For Better or for Worse?

In this volume, a distinguished set of international scholars examine the nature of collaboration between life partners in the sciences, with particular attention to the ways in which personal and professional dynamics can foster or inhibit scientific practice. Breaking from traditional gender analyses which focus on divisions of labor and the assignment of credit, the studies scrutinize collaboration as a variable process between partners who were married and divorced, heterosexual and homosexual, aristocratic and working-class, politically right and left, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors analyze cases shaped by their particular geographical locations, ranging from retreat settings like the English countryside and Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to traditional university laboratories in Germany and urban city life of Stockholm, Geneva and London. The volume demonstrates how the terms and meanings of collaboration, variably shaped by disciplinary imperatives, cultural mores, and the agency of the collaborators themselves, illuminate critical intellectual and institutional developments in the modern sciences.