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 living in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were married and divorced heterosexual and homosexual
aristocratic and working-class and politically right and left. The contributors analyze cases
shaped by their particular geographical locations ranging from retreat settings like the
English countryside and Woods Hole Massachusetts to university laboratories and urban centers
in Berlin 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.
