Hilary Rose (sociologist)

During World War II she was evacuated from London with her mother and brother. In 1940, they were sent to Weymouth, Dorset. The same year the French army was defeated, and many evacuated troops took shelter in Weymouth. Exhausted soldiers slept on the pavements and the luckier ones on straw in the requisitioned schools. The children, with no school to attend, mostly watched the war, fascinated but sometimes terrified. The authorities soon despatched the evacuees to safer places. Eventually her mother found a home in Framlingham, her family home. Like Weymouth it wasn’t very safe, being surrounded by US airbases. Returning to London in 1945, she was admitted to an elite girls’ day school, but its snobbery and authoritarianism alienated her.

Women from her lower middle class background rarely went to university in the fifties, and in consequence it wasn’t until personal tragedy intervened that she did. She married young, and soon became a mother. Her husband died in the last year of the polio epidemics in 1958. The support of friends helped her to rethink the issue of going to university. She applied and was admitted to the London School of Economics in 1959 to study sociology with two key interests: the sociology of social policy – not least because as a widowed mother she had been dependent on the Welfare State – and the sociology of science because as an activist in CND she could make no sense of the ideology of ‘science is progress’ (including social progress) and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These have remained her two interests throughout her academic career.[1] She was the second chair of the Young Fabians and the first female chair.

Rose has published extensively in the sociology of science from a feminist perspective and has held numerous appointments in the UK, the US, Australia, Austria, Norway, Finland and at the Swedish Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Science. She is visiting research professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Professor Emerita of Social Policy at the University of Bradford. She was the Gresham Professor of Physic between 1999 and 2002.[2] In 1997 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden [3] for her contribution to the feminist sociology of science.[4] In 2001 her book Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences was listed one of the "101 Best Books of the 20th Century" published by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. She collaborated for a number of years with the European Commission research division on mainstreaming women scientists in the European research system.

Together with neuroscientist Steven Rose, to whom she is married,[5] she gave a three-year lecture series on "Genetics and Society" as joint Professors of Physick at Gresham College London. One of the products of this collaboration was the edited book Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology published in 2000.[6][7] Her most recent books, with Steven Rose, are Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology (Verso, 2012) and Can Neuroscience Change Our Minds? (Polity, 2016)

She was a founder member of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the 1960s, and more recently has been instrumental in calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions for as long as Israel continues its occupation of the Palestinian Territories, on the grounds of Israeli academics' close relationship with the IDF. An open letter[8] initiated by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, and also signed by 123 other academics was published in The Guardian on 6 April 2002.[9] In 2004 Hilary Rose was one of the founding members of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, a key part of the academic boycott movement.[10]

Rose co-authored or co-edited 13 books and over 150 articles.

• "Regulating Human Genes" – Hilary and Steven Rose lecture
• "Love and power in a scientific climate" in Times Higher Education – 1995 book review of Love, Power and Knowledge
• "It's hard to be critical these days..." — interview with Rose on the subject of interdisciplinarity
• "Professor Hilary Rose" – profile at Gresham College
• "Hilary Rose" at Google Scholar