Laura Bassi Scholarship- Summer

Laura Bassi

 

Born in Bologna in 1711, Laura Bassi was the first woman to take up a professorship in Europe and the second to earn a doctorate. Her extraordinary career as an academic spanned nearly five decades, for much of which she was a galvanizing figure for the scientific culture of eighteenth century Europe. Bassi’s admirers included the likes of Voltaire in France, who preferred Bassi’s academy to that of London’s, and Dorothea Erxleben in Germany, the first woman to earn a medical doctorate, who notably found inspiration in Bassi’s fierce struggle for equal opportunity for women. Bassi’s career culminated in her succession to the chair of physics (then known as natural philosophy) at the University of Bologna in 1776—a role in which her husband, Giuseppe Veratti, was her assistant.

 

The Editing Press Laura Bassi Scholarship is named in her honour, in part with the intention of supporting work undertaken against the grain of the disciplinary fashions of academia.

 

The Laura Bassi Scholarship was established by Editing Press in 2018 with the aim of providing editorial assistance to postgraduates and junior academics whose research focuses on neglected topics of study, broadly construed, within their disciplines. The scholarships are open to every discipline and are awarded three times per year: December, April, and August. The value of the scholarships are remitted through editorial assistance as follows:

 

 

Master’s candidates: $750

Doctoral candidates: $2,500

Junior academics: $500

 

These figures reflect the upper bracket of costs of editorial assistance for master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, and academic journal articles, respectively.