Dissertation Research: Joseph Dalton Hooker's Scientific Exploration in India

约瑟夫·道尔顿·胡克成为19世纪最有影响力的英国博物学家之一：他做出了令人印象深刻的分类学和植物地理学研究成果，曾担任Kew Gardens主任以及皇家学会和Baas的主席，为查尔斯·达尔文的进化论提供开创性的植物学建议，与欧洲许多杰出的科学权威建立了密切的私人关系，并在业余自然科学家向专业公务员转变的过程中发挥了核心作用。然而，尽管他的职业生涯卓著，但直到他38岁生日的前三周，他才担任了他的第一个永久的专业科学职位。这项研究将考察他在1845年(当时是当地的；政治让他试图成为爱丁堡的植物学教授)和1855年(他最终在Kew获得助理主任职位)期间的生活，这段时期的基础是他在印度进行了三年半的科学探索。它将追溯他在日常生活实践中驾驭多样化的社会、文化和自然地形的经历，揭示他获取自然知识的方法，他如何将这些知识传达给同事和公众，是什么赢得了他的声誉，他必须做些什么来提供谋生收入，以及他协调科学和家庭生活的方式。在讨论的史学问题中，将包括自然历史中“传统”的重要性、科学权威在田野工作和博物馆工作中的分配、职业化和机构建设的作用、科学表现的方法和目的、科学与帝国主义之间、大都会与外围之间的关系，以及妇女和更严格地说是妻子在“男子汉”维多利亚时代科学中的地位。胡克在印度的十年提供了一个极好的机会，来描绘一位雄心勃勃、才华横溢、成就斐然、但在职业上缺乏安全感的年轻博物学家如何在维多利亚时代的英国谈判自己的身份，进而揭示出一个截然不同的社会和文化变革时期的科学特征。

Joseph Dalton Hooker became one of the most influential British naturalists of the nineteenth century: he produced impressive taxonomic and phytogeographical research, served as director of Kew Gardens and president of both the Royal Society and the BAAS, provided seminal botanical advice for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, enjoyed close personal relationships with numerous preeminent scientific authorities throughout Europe, and played a central role in the transformation of the amateur natural scientist into the professional civil servant. Yet despite his distinguished career, he did not hold his first permanent professional scientific position until three weeks before his thirty-eighth birthday. This study will examine his life during the formative, unsettled years of 1845 (when local; politics cost him his bid to become professor of botany at Edinburgh) and 1855 (when he finally achieved assistant directorship at Kew), a period anchored by three-and-a-half years of scientific exploration in India. It will trace his experience as he navigates diverse, social, cultural, and physical terrain in the quotidian practice of his daily life, to uncover his methods for acquiring natural knowledge, how he communicated this knowledge to colleagues and the public, what won his reputation, what he had to do to provide a living income, and the ways he harmonized science and family life. Among the historiographic issues addressed will be the importance of `traditions` within natural history, the apportioning of scientific authority among field and museum work, the role of professionalization and institution-building, the methods and purposes of scientific representation, the relationship between science and imperialism and between metropole and periphery, and the position of women, and more strictly wives, within `manly` Victorian science. The decade surrounding Hooker's time in India provides an excellent opportunity to chart the ways an ambitious, talented and accomplished but professionally insecure young naturalist negotiated his identity in high Victorian Britain, and in turn reveals much about the character of science during a period of distinct social and cultural change.