Laurence Talairach
Laurence Talairach is a Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and an associate researcher at the Alexandre-Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology (UMR 8560). Her academic interests span medicine, natural history and British literature in the long nineteenth century. She is the author of 5 monographs (Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897 (University of Wales Press, 2019); Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture (Palgrave, 2014); Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2009); Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (Ashgate, 2007), and has edited several collections of articles on the interrelations between science and literature and the popularisation of science in the nineteenth-century. She is also the author of a series of 27 popular science novels for children aged 8–12, which take place in museums of natural history.
Her current research aims to map out the forms of natural historical knowledge produced by British women in the nineteenth century and seeks to examine the complexity of the relationship between scientific knowledge and popular representations, the construction of a learned/scientific female identity, the relationship of women naturalists to scientific expertise, and their place in the field of scientific knowledge.
As a Visiting Fellow in History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the Maison Française d’Oxford, as well as co-PI of a CNRS International Emerging Actions (IEA) research project (WOMNH–19; 2024–2025) with Linda Andersson Burnett (Uppsala University, Sweden), she will notably organise events aimed at re-evaluating nineteenth-century British women’s contributions to natural history, such as a symposium on ‘Women Collectors of Natural History in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, held at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on 24 June 2024, organised in collaboration with the Maison Française d’Oxford, the Oxford Museum of Natural History, the Alexandre-Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology and the Department of History of Science and Ideas of Uppsala University.
