A few weeks back, an article of mine finally came out in the journal History of Social Science. It tells the story of Bruno Latour’s non-hiring at the Institute for Advanced Study in the early 1990s through close work with a set of only recently available archival documents.

The journal has now very kindly made the article open access for a temporary period, so I wanted to share it again for anyone who may not have been able to view it previously. I’m really happy with the piece and the initial responses I’ve seen—I’d love to hear more thoughts. The article is available for free (for now) here.

With their defeat in sight, Latour had written to Geertz that the challenges did not surprise him as much as they might have. “If they had welcomed me,” he noted, “it would have meant that we would have entered a different epistemological era. We have of course, but it will take a couple of decades before the establishment realises it!”

Although I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as a Latourian, my initial interest in a particular approach to the history of science was informed by avidly reading a number of his foundational works: Laboratory Life in a seminar, Reassembling the Social while writing my senior thesis. I never met Latour, but I have a fond memory of the last time I saw him in person: visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a talk, Latour found himself strolling casually down a side street when marching Harvard Graduate Student Union members (myself included) came barreling past him to chant in front of an academic administration building.

Writing this article had, much as I tried to avoid it, a certain autobiographic tenor. As I frittered away at understanding an event many would consider relatively marginal, I was also submitting a seemingly endless set of job applications with decreasing confidence. It was hard not to identify with a scholar who did not get a job that would have changed his entire life and then had to grapple with deep, personal disappointment while the world around him seemed to be growing crazier by the day and a bitter war raged on in the Middle East. Much of growing older as a scholar and a person has involved recognizing that we are rarely the first to experience even our most particular disappointments. This is one value of history.