Genealogies of Genius

Genius as a historical concept, rather than as a presumed trans-historical fact, is surprisingly underexamined. Only a handful of studies to date have attempted to explain its emergence and development as a contingent category, one shaped by the exigencies of time and place. Building on this budding interest, the essays in this volume seek to examine the uses to which concepts of genius have been put in different cultures and times. Collectively, they are designed to make two new statements. First, seen in historical and comparative perspective, genius is not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently identified by modern science, but instead a categorical mode of assessing human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it had a historical presence.

Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, USA. The author of prize-winning monographs and many scholarly articles, her works include The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic, 2006), Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Smithsonian Institution, 2009), and Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (Simon and Schuster, 2012). Her reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal.

Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University, USA. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate. McMahon's history of the idea of genius and the genius figure, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, was published in October with Basic Books. His writings have appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal.