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Van Allen Biographer Visits UI Libraries – Feb 1

How do you go about writing the biography of one of the country’s most influential physicists of the 20th century? Where do you find primary source information and how do you write compelling prose based on scientific notes?

foerstner-vanallen.jpgAbigail Foerstner, author of James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles, will visit the University of Iowa Libraries to discuss her approach to researching and writing this biography on Friday, February 1 at 10 a.m. in the Special Collections classroom on the third floor of the Main Library.

She spent seven years researching and writing James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles. Foerstner blends space science drama, military agendas, cold war politics, and the events of Van Allen’s lengthy career to create the first biography of this highly influential physicist. Drawing on Van Allen’s correspondence and publications, years of interviews with him as well as with more than a hundred other scientists, and declassified documents from such archives as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Foerstner describes Van Allen’s life from his Iowa childhood to his first experiments at White Sands to the years of Explorer I until his death in 2006.

abigailfoerstner_21.jpgIn this hands-on discussion, Forestner will share some of the unique documents and interesting stories she found in the Van Allen papers located in the University Archives.

Foerstner teaches science writing and news writing in the graduate program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; she is the author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers (Iowa, 2000) and of hundreds of articles on science, history, and the visual arts. As a staff reporter for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune, she covered science and the environment for nearly ten years.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Kristi Bontrager, UI Libraries Public Relations Coordinator at 335-5960 or Allison Thomas, University of Iowa Press at  319-335-2015.