Impressionable Biologies

Maurizio Meloni is a social theorist and a science and technology studies scholar. He is the author of Political Biology (Palgrave 2016), co-editor of Biosocial Matters (Wiley 2016), and chief editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (2018). He is Associate Professor of Sociology at Deakin University, Australia.

With this impressive genealogy of the thinking that underwrites current interest in epigenetics, Meloni provides us with a much-needed frame for one of the most compelling ideas in contemporary bioscience. This book should be required reading for anyone curious about the ways that we, as living beings, carry the past both with and within us.Ed Cohen, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, author of A Body Worth DefendingImpressionable Biologies, a tour de force, engages with a concept of inherent bodily plasticity recognized as one form of another from classical humoralism to present day epigenetic effects due to the increasingly toxic environments in which we now live. Margaret Lock, PhD, author of The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Aging and Dementia

• Preface and Acknowledgements: Problematizing the Turn to Plasticity Chapter One: An Archaeology of Plasticity Chapter Two: Plasticity before Plasticity: The Humoralist Body Chapter Three: Taming Plasticity: Darwin, Selectionism, and Modern Agency Chapter Four: Epigenetics or How Matter Returned to the Genome Chapter Five: A Sociology of the Body After the Genome References Index