First female professor’s archive goes online

Laura Bassi (1711-1778) was the first woman to be offered an official teaching position at a European university. Bassi had a significant influence on the scientific culture of the Enlightenment in Italy. She was the most prominent female member of Italy's leading scientific society, the Bologna Academy of Sciences, and helped create a network of experimenters and teachers connecting Italy with France and England.

She left behind 6,000 pages of intriguing documents that describe her life and work. They now rest in the archives of the principal municipal library in Bologna, Italy.

Stanford University has teamed up with the Bologna library and the Istituto per i beni culturali della Regione Emilia-Romagna to scan Bassi’s archives and make them easily accessible online later this year.

Bassi was widely admired as an excellent experimenter and one of the best teachers of her generation.

Stanford history professor and an expert on Bassi Paula Findlen says:
“Bassi was widely admired as an excellent experimenter and one of the best teachers of Newtonian physics of her generation,” “She inspired some of the most important male scientists of the next generation while also serving as a public example of a woman shaping the nature of knowledge in an era in which few women could imagine playing such a role.”

Stanford will lend its technical expertise to create an easily searchable website. The digitized documents, many of them handwritten, will be translated and explained.