Introduction: The Scholar Incarnate

Abstract

After introducing the volume’s animating questions about identity and scholarship, the editors situate the volume’s contributions in recent efforts to define and understand the scholarly persona. This volume emphasizes gender and corporeality in such analyses, with each part of the volume considering these themes from a different perspective. The first part focuses on the role of funding bodies, transnational mobilizations and institutions in the creation of gendered scholarly personae. The second examines corporeal and incorporeal elements’ manifestations (and absences) of bodies in academic self-conceptions and presentations. The third treats co-constructions of scholarly personae and academic masculinities in various disciplinary contexts. The editors conclude by suggesting new dimensions to historical studies of scholarly personae opened up or reimagined by this volume’s approach. These include the role of the go-betweens of the post-postcolonial global studies in the study of knowledge circulation and academic self-conceptions, scholarly personae and the power of the professorial voice, and the role that new forms of subjectivity, embodiment and contested masculinities played in the shaping of new academic disciplines during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.