceptor germaniae, a la lengua y a la enseñanza. Entre la cultura humanista europea y la reforma alemana

Aunque pueda calificarse a Melanchthon de hombre eminente, sin embargo, no es suficientemente conocido, ni traducido, ni estudiado fuera de Alemania. Su pensamiento acerca de la lengua y de la enseñanza no se redujo a mostrar su importancia. Fue más lejos que esto, ya que le preocupó mucho el uso didáctico de las mismas. Su preocupación fundamental por mejorar el aprendizaje de las lenguas se focalizó en las lenguas clásicas, especialmente en el latín, sin que esto supusiera darle la espalda a las lenguas vernáculas, en este caso al alemán. El hecho de que para Melanchthon las Letras y los grandes escritores de la Antigüedad fueran su preocupación principal, explica el reconocimiento público que Alemania le hizo, nombrándole Praeceptor Germaniae.

The eviction of Augusta and the Dejerine Foundation

The eviction of Augusta and the Dejerine Foundation

Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture by Simone Natale

Reviewed by: Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture by Simone Natale Roger Luckhurst KEYWORDS Simone Natale, Roger Luckhurst, Spiritualism, 19th century technology, history of technology, occult technology, magic technology, magic in media, séance simone natale. Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 235, 31 ill. Thirty years ago, scholarly study of spiritualism was decidedly marginal to Victorian studies, an area of eccentric belief and pseudoscience that was considered an embarrassment at best. Janet Oppenheim's breakthrough study The Other World (1985), which examined spiritualism, theosophy, and psychical research, remained symptomatic in beginning from the premise that it needed to be explained how substantial numbers of intelligent men and women came to believe in such self-evidently false beliefs. Oppenheim opened the field to more mainstream cultural historians. The next generation, though, did not prejudge these beliefs, but offered contextualization from religion, science, and culture, investigating how eminent men of science such as Alfred Russell Wallace could simultaneously sustain a rigorous materialism and an affirmation of the spirit world. New methods from the history of science that did not prejudge the truth and falsity of historical phases when multiple, competing theories circulated to explain anomalous [End Page 265] phenomena proved very helpful, as did an understanding of how new technologies and magical thinking have always been intertwined. The sociology of occultism and new religious movements were important resources, and feminist historians since Alex Owen's The Darkened Room (1989) have also examined spiritualism for its subtle play with gender paradigms. The scholarly floodgates have really opened, and I sometimes wonder if the nineteenth century has been made far more spooky and psychical by scholars than it ever actually was. This probably says more about us than the Victorians (as Natale himself hints in his conclusion). Simone Natale's Supernatural Entertainments book has to fight hard to find space to say something new in this area. Even in his own field of media and communication studies, there have been major works on how the interplay of tele-technologies and the supernatural was key, from John Durham Peters's Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999) to Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000) and many in between. That Natale has managed to produce an engrossing and informative book is a testament to his work in the archives, although that anxious first monograph rhetoric of clearing the ground to stake out new territory is sometimes exaggerated and sometimes rather distorts the record. Natale's basic premise is that studies of spiritualism have been too concerned to justify the movement as a serious field of legitimate study. Historians have studied spiritualism as a po-faced theology and underplayed the extent to which it was thoroughly imbued with the emerging "modern entertainment industry." Across six chapters, Natale explores the theatricality and showmanship of public séances from the very beginning of the movement in 1848 (Chapter 1); to the link between family séance circles and the culture of parlor games and evening entertainments at home (Chapter 2); the imbrication of mediumistic performances with the emergence of mass journalism, advertising, and popular theater culture (Chapter 3); the way in which "star mediums" like the Fox Sisters and the notorious Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino joined an emergent celebrity culture, often managed by theatrical impresarios who actively courted controversy to generate sales (Chapter 4); the rise of spiritualism as coincident with the emergence of a democratic, mass print culture and its technologies of automated dissemination (Chapter 5); and finally, the way in which spiritualists latched on to the new technology of photography in the 1860s to generate spectacular images of ghosts captured in the chemicals, further illustrating the symbiotic relationship between articulations of the spirit world with modern mass technology (Chapter 6). [End Page 266] Every chapter contains rich and absorbing material: how P. T. Barnum actively generated controversy for his displays by sowing doubt about his own claims in the press; how the Ouija Board was marketed first as a parlor game and only latterly became the...

A ‘Somewhat Eccentric Preacher’; the Reverend Richard Hale of Harewood

In December 1810 Lord Harewood hosted an unusual event in his London townhouse. The visitors were eminent men, leaders in their field, but the guest of honour was apprehensive. Beneath the elegant Adam ceilings, the baron’s nephew, the Revd Richard Hale, was about to have his leg amputated at the knee. The operation also marked the end of Hale’s life as a man of fashion enjoying a busy social whirl of parties, balls and race meetings whilst curates attended to his parishes. During his recuperation he vowed to devote himself to God and his parish, thus beginning four decades as one of the more colourful clergymen of the nineteenth century.

Interrupted Fertility

Mrs Buff, wife of Mr Buff, silk weaver in Fashion Street in Spitafields, London, aged twenty-seven years the mother of several childerine, on 27th of July 1774, having gone her usual time of pregnancy, was attended by her midwife several days, but the labour pains ceasing, the midwife left her promising to return soon but did not fulfil her promise. Mrs B. not being delivered of her child, thought she might have a month longer to go and went about her domestic affairs as usual. Christmas following she prov’d with child again and not being delivered of the former one she became uncommonly big and unwieldly, she applied to several physicians for advice and particularly to Dr. Wyman an eminent man midwife in Aldermanbury, who ordered her a variety of purgative medicines but without relief.

“It Is Hardly News that Women Are Oppressed”: Sexism, Activism, and Charlie

I first met Charlie in 1961 when I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was a rather odd position for me because I was in my second year of graduate school in the department of experimental psychology at Harvard. This arrangement, however, illustrates the kind of discrimination against women in experimental psychology during the early 1960s (as well as earlier and later). I will briefly outline why I was working at MIT to contrast the attitudes and behaviors of the Harvard faculty with Charlieʼs kindness and support of women. Sexism was particularly virulent at Harvard. There were, of course, no female faculty members and only two female postdoctoral fellows during the six years I studied there. The first week I arrived, Richard Herrnstein, the director of the graduate program, called a meeting of the first-year graduate students and announced that only one in two men were expected to obtain their PhD and only one of four women. I do not know if the percentages were correct. However, in an examination of PhD recipients during the time the program existed as a separate department (1951–1973), 99 men received their PhD and only 14 women. These figures might help explain why I was supervising a very large class in introductory psychology at MIT. The Harvard department had been founded by E. G. Boring, who, like his mentor Titchener, did not believe that women should be experimental psychologists (Furumoto, 1988). Boring did not believe that women could survive the grueling 80-hr week prescribed for scholarly success at Harvard. Men who survived the very difficult first-year curriculum were routinely offered research assistantships with one or another of the faculty members. Because they did not believe that women would go on to do productive scholarship and enhance their mentorsʼ reputations, women were not offered research positions. When I passed my first yearʼs classes and requested financial aid, they “solved” the problem by making an arrangement with Hans-Lukas Teuber who was starting a neurosciencefocused psychology program at MIT and did not yet have enough graduate students to help with the undergraduate program. I still do not know who paid for this, but I got my tuition and a stipend as well. It proved to be an opportunity to get to know and work with Charlie. Professor Teuber was very supportive when I told him I was interested in physiological psychology and introduced me to Charlie and Steve Chorover, who were studying the frontal cortex of monkeys at that time. They allowed me to assist in operations and taught me how to use stereotaxic devices. When I decided to do some research in a related area, the only animals available in the Harvard laboratory were pigeons and rats. Charlie and Steve believed that the caudate nucleus of lower mammals had some of the functions of the frontal cortex in primates so I began to examine the effect of caudate nucleus lesions on the ability of rats to make rapid temporal and spatial shifts. This allowed me to use sophisticated operant conditioning techniques available in Skinnerʼs lab. Harvard did not have any objection to this combination of physiological psych and operant conditioning, and Charlie became my more or less official advisor. The transition to official thesis advisor was made easy because Charlie joined the Harvard experimental psychology program as an assistant professor in 1964. I tried to convince him not to do so because I believed he would be incompatible with its sexist and politically conservative faculty. By the time I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation in 1966, Charlie and Dick Herrnstein (another member of my doctoral committee because of the operant techniques I used) were barely on speaking terms. Some of you may remember Herrnstein as the coauthor of The Bell Curve, which argued that intelligence was genetically determined and underlay social class as well as racial differences (Herrnstein & Murray, 1973, 1994). Charlie was very opposed to such social Darwinist theories and later opposed Herrnsteinʼs giving a lecture at Princeton. On the basis of the autobiography that Charlie wrote for the American Psychologist when he received APAʼs gold medal for achievement in science (Gross, 2005), some might argue that Charlieʼs progressive beliefs were related to his fatherʼs progressive politics. Ironically, Herrnstein came from a very similar background. He Brandeis University

The Board of Longitude and the funding of scientific work: negotiating authority and expertise in the early nineteenth century

During the winter of 1825, and again in 1828, two eminent men of science, Thomas Young and John Herschel, debated the state's obligation to provide for the scientific arts, particularly the Board of Longitude's support for attempts to improve navigation and the provision of instruments for seagoing men of science. The question of how authority and expertise in scientific matters was judged by members of the Admiralty and their associates was closely connected with individuals' opinions about the support men of science should be able to expect from the state to further their expertise, both financially and materially. The exchange offers insight into the relationship of expertise and authority as understood by those attempting to negotiate Admiralty patronage. Alongside discussion of how the Board of Longitude more generally negotiated the demands, needs and wants of men of science, light is shed on how the Commissioners of Longitude used their authority to judge scientific expertise on behalf of the Admiralty in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Botany and the Indian Forest Service: an early controversy about the education of foresters

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: educationforestrybotanyhistoryIndiaBritain

The music of the genes

The music of the genes