IT’S OFFICIAL! Anna-Sophie has signed a book contract with University of California Press!!!

After more than four years of working on this book pretty much all the time and everywhere (yes, everywhere – including, apparently, on rollerskates on a rock next to a lake), “Comic Scientists in Pop Culture: Humor and the Visual Fictions of Science” is officially becoming a monograph!

“Comic Scientists” offers a new cultural history of the scientist in Western society, arguing that since the emergence of film, science has been closely associated with humor, laughter and comic performance in popular culture. Anna-Sophie explores how performance traditions and aesthetics from the popular stage, including clowning, intersected with late-nineteenth-century fascinations with bodily pathologies and so-called nervous disorders (such as hysteria) and hypnosis. Bridging cultural studies, science communication, the history of science and humor studies, the book positions the comic scientist alongside the mad scientist in the cultural imaginary of science narratives.

Just as Frankenstein defines the mad scientist, Anna-Sophie argues, the clown defines the comic scientist.

Stay tuned for more!