The Schumacher Affair: Reconfiguring Academic Expertise across Dynasties in Eighteenth-Century Russia

This essay examines the career of Johann Daniel Schumacher, secretary to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences from 1725 to 1759, in order to illustrate the flexible nature of expertise in an early scientific academy and the ways in which that expertise needed to be negotiated to suit different demands from the court, government, and academy across several changes of regime. Schumacher, whose activities have often been vilified by historians, is shown to have been an astute administrator, whose activities demonstrate the importance of mediating roles in shaping academic expertise in the eighteenth century.