HSTM Events
Spring 2025 Colloquium - Jared S. Richman
Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, 3:35 p.m. through Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, 4:30 p.m.
Nicholson 125
Department of English, Colorado College
Title: Disability, Representation, and the British Military
Abstract: Literature often casts soldiers and sailors as icons of fitness, yet few return from combat physically or mentally unscathed. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature is filled with impaired and disabled figures on the stage, in poetry, and in fiction. Taking account of ways in which European Enlightenment attitudes shaped conceptions of the body and human identity, this talk will trace representations of the British military through the lens of Critical Disability Studies. From Rochester to Austen, the myriad textual instantiations of deformity, illness, debility, and disability featured in eighteenth-century British literature shaped and reflected the experiences of disabled combatants in an era of global warfare. Marking the many military conflicts and the colonizing projects of Britain’s expanding empire in India, Africa, and the Americas, British writers marshaled the figure of the soldier again and again, using tropes of disability to interrogate British foreign and domestic policy, the Atlantic slave trade, class hierarchy, rural depopulation, and advancements in science, medicine, and industry. Viewing literary representations of the military from the perspective of disability, this talk will explore how images of British soldiers, sailors, and veterans shifted attitudes regarding health, technology, gender, race, patriotism, nationalism, and radicalism under the shadow of endless war and colonial exploitation.
Island Tinkerers: A virtual talk with Prof Honghong Tinn
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025, 2 p.m. through Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025, 3 p.m.
Virtual via Zoom
HSTM Asst. Professor and CBI Affiliated Historian Honghong Tinn will be presenting a talk on her most recent book, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan's Computing Industry. In it, Tinn discusses the history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, which included engineers, technologists, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country.
Bio

Honghong Tinn is a historian of information technology and received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. Her research interests are in the areas of the history of electronic digital computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. Her work on these topics has appeared in Technology and Culture, Osiris, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.
She was on the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (2017-2019), chaired the Society's Internationalization Committee (2013-2014) and the International Small Grants Committee (2017-2019), and is an elected member of the nominating committee (2023-2025). She is currently an advisory editor for Engineering Studies and on the editorial board of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.
Global Exchange and Visual Culture: An East Asian Collections Pop Up Exhibit at the Wangensteen
Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025, 11:30 a.m. through Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025, 1 p.m.
Wangensteen Historical Library Classroom, Phillips-Wangensteen Building Room 2-330, 516 Delaware St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455
Explore the Wangensteen Historical Library’s new additions to the East Asian collections at this casual, open house-style pop up exhibit! See texts produced in China, Japan, and Korea from as early as the 1600s in a variety of formats: manuscripts, printed books, scrolls, even acupuncture mannequins! We’ll also be showcasing our new, selected translations of some of these materials, funded through a Creative Collaboratives grant from IAS.
Turn pages of our original texts, manipulate 3D models, and make your own Japanese flap anatomy. Don’t forget to pick up our newest sticker! The pop-up will also feature materials from the Andersen Horticultural Library and the East Asian Library at UMN.
Predatory Data: Feminist Resistance to Eugenics in Big Tech
Thursday, March 6, 2025, 5 p.m. through Thursday, March 6, 2025, 7 p.m.
Humphrey Forum (105)
Join us for a talk by Dr. Anita Say Chan about her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future. Chan analyzes how contemporary Big Tech is built on data that exploits women and immigrants and reinforces social inequalities. At the same time, Chan looks to the past for previous models of feminist resistance to institutional research and data practices, which continue to inspire today’s data-justice activists.
Bio: Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Co-hosted by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy (Humphrey School) and the Charles Babbage Institute of Computing, Information, and Culture (HSTM, CSE).
Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology CLA); Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change; the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.



Spring 2025 Colloquium - Paul Brinkman
Friday, April 18, 2025, 3:35 p.m. through Friday, April 18, 2025, 4:30 p.m.
Nicholson 125
Title: Now is the Time to Collect: Museums & Salvage Zoology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, naturalists anticipated the extinction of innumerable wild animals due to the global spread of Western civilization. Economic development, especially land-intensive practices like farming, logging, ranching, and urban sprawl, was destroying or degrading natural habitats worldwide. Yet development was an integral part of that quintessential Victorian virtue: progress. Victorian naturalists, then, viewed extinction as the inevitable, if regrettable, byproduct of humanity’s advance. The demise of species was a pity, many naturalists agreed, but the loss was a small price to pay to maintain the pace of progress. To mitigate the problem of the loss of scientific data through extinction, museum zoologists assumed the role of salvaging the remnants of these threatened species – while they could still be acquired – and preserving them as museum specimens for all time. The scientific rationale behind salvage zoology was obvious: certain animals were doomed to extinction by the unrelenting spread of Western civilization. Zoologists, therefore, were obligated to harvest their specimens and keep them in museum collections as a permanent record of disappearing nature. The practice of salvage zoology had its heyday in the 1890s, then eventually gave way to conservation in the early twentieth century, as more and more naturalists prioritized the saving of species over the taking of specimens.