Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop:
Georgina Ferry,
Lives under the microscope: scientific obituaries dissected
Scientific biography was once an excessively deferential genre that presented the scientist as a heroic individual. Today biographers take an approach that embraces broader cultural influences and impacts, notes flaws as well as achievements and highlights the social and collaborative practice of modern science. Obituary writing is a short form with its own conventions, and choices to be made about what to include or exclude. As a writer who has worked in both genres, I will reflect on the particular challenges of writing obituaries of scientists who may not be household names but have materially changed our understanding of ourselves and the natural world.
Speaker Details:
Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster. She began as a staff editor and feature writer on New Scientist, and has presented science programmes on BBC Radio. Her biography of Britain's only female Nobel-prizewinning scientist, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: Patterns, Proteins and Peace, was reissued by Bloomsbury in 2019. She has published several further books on 20th and 21st-century science. She edits obituaries for Nature and is a regular contributor of reviews, obituaries and features to The Guardian, Nature and The Lancet.
Further Details and Contacts:
This is an in-person event and will not be recorded.
NOTE: this event takes place at the new Schwarzman Centre, not the St Cross building.
Registration is required and will close one week before the event (REGISTRATION EXTENDED UNTIL Thus 5 January at 17:30). Confirmations of successful registration will be sent out.
Please note that this event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty.
Queries regarding this event should be addressed to Charles Pidgeon.
