Making Science Popular Figuier in the Brazilian Newspapers and Magazines (1850-1870)

Abstract The article intends to analyze the presence of the science popularizer Louis Figuier’s texts in the Brazilian press during the 1850s and 1870s. Throughout the two decades studied, in a context particularly conducive to scientific vogue, the author becomes popularized through the press and by the circulation of their books in Portuguese, reaching wider audiences, such as women and children. At the same time, the mediation of science promoted by the author comes to be recognized as a specific genre: the popular science. Both the appropriation of the author’s texts in the press and the changes that conform the context of the institutionalization of science in the country provide the keys to understand the hierarchy between popularized science and the science of the scholars at that moment.