On the Spot: Materializing Knowledge, Gender, and Scientific Identities in Eighteenth-century Naturalists' Travel Journals

This two-years project proposes the first material, social, and gender history of eighteenth-century naturalists travel journals.

The project is particularly timely now that mobility is at the heart of social, cultural, intellectual, gender history and the history of science, and that travel narratives have been recognised as important sources for historical analysis.

However, so far only a few studies have been devoted to the travel journal, that very object in which naturalists used to record their observations while travelling.

ON THE SPOT will fill this gap, by focusing on the various and still ill-explored archival materials assembled by two famous married collaborators, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758-1836) while travelling in the French provinces in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the project will unfold the variety of social, intellectual, and cultural values and emotions operating in the production and use of the travel journal.

The projects broader aim is to provide a theotherical and methodological framework that will allow to understand naturalists travel practices as collective and gendered endeavours. The action will be undertaken under the supervision of Prof. Mnica Bolufer at the University of Valencia (UVEG).

It will comprise a transversal training in gender history and the acquisition of transferable skills, as well as a targeted program of dissemination and communication activities. Prof.

Bolufers ERC-funded research project Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies (CIRGEN), which focuses on transnational approaches to gender, identities, and cultural mediations in Enlightenment societies and cultures, is highly complementary to my experience as an historian of eighteenth-century science, making UVEG the perfect locus for my project.