Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 12, 2026

Description

This special number of the Australian Journal of Biography and History consists of papers presented at a workshop on intellectual biography, held at The Australian National University in December 2024. The guest editor, Melanie Nolan, notes that historians increasingly do not agree on one kind of approach to intellectual biography. She surveys the kinds of postwar intellectual biographies historians have published, together with current debates over whether intellectual biography should entail methodological individualism or collectivism, internalist or externalist approaches, and whether to lump or split lives and intellectual developments. The first group of papers then considers intellectual biography written through the lens of the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which continues to dominate the field. Richard Whatmore and Thomas Ashby examine the historian J.G.A. Pocock’s methodology and his own biography. Kate Fullagar comments on this work, as she did at the workshop. A second group of papers—by Ian Kumekawa on A.C. Pigou, Emile Chabal on Eric Hobsbawm, and Matthew Birchall on Edward Gibbon Wakefield—are part of the push by historians to extend the span of intellectual biography. The authors argue respectively for a more ‘capacious’ approach to the category of economic intellectuals, the wider social influences on intellectual historians, and the need to consider how ideas have been applied as much as their disembodied theories. Finally, a pair of papers consider historians’ push of intellectual biography inwardly. That is, they are participating in what scholars identify as the more general ‘interventional’ or ‘reflexive’ turn in historiography. Jaume Aurell considers historians’ autobiography as intellectual biography, while Alison Bashford considers the intellectual biographies she has written metabiographically, weaving the biographies of intellectuals with her own historical self-reflection on intellectual biography.