21 October 2022 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100 (4th floor of Garrison Hall)

Robert Abzug, Megan Raby, and Bruce Hunt

“Writing Biographies in the History of Science”

The panellists for this roundtable discussion will be Robert Abzug, whose biography of the psychologist Rollo May appeared last year; Megan Raby, who is at work on a biography of the American ecologist Marston Bates; and Bruce Hunt, who has embarked on writing a biography of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Together they will explore the attractions and challenges of writing history through biography, particularly in the history of science.

All of the panellists are members of the UT History Department:
— Robert Abzug is a professor emeritus and held the Audre and Bernard Rapoport
Regents Chair in Jewish Studies. Besides Psyche and Soul in America: The
Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021), he is the author
of Passionate Liberator: Thomas Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of
Reform (1980); Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of
Nazi Concentration Camps (1985); and Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and
the Religious Imagination (1994).
— Megan Raby is an associate professor and the author of American Tropics:
The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (2017).
— Bruce Hunt is a professor and the author of The Maxwellians (1991);
Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert
Einstein (2011); and Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical
Physics in the Victorian British Empire (2021).