Previous HSTM Colloquium

Dana Matthiessen - MCPS Postdoc

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: Scientific models allow users to draw informative inferences about natural phenomena. In recent decades,philosophers of science have sought to explain this capacity of models via theories of scientific representation. This talk will discuss some shortfalls of traditional theories, which appeal to a specific kind of relation between model and target as the source of models’ informativeness. I’ll present elements of an alternative view alongside illustrative examples from the history of science. This alternative accounts for the informativeness of scientific models along two dimensions: (i) synchronically, in terms of the practical inferences they license in data-gathering contexts; (ii) diachronically, in terms of the mutual refinement of modeling and experimental practices over time.

Emily Baum - History School of Humanities University of California, Irvine

A Charles E. Culpeper Lecture in the History of Medicine

Abstract: In the early 1970s, acupuncture burst into the American consciousness. Millions of Americans, dissatisfied with the current healthcare system and wary of a growing pharmaceutical industry, scrambled to gain access to the procedure themselves. The enthusiasm over acupuncture concerned biomedical physicians, who struggled to learn more about the practice and gain clarity on how (or if) it worked. Over the following decade, numerous studies were undertaken on the foreign modality, most of which showed contradictory or inconclusive results. This talk will explore acupuncture's early years in the United States and the ways that physicians tried to make sense of the procedure. Their inability to form a definitive consensus, this talk argues, would eventually lead to acupuncture's "alternative" status within American medicine.

Victor Seow - History, Harvard University

Abstract: We live in a world that carbon made. The intensified exploitation of fossil fuel energy in the form of coal that began in the eighteenth century set off seismic social and material shifts across the globe. Harnessed through the steam engine, the power contained in coal helped drive mass industrial manufacturing, long-distance travel and transport, and transformations in landscapes molded by machines. In this talk, I draw upon my recent book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), to examine how states came to embrace dreams of fossil-fueled development and mobilized various extractive technologies in costly and contentious attempts to render those into reality

Jonathan Birch - London School of Economics and Political Science

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: Two pictures of the neural basis of emotional experience currently compete: a "basic emotions" picture
(Ekman, Panksepp) on which at least a core set of basic emotions are neurobiological natural kinds, and a
"constructionist" picture (Feldman Barrett) on which emotions involve the skilful interpretation of signals from the
body in ways that are highly susceptible to cultural influence. The existing evidence does not decide between these
pictures. But what are the implications for other animals if constructionism is correct? I argue that, while one
version of constructionism implies no other animals have emotions, this version is implausible. More plausible
versions of constructionism allow that many other animals can have emotional experiences, but that human emotion
categories (such as fear, anger and joy) may be poor guides to what those experiences are like.

Peter J. Lewis - Philosophy, Dartmouth

MCPS Lecture 

Abstract: It is part of the common-sense view of science that it makes progress, where that progress includes an
epistemic component, perhaps to be cashed out in terms of increased knowledge or understanding. In this talk I will
consider whether science does, in fact, make epistemic progress, and if so, how that progress should be
characterized. In particular, I will argue that a recently influential approach to epistemic progress in terms of the
accuracy of our beliefs fails to correctly characterize canonical cases of epistemic progress taken from the history of
science.

Emily Stanback - English, University of Southern Mississippi

A Charles E. Culpeper Lecture in the History of Medicine

Abstract: This talk examines the complex relationships between disability and race as they developed over the course of the long eighteenth century into their modern forms. Focusing on cultural touchstones including travel narratives, both literary and scientific, I will argue that attending to colonialism, empire, and race can significantly shift our sense of disability history and that we cannot understand eighteenth-century race or disability without examining the two in tandem.

Faisal Husain - History, Penn State University

Abstract: In December 1701, an Ottoman engineering expedition, dispatched by Sultan Mustafa II, arrived on the banks of the Euphrates River, over 1,000 miles away from the Ottoman capital Istanbul. For four months afterward, the expedition toiled to build a giant dam that would—the Ottoman court hoped—revert the Euphrates to its old course. The overly ambitious idea proved highly controversial, both within government and in public, culminating in the death of 40,000- 50,000 peasants and the dam’s collapse before its completion. This presentation uses the unpublished manuscript of Esiri Hasan Ağa, an Ottoman military expert who participated in the expedition, to reconstruct the history of Mustafa II’s dam project. Though it rose and crumbled in a small, rural outpost, the Ottoman dam’s story illuminates three broad issues in the historiography of the early modern world: the concept of expertise, the age of projects, and the knowledge of river channel evolution.

Denise Phillips - History, University of Tennessee

Abstract: In 1761, the doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biographical sketch of Jacob Guyer, a farmer living in a small village just outside of Zurich. Hirzel’s book became a bestseller, and catapulted Guyer from rural obscurity to European-wide fame. Agricultural improvers showed intense interest in Guyer’s farm, and celebrated poets and even princes came to visit him, to meet the famous peasant in the flesh.  

What did it mean in the mid-eighteenth century for a peasant to be praised as a noteworthy authority, and even, in Guyer’s case, to be awarded the Enlightenment’s most vaunted honorific – the title of philosopher? My paper will use the case of Guyer (better known in the eighteenth century by his nickname Kleinjogg) to explore the complex relationships between social and epistemic authority in mid-eighteenth-century German-speaking Europe. The circumstances around Guyer’s fame represented an unusually intense example of elite interest in an ordinary rural person’s knowledge, but from a certain perspective he was less atypical than one might assume. In didactic and polemical writing from this period, elite authors often cast peasants as the enemies of reform, suspicious of novelty and wedded to old, outdated practices. In more technical writings, however, the same elite authors frequently quoted rural people as authorities.  

Eran Tal, Philosophy - McGill University

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: The concept of magnitude was central to theories of measurement until the mid-twentieth century, when it
began to fade from discussions on the foundations of measurement. For example, the concept of magnitude plays
virtually no role in the Representational Theory of Measurement. I argue that the neglect of magnitude has resulted
in confusion regarding central measurement concepts such as unit and scale. I develop a concept of magnitude that
resolves these confusions, and explore its implications for the nature of measurement and the conditions of
quantification of empirical attributes.

William Deringer - Science, Technology, and Society, MIT

Abstract: In two weighty economic volumes published in 1906 and 1907, the American economist Irving Fisher sought to place the science of economics on sounder footing by redefining some of the most fundamental categories of economic analysis, including capital, income, value, and interest. At the center of this transformation was a dramatic rethinking of the nature of economic value and its relationship to time. Fisher asserted that the economic value of anything ultimately derived from the subjective satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) it brought to the individuals who used or consumed it, what Fisher called “psychic income.” These psychic benefits were not a static quantity but were always realized over some space of time, whatever the item—a financial asset, an item of food, a house, a piece of furniture, a piano. Psychic income flowed. All economic decisions, Fisher argued, thus entailed translating between this future flow of benefits (or costs) and circumstances in the present moment. “The basic problem of time valuation which Nature sets us is always that of translating the future into the present,” Fisher would write in 1930, “…coming events cast their shadows before.” Fisher described this process mathematically through a technique called “discounting,” which would become one of the rudiments of neoclassical economics in the ensuing century.

Fisher’s contributions to economic theory—and to the popularization of discounting techniques—are a familiar part of economists’ disciplinary histories and have recently attracted increasing attention from historians and sociologists of modern capitalism. Yet the historical sources for Fisher’s rather peculiar ideas remain little understood. How did Fisher come to comprehend the relationship between time, value, and human subjectivity in this way, and how did he come to see a relatively esoteric financial calculation, discounting, as the key to unlocking the mysteries of economic behavior? This paper—drawn from a book-length “biography” of discounting—recovers an essential and overlooked part of Fisher’s thinking: a “pop psychology” that Fisher assembled while recovering from a physically and mentally debilitating bout with tuberculosis. Fisher’s conception of the human mind and the self combined idiosyncratic (mis)readings of prominent psychological authorities, notably William James, with spiritualist and self-help literature, particularly that associated with the highly popular contemporary movement known as “New Thought” or “mind cure.” The story of Fisher’s pop psychology offers new insight into the psychological underpinnings of early American neoclassical economics and a vivid case study of how the success of highly technical concepts (like discounting) may be enabled by seemingly distant cultural trends.

Talia Schaffer - English Dept., Queens College, CUNY

Abstract: Can the feminist and disability-studies theory of “ethics of care” give us an alternative model for understanding disability? In this talk, I take us back to a mode of thinking about bodies that predates the medical model. Early Victorians regarded suffering as an inevitable part of life, to be ameliorated through social support provided by a community of care. Cultural representations from the nineteenth century preserve this human variability as enmeshed in relationships, giving us a welcome alternative to the modern assumption that bodies with flaws require diagnosis, intervention, and cure. An ethics of care not only characterizes historical texts but also connects them to a rich range of global practices, including queer families of choice and African-American other-mothering, as well as the care-collective vision of disability justice activists are advocating today.

Callie H. Burt - Criminal Justice & Criminology; Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence (CRIV), Georgia State University

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: TSociogenomics is posed to flourish. Social scientists can now incorporate PGSs into their research with
relative ease. In recent years, sociogenomicists have encouraged other social scientists to include PGSs in their
research or risk losing out. Others have argued that social scientists have not just an opportunity but a duty to
incorporate genetics into their research. I scrutinize arguments about the utility of PGSs in social science research. I
first cover the genetics and statistical genetics methods necessary to understand what PGSs measure and why. Then
I discuss limitations, focusing on confounding, causation, and unknown biology, and their implications for the utility
and interpretation of PGSs. Additionally, I highlight the persistence implicit, unavoidable reductionist genetic versus
environment approach undergirding most PGS studies. I conclude that the potential scientific rewards of adding
PGSs to social science are few and overstated and the potential costs are significant.

David Redish - Neuroscience, University of Minnesota

Annual Science Studies Symposium & MCPS Lecture

Abstract: I present ideas from my new book "Changing how we choose: the new science of morality" (MIT Press 2022). Most people talk about morality in terms of "do the right thing, even though we know you really want to cheat", but that's not the lived experience most of us have. I argue that this is because moral codes are actually toolkits (technologies) that change societies so as to align individual and community benefit. Importantly, these moral codes work through an interaction with the processes that underlie human decision-making (which we

know a lot about, scientifically). I show that bringing together meso-economics (the study of small groups) with sociology and the neuroscience of decision-making provides a new view on morality that provides access to address both the descriptive and prescriptive sides of morality.

Merlin Chowkwanyun - School of Public Health, Columbia University

Abstract: Conventional medical research fetishes conclusions derived from aggregate (typically quantitative) datasets. What results are top-down, national narratives of health policy that marginalize the thick experience of specific places. This talk takes an alternative approach and argues that one cannot understand the origins of health problems -- and the success of solutions to address them -- without analyzing the local context that surrounds them. We'll examine battles over pollution caused by industrial giants, coal extractors and fights over the unequal distribution of medical care in major cities via deep dives -- not ephemeral stops -- in four localities: New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Central Appalachia. In addition to arguing for the virtues of the local optic, this lecture will also analyze localism as a political practice, which was embraced by community health advocates in the mid-20th century, only to fizzle and confront new challenges a few decades later that remain today.

Alma Steingart - Department of History, Columbia University

Abstract: The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr sparked renewed interest in the mathematics of electoral politics in the United States. In the three months following the Court’s ruling that malapportionment cases were justiciable, challenges to the existing apportionment plan were brought up in 22 states. Initially, however, there was no clearly articulated standard by which malapportionment should be measured. As then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller retorted when pressed on why New York has not revised its apportionment plan, “But what would be your basis for apportionment? Have you got a formula?” In search of a solution, political scientists, mathematicians, and early computer enthusiasts began asking whether mathematical analysis could be used to achieve fair representation. In this talk, I survey some of the early 1960s attempts to bring mathematical and computational techniques to the study of political representation. I demonstrate how conflicting ideas about how to measure fairness came to influence electoral politics in the Unites States and how claims to mathematical exactitude served to further obscure political questions. 

Justin Biddle - School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology

MCPS Lecture

Erik Heinrichs - History, Winona State University

Abstract: This talk explores how early modern interest in the ancient remedy theriac stimulated medical innovations, both experimental and commercial in nature.  Although Venice was famous for producing its prized theriac since the 12^th century, variations soon appeared in other Italian trading centers, such as in Genoa and Milan.  This talk examines how this trend of reformulating or rebranding theriac on a more local basis took hold in lands beyond the Alps after 1500, as various communities sought to make theriac their own.  In France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, physicians and apothecaries began to rethink the original recipe more fundamentally as they also grappled with the economic and political implications of the foreign theriac trade.  This trend gives insight to the commercialization of medicine in these regions as well as to the nature of experimentation within traditional recipes by early modern physicians and apothecaries.  Subjects covered include the “German theriac” of Johann Vochs, the “French theriac” of Symphorien Champier, as well as the “London treacle” from the apothecary William Besse. 

Elena Aronova - History, University of California Santa Barbara

Abstract: There is a growing recognition today that the image of the sciences and the humanities as two separate “cultures”, famously described by C.P. Snow in his Rede lecture in 1959, is no longer tenable. Movements within the historical profession, such as “big history,” “deep history”, and bio-history, are trying to articulate modes of constructive engagement between historians and natural scientists. Within natural sciences, there has been a similar pattern in the relatively recent past that involves the increasing blurring of boundaries between the natural and the social/human sciences. The trend is posited as distinctly twenty-first-century phenomenon. Against this backdrop, I argue that throughout the twentieth century, when the specialization has driven the sciences and the humanities father apart, there have been notable examples of collaborations between natural scientists and historians, that were diverse, complex, and, at times, surprisingly productive.

In the paper, I consider 3 examples of collaboration across and beyond “two cultures”. The first example considers the case of the International Center of Synthesis in Paris, which promoted and institutionalized interdisciplinary and international collaboration as an end goal of this institution operating between 1925 and 1939. The second example considers the entanglements between the emergence of Big Science and the project of “Big History” – a large-scale collaborative project of writing a “universal history for the twentieth century,” launched by UNESCO in the 1950s. In the third example, I will consider an effort to carve a space for history within a Big Science project in geophysics, the International Geophysical Year (IGY), and its successor, the World Data Center system. These different programs were designed to straddle the two cultures. Some of these efforts were more successful, others less so, but this, I would suggest, is in itself a phenomenon worthy of note: throughout the twentieth century, natural scientists have increasingly recognized that many scientific questions are composites of the natural and the social, and that many of the problems they address – in physics, in evolutionary biology or in environmental data collection – are hybrid problems, involving interrelationship of the social and natural worlds.

Rasmus Winther - Humanities, UC, Santa Cruz

An MCPS Lecture

Abstract: Situated at the intersection of natural science and philosophy, Our Genes explores historical practices, investigates current trends, and imagines future work in genetic research to answer persistent, political questions about human diversity. A moderate position about the explanatory power of genes that is often left unarticulated is defended. Simply put, human evolutionary genomics—our genes—can tell us much about who we are as individuals and as collectives. However, while they convey scientific certainty in the popular imagination, genes cannot answer some of our most important questions. Alternating between an up-close and a zoomed-out focus on genes and genomes, individuals and collectives, species and populations, Our Genes argues that the answers we seek point to rich, necessary work ahead.

Graham Mooney - History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: In September 1994, Baltimore’s Health Commissioner Dr Peter Beilenson wrote a memo to Mayor Kurt Schmoke with a sweeping proposal: the privatization of the Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD). Claiming that the average citizen of Baltimore "won’t know or care much" about a "Baltimore City Health Corporation," Beilenson’s idea was to release the health department from the shackles of government red-tape. Mayor Schmoke, himself no stranger to radical public health policies, rejected Beilenson’s suggestion. In this paper I explore the historical contexts in which Beilenson was able to make the suggestion in the first place. I argue, first, that part of Baltimore's self-curated image as a Renaissance City in the mid-1970s was achieved through an illegal scheme of loan financing that dispensed city funds to corporations and quasi-government entities for all kinds of projects. This so-called Shadow Government established an administrative culture in City Hall whereby an attempt to privatize the city health department might be seen as a wholly unremarkable step. Second, I argue that the incremental neoliberalization of public health functions instigated by Beilenson's predecessors made his plea for BCHD privatization a more realistic proposition than would otherwise have been the case. By the early 1990s BCHD had already set up two large quasi-private agencies delivering mental health and substance abuse Rather than dismantling the harmful structures that produce and condition such behaviors, neoliberalization in public health opens the doors for corporate entities to profit from them. Comprehending how and why neoliberalization unfolded is crucial to understanding the performance of local public health government in the present.

Nathan Crowe - Department of History, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

Abstract: Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American embryologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs and his team developed the technique of nuclear transplantation using frogs in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, Marie DiBerardino, John Gurdon, and University of Minnesota’s own Robert McKinnell before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, I demonstrate how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of what was then referred to as the Biological Revolution. My work illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as providing new insights into

Stephen Snobelen - History of Science and Technology, University of King's College, Halifax

Abstract: Newton was celebrated already in his own lifetime for his paradigmatic contributions to mathematics, optics, physics and cosmology. The recovery and study of Newton’s theological papers in recent decades demonstrates that he was just as passionate about researching early religion, church history, Christian doctrine and biblical prophecy. Newton’s science and religion can be studied separately, but what did Newton himself think about the relationship or relationships between these two spheres of his intense intellectual engagement? This presentation uses a series of programmatic statements on the relationship of God to natural philosophy that Newton penned in his later years to test the degree to which Newton adhered to his own models for relating science and religion. Did Newton believe that natural theology could be a part of natural philosophy or that they should be kept separate? Was there any conceptual overlap between his cosmology and his apocalyptic studies? Might his theological heresy have impinged on his science? And did Newton relate his biblical faith to his science or keep the two distinct? Newton scholarship is now ready to answer these questions.

Amy Sullivan, Department of History, Macalester College

Abstract: Professor Amy Sullivan will discuss the background and oral history methodology of her book, Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Situated as we are in the state that founded “rehab” and launched a Twelve Step revolution, she will discuss how she came to see the fifty-plus oral history narratives she conducted as possible "interventions" on the persistence and trauma of the opioid epidemic, on entrenched stigma against drug users, on the fallacies of criminal justice drug reforms, and the growing acceptance of the once-derided harm reduction model.

Evelyn Brister, Rochester Institute of Technology

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: There is a fundamental paradox in interdisciplinary research: while aiming to tear down the epistemic and
linguistic barriers between disciplines it also leads to increasingly specialized knowledge. Scientific research and
training institutions are set up so that knowledge grows toward greater specialization. Often, what starts as
interdisciplinary research becomes a discipline in its own right. And yet, the downsides to scientific specialization
have long been recognized. Otto Neurath’s anti-reductionist approach to unified science illuminates contemporary
hurdles to interdisciplinarity—and, in particular, to research that draws on disparate fields, such as from natural and
social sciences. I argue that we should conceptualize interdisciplinary integration as aiming, in Neurath’s words, at
“coordinated and unified action” and that the predominant metric of interdisciplinary integration fails to show
whether this epistemic goal has been achieved.

Emily Merchant, Science and Technology Studies, University of California – Davis

Abstract: In the twentieth century, population growth became an object of intervention for governments, intergovernmental agencies, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide. Histories of population control typically assume that these interventions arose in response to evidence of rapid population growth. However, demographic data were sparse to nonexistent in many parts of the world during the decades immediately following World War II. This talk examines efforts by the United Nations to facilitate the collection and analysis of population data in all of its member states, and explores how the failure of those efforts created opportunities for U.S.-based philanthropies, and eventually the U.S. government, to promote population control programs throughout the Global South.

Matthew Stanley, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

Abstract: Astronomers are good at predictions – eclipses down to the second, spacecraft landings to the minute. But in the 1980s they struggled with convincing their colleagues, politicians, and publics to take one of their predictions seriously at all. This was their novel warning that the Earth was in danger of being struck by an asteroid like that which killed the dinosaurs. What they saw as straightforward technical calculations turned out to be deeply entangled with the way late Cold War America thought about apocalypses in general, and the threat of nuclear war in particular. The scientists involved found that galvanizing political and social action required developing a new set of skills and networks that took advantage of the apocalyptic infrastructure that had been emplaced by decades of nuclear threat.

Jennifer Jhun, Duke University

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: How does one delineate a system of interest? Here I consider categories such as market, which pick out
systems that we might wish to intervene on. I propose that kinds of this sort have a distinctive epistemic role to play
that has been underappreciated in the extant literature. They partake in demarcating systems of interest, enabling us
to effectively draw boundaries around relevant domains of inquiry. Insofar as this role is concerned, such categories
must be treated as functional kinds. So the membership condition for a member is whether or not it fits a particular
functional profile, articulated in terms of the counterfactual features it would exhibit under changes. Moreover, I
suggest that this activity is presupposed by, but in important ways conceptually distinct from, mechanistic reasoning
(as conceived by New Mechanists).

Suman Seth, Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

Abstract: In this talk I will explore one of the most interesting current areas of overlap between Postcolonial and Indigenous STS: a shared concern with the problems posed and the opportunities offered by relativizing ontologies. The central issue may be explained quite simply. Imagine a disagreement between two groups. One explains a given event—the shaking of the earth, perhaps—by invoking the action of some Gods; the other insists on a ‘scientific’ explanation, pointing to the coming together of tectonic plates. Were we, as analysts, to adopt an epistemologically relativist position on this disagreement, we might suggest that both groups were really ‘talking about the same thing.’ That they, in fact, were simply offering competing representations of truths—beliefs—about the world. Such a position insists that only one world exists, however many understandings of that world there may be. As an alternative, scholars in both postcolonial and Indigenous STS have proposed that it is the ontological and not the epistemological that needs to be relativized: that the problem lies in assuming that ‘we’ all share a single world. Instead of a universe, some have argued, we inhabit a pluriverse. Is the pluriverse a solution, however, or does it pose its own set of problems, both practical and political?  

Nora Boyd, Philosophy, Siena College

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: This talk explores the epistemology of empirical science in a difficult epistemic context: the study of the
‘cosmic dawn’ via the faint signal from neutral hydrogen during the birth of the first stars in our universe.
Calibration plays a crucial epistemic role in that it truncates the ‘experimenters’ regress’. Especially when
investigating new phenomena, scientists often rely on surrogate signals to calibrate their instruments and thereby
help justify their results. I evaluate a Bayesian proposal in cosmic dawn research to largely sidestep surrogates and
lump calibration parameters together with other unknowns, thereby apparently erasing the distinctive epistemic role
of calibration.

Matt McGue, Psychology, University of Minnesota

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: One of psychology’s defining issues has been to understand how children come to resemble their parents.
Throughout most of the 20th century, psychoanalytic, behaviorist and social learning traditions dominated within
psychology and parents were seen to be the primary socializers of the children they raised. This view was challenged by a series of behavioral genetic studies in the late 20th century, leading some of the more extreme behavioral geneticists to question whether parents had any effect in shaping their children’s psychology. The current century has seen a moderating of extreme positions and a more nuanced view of parent-offspring transmission. I will make use of findings from a series of long-term longitudinal family studies to discuss how genetic and genomic research designs have helped us understand the nature of parent-offspring resemblance. Illustrations will be drawn from four trait classes that show different patterns of parent-offspring resemblance: personality, academic abilities, mental health and social attitudes.

Erika Milam, Department of History, Princeton University

Abstract: This talk explores the history of behavioral research on marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the mountains of Colorado. Started in 1962, this is one of several long-term studies of animal behavior that started in the decades after the Second World War that have become central to behavioral ecology as a discipline. Why did researchers decide to return to the same site year after year, and how have those reasons changed for subsequent generations of ecologists? How were affective connections to place—from danger to freedom—important in cementing ecologists’ commitments to field sites like RMBL? Charting the history of this project allows me to navigate the relations of activity and torpor, sociality and solitude, and station and university over the last sixty years, so as to understand the role of remote research stations as crucial places for the production of knowledge about the natural world in which we live. 

Mariola Espinosa, History; Biomedical Ethics, University of Iowa

Abstract: This talk discusses how the history of disease and medicine, which is usually studied in very localized geographical contexts, benefits from also being evaluated from a broader, more global, perspective. The Caribbean provides a perfect example to see how connections among islands and mainland ports—between their inhabitants, their economies, their environments, among others—are manifested in the history of epidemics and of medical knowledge.  Studying the history of disease and medicine in this manner reveals the interconnections between the islands and the networks of medical knowledge to be multi-directional exchanges that at the same time transcend the boundaries of language and empires.

Christopher Kindell, Visiting Assistant Professor and Lecturer, History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Abstract: By 1860, Hawai‘i's Indigenous population had declined by 75 per cent when compared to its estimated pre-contact level. Legislators and physicians attributed this crisis to the seasonal migration of Hawaiian women engaged in sex work. After contracting syphilis from sailors in Honolulu, these women returned to their Native villages where they unwittingly spread the disease. Drawing on legislation, health reports, and newspapers, this presentation will underscore the urban-rural nature of Hawai‘i's syphilis epidemic by analyzing the 1860 Act to Mitigate the Evils and Diseases Arising from Prostitution. The law compelled alleged prostitutes to enlist on a government registry, undergo medical inspections, and submit to treatment if infected. Arresting depopulation, adherents argued, hinged on the government's ability to police Indigenous women within a conspicuous urban environment. In designing and enacting the Act to Mitigate, legislators and physicians characterized Honolulu as a syphilitic breeding ground that catalyzed Indigenous depopulation by sheltering transient carriers of this highly gendered disease. 

Andrew Janiak, Philosophy, Duke University

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: Newton’s startling conclusion in Book III of the Principia that all bodies gravitate toward one another
defied easy interpretation. Whereas the editor of the Principia’s second edition, Roger Cotes, claimed that gravity is
a primary quality, Newton demurred, merely denying that he regarded gravity as essential to matter. In the aftermath
of this dispute, Du Châtelet argued in her Foundations of Physics (Paris, 1740) that the first task of philosophers is
to broach the very metaphysical questions concerning the essence of matter that Newton eschewed. Only such an
approach would enable them to understand the principal conclusion of the greatest discovery of the Scientific
Revolution, a revolution that was first proclaimed by Du Châtelet herself in 1738.

Joel Isaac, Social Thought, University of Chicago

Abstract: For much of the twentieth century, economics prided itself on formulating principles of consistent choice that relied only on minimal logical conditions.  Rationality had been reduced to formal logic — for scientific purposes, at least.  In recent years this logical ideal of rationality has come under attack.  But how did it gain a grip in economics and the decision sciences in the first place?  And just how new are our misgivings about formal rationality? 

My paper argues that the use of logic to make normative claims about rationality and justification go back at least to the 1920s, and especially to the critical writings of the British philosopher Frank Ramsey on inductive logic.  His contrast between a narrow ‘logic of consistency’ and a wider ‘logic of discovery’ — the latter of which cannot, by definition, be formalized — has come up again and again in twentieth century social thought.  I consider this dialectic between formal logic and ‘human logic’, and suggest that recent histories of 'calculative practices', while deeply illuminating, are prone to miss the ways in which this dialectic reflects an abiding interest in the sources of normativity among mathematicians, philosophers, and social scientists.

Corinne Bloch-Mullins, Philosophy, Marquette University 

MCPS Lecture

Abstract: This paper examines the productive roles of concepts in investigative practice. Specifically, it explores the roles of placeholder concepts—rudimentary concepts formed on the basis of few differentiating characteristics—in the generation of empirical knowledge. My analysis will focus on the concept “slow virus”, which was proposed in the 1950’s by Bjorn Sigurdsson. The concept grouped together what is now known to be a rather heterogenous collection of infectious agents. I show that, despite its rudimentary nature, the concept facilitated investigation into the nature of the agents by setting up specific explanatory targets that contributed to the eventual development of the later concept “prion.” I propose that such placeholder concepts can be fruitfully understood as scaffolds: while they may later be discarded or split, they serve an important role in bringing about the very developments that result in their removal or modification.

Hyeok Hweon Kang, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Washington University – St Louis

Abstract: This talk recasts the history of early modern science from the perspective of artisans and practitioners in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). It argues that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, craftspeople in the military factories of Seoul developed a hands-on, experimental approach to investigating the material world. Their experimentalism originated from the shopfloor—the artisanal practice of “prototyping.” But as it passed on from the army workshops to poetry associations and literati studios, it spread across society, prompting the rise of new practitioners who emphasized a bodily, experiential approach to knowledge. The talk reconstructs this Korean artisanal science and expands our understanding of experiment and empiricism in the early modern world.

Chris Hamlin, Department of History, University of Notre Dame

Abstract: Behind the current fascination with forensic science lies a long, large, varied and underexplored history of forensic medicine, often called legal medicine or medical jurisprudence. Mostly it has been overlooked by medical historians focused on health care and by legal historians focused on constitutional issues. Historians have encountered it mostly in terms of single techniques or issues in local settings; the absence of a long-term, comparative big picture of medico-legal institutions, professions, and practices of governance has hampered interpretation. As in Locating Forensic Cultures (co-edited with Ian Burney, 2019), I use “citizenship to problematize. A medical jurisprudence will always exist, the states of bodies being matters of state concern. I focus on two axes. One, diachronic, is the change from a rule-bound medical jurisprudence of 18^th century German cameralism, in which categories of persons (by age, sex, race, place, property, station, and nation) were central, to the program of evidence-based individuation outlined by Paul Kirk in the 1960s. The second is the tension between retrospective and prospective actions -- “forensics” and “public health” may now seem separate, but a comparative medical-legal history helps to highlight the complex contingencies that underlie their relationship.

Jessica Ratcliff, Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

Abstract: This project investigates changing patterns of knowledge resource management at the British East India Company. It covers the years between the Company’s takeover of Bengal in 1757 and the abolition of the Company in 1858. At the beginning of the period, the Company generally depended upon individuals for the historical, linguistic, navigational, botanical, medical and other sciences upon which their operations depended. By the end of the period, the Company had taken over the direct management and production of many domains of colonial science. Along the way, the Company would become a key institution of science in London, establishing around 1800 a library, museum and two colleges in Britain. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the changing structure and geography of science under the Company. Out of this overview, the role that the East India Company played in shaping British science becomes clear, as does the debt that the organization of both modern states and modern sciences owe to the corporation as a form of governance. I will then consider the importance of this case for our understanding of the relationship between “state science” (or public science) and “corporate science” (or private science), and the fuzzy historical boundaries between these two orders of access.

Sarah Richardson, History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Abstract: ​Sarah Richardson will discuss her new book, The Maternal Imprint, which examines the history of scientific speculations about the long-term effects of experiences or exposures in the womb from the eugenic era to today’s epigenetics.  Through this history, Richardson traces a genealogy of biosocial science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and examines persistent and unresolved questions about the limits of empirical science in confirming maternal-fetal effects in human populations.

Stephen Casper, Department of History, Clarkson University

A Dorothy Bernstein Lecture in the History of Psychiatry

Abstract: Since hits to the head can cause dementia, why is our culture only now realizing it? This essay argues that the observation that neurological illnesses follow recurrent hits to the head was tempered by the very languages that first called the diseases into scientific existence: punch drunk, slug nutty, slap happy, goofy, punchie, and a host of other colloquialisms accompanying class identities. Thus the discovery of disease and its medicalization ran straight into a disbelief about losers - losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general. To medicalize such individuals, was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes. Yet, a subculture began to emerge around pathological understandings, first in medicine, then in journalism, then in the courts, and then finally with patient accounts about illness. These new understandings never achieved canonical status in English-speaking cultures prior to the 2000s but they persisted and grew stronger throughout the post-war period.

Jole Shackelford, History of Medicine, University of Minnesota

Abstract: I will posit an epistemological gap between the research designs and interpretations of results of experimental psychologists and animal physiologists during the first half of the twentieth century, evident at least in the study of biological rhythms and the pursuit of biological clocks.  That scientists working in different fields often operated within their own silos, as this is sometimes called, is not a particularly novel idea, but I will show that in the history of rhythms studies this has led to a mistaken priority claim in the search for “the biological clock” – one that led to a nomination for a Nobel Prize on historically dubious grounds.  It remains to be seen whether this finding can be applied more broadly.

Andre Wakefield, Department of History, Pitzer College

Abstract: The history of science and technology has long been especially prone to Whiggish anachronism. You might say it’s built into the marrow of our discipline. While the complete elimination of anachronism from our histories may be a fool’s errand, certain forms of anachronism, instantiated in what I have elsewhere called “Disney History,” constitute a problem worth discussing. I will use the case of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his experiments with mining machines in the Harz Mountains, to demonstrate what I mean.

Jacob Steere-Williams, Department of History, College of Charleston

A Charles E. Culpeper Lecture in the History of Medicine and HSTM Alumni Lecture

Abstract: This talk examines the entanglements of colonial public health through the history of a singular chemical technology; carbolic acid. Derived from coal tar production in British and German industrial factories, carbolic acid exploded in use from the 1870s after Joseph Lister advocated for aseptic and antiseptic surgeries. By the early twentieth century, carbolic acid and other chemical disinfectants were domesticated as common household tools in the fight against germs. An unexplored history of carbolic acid, however, are the practices—gendered and racialized—whereby carbolic acid became the central and everyday weapon used by colonial public health officers and indigenous laborers in fighting outbreaks of infectious disease. This talk, using the rich archival material derived from anti-plague work in British India and South Africa around 1900, shows how carbolic acid and the practices of disinfection were key sites of scientific knowledge transfer, debate, and contestation, over colonial environments, bodies, and what bodies produce.

Elizabeth Toon, University of Manchester

Abstract: This talk is part of my larger project, 'Making Screening Work', on the history of cervical cancer screening in the United Kingdom.  While national health authorities registered support for a regular programme of cervical cancer screening early in the 1960s, it took until the end of that decade for facilities, practitioners, and systems to be fully ready to take on the challenge of providing the service to the UK's women. Even so, policymakers and leading medical experts disagreed about the best approaches to delivering screening, and were particularly worried about reaching rural women and women thought less likely for cultural, social, or economic reasons to attend.  One approach they trialed was what they called the 'do-it-herself smear', a form of self-sampling that -- theoretically, at least -- would allow women to participate in screening without visiting a GP or clinic.  In this talk, I discuss why this approach initially seemed appealing, and why it failed in practice, asking what it can tell us about the technological, social, and political challenges associated with the introduction of screening.  By focusing on historical discussions about the mundane realities of smear-taking, I show that we can better understand the larger challenges that instituting screening presented to medical organisation, and grasp how this new technology of prevention reshaped both the delivery of care and women's health experiences. 

Elena Conis, School of Journalism, UC-Berkeley

Abstract: Hesitancy and resistance to vaccination is more common than not in U.S. history. This talk will explain how and why public attitudes toward vaccination have changed over time, with an emphasis on twentieth and twenty-first century trends. Many age-old vaccination objections—including those grounded in religious beliefs, secular values, political ideology, and distrust in powerful interest groups—have persisted for more than two hundred years. But the modern era of vaccination, which dawned in the 1950s, is unique for its emphasis on compulsory vaccination of children, the visibility of so-called anti-vaccine views, and the often-overlooked but historically unprecedented acceptance of mandatory vaccination of the youngest citizens. This talk will place trends in the modern era of vaccination in the context of issues related to the nuclear family, economy, health care, and federal politics. It will also discuss how shifting social values, environmental concerns, gender roles, the valuation of children, and the relationship between secular and religious values inform vaccination skepticism. Finally, it will consider how today’s vaccination discourse and behaviors both echo and depart from historical trends in vaccination resistance and acceptance. 

Mackenzie Cooley, Department of History, Hamilton College

Abstract: The Renaissance is celebrated for its belief that man could fashion himself to greatness. But there is a dark parallel to this fêted history. Those same men and women who were offering profound advancements in understanding the human condition, laying the foundations of the Scientific Revolution, were fascinated with controlling that condition and the wider natural world. This talk introduces The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Humans, and Race in the Renaissance (In Press, The University of Chicago Press), a book that traces how the Renaissance world – from the Mediterranean to Mexico City to the high mountains of the Andes – was marked by a lingering fascination with breeding. Just as one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. Aristocrats, breeders, and intellectuals thought through generation as those around them endeavored to create improved animal bodies, traced here through the cases of Italian horses, Mesoamerican dogs, Andean camelids, and other creatures. As the idea of controlled breeding was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding developed. The bureaucratic language of “razze,” employed to designate a selected population thought to embody fragile differences over a few short generations, slipped from animals, becoming more permanent and hierarchical when applied to humans living in European colonies in this chapter of the long and convoluted history of race.

Ashley Inglehart, College of Medicine, Florida State University

Abstract: This paper examines the problem of generation -how plants, animals, and minerals come into existence- as considered by eminent English Aristocrat, Robert Boyle. Boyle, most noted today for work in pneumatics, addresses the problem in more than twenty treatises spanning roughly forty years. His understanding of the forces of generation, moreover, would remain closely tied to his ideas about God and the biblical account of Creation throughout his life.

I show how Robert Boyle took up the imagery of seminal principles for religious purposes and made them cohere with his larger mechanical and experimental project. I likewise expand upon the influence that Boyle’s Theological Voluntarism had upon his epistemology and methodological approach to experiment. In doing so, Boyle would contribute to a larger project of rejecting Aristotelian essentialism in favor of a modern approach to science. Both his approach and ideas about the forces of generation would go on to have tremendous influence in medicine, philosophy, and the birth of science itself.

Ashanti Shih, Post-doctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, University of Southern California

Abstract: This talk explores the relationship between the natural sciences and settler colonialism, using the case of American botany in the Territory of Hawai‘i from the 1920s to the 1940s. In particular, I focus on a white American botanist and his Asian and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) collecting partners, who worked and lived in intimate arrangements to turn Hawaiian plants into scientific commodities. By centering their complicated relationships with each other and with Indigenous land, I propose a different way of reading encounters between Native peoples and western science: through the lenses of territory, erasure, and refusal.

Rescheduled from Spring 2020

Sigrid Schmalzer, Department of History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Abstract: Chinese agricultural scientists are prominent actors in global movements to promote agroecological engineering and preserve agricultural heritage systems. This presentation will explore the diverse historical roots of the systems paradigm, along with the scientific and political work it accomplishes. The notion that Chinese farmers have traditionally viewed agriculture as an ecological system (expressed most famously in the mulberry dyke / fish pond system of southeastern China) has inspired proponents of agroecology around the world. However, the mapping of such farming practices as systems of efficiently functioning components—along with the more general, transnational phenomenon of systems science—is a quintessentially modern way of thinking rooted in the application of scientific knowledge for the rationalization and control of nature and society. Similar language and diagrams have been used in China since the Mao era to describe agricultural, industrial, and political processes. The overarching principles of integration, efficiency, totality, and harmony emphasized in such schematics may be read as representing environmentalism or industrialism, holism or authoritarianism—or, more productively, some combination thereof. A deeper understanding of the history and current application of systems thinking in Chinese agriculture will help us more clearly identify where it inspires respect for ecological complexity and balance, and where it serves to justify and buttress state power.

Sarah Richardson, History of Science and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Abstract: This paper offers a critical analysis of three touchstone research streams linking epigenetic markers with prenatal exposures and later life health in human populations: studies of individuals gestated during the Dutch Famine; research on individuals prenatally exposed to a 1998 ice storm in Quebec; and studies of the offspring of Jewish Holocaust survivors. In human studies, maternal intrauterine effects are what I call cryptic: they are small in effect size, vary depending on ecosocial context, and occur at a great temporal distance from the initial exposure. The fetal epigenetic programming hypothesis functions as a narrative glue that coheres disparate cryptic findings into plausible causal stories. Through close analysis of these research streams, I examine precisely what inferences scientists believe epigenetic studies can support, and how, in practice, scientists construct causal claims in fetal epigenetic programming research, despite the crypticity of their findings.

Jessica L. Adler (History, Florida International University.

This is the Dorothy Bernstein Lecture in the History of Psychiatry.

Abstract: In 1979, Congress approved funding for an outpatient, community-based “readjustment counseling” program to be administered by the Veterans Administration (VA), and accessible to those who had served during the war in Vietnam. Today, 300 Vet Centers are located in storefronts throughout the country and their doors are open to veterans of a variety of conflicts; they outnumber VA hospitals two to one. This talk, which shows that the veterans’ health system gradually “deinstitutionalized” in the mid-twentieth century, explores the social and political conditions undergirding the establishment of the Vet Center program. It has two larger implications. First, it sheds light on general conditions that impel transitions in health systems: changing conceptions of how illness should be treated, transformations in social definitions of disease, and forceful stakeholder advocacy. Second, it highlights how Vietnam veterans and their advocates restructured VA health services according to their own priorities, with lasting results for future generations.

Maria Gonzalez Pendas, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University.

Abstract: A vibrant interior built on a gridded structure of steel and glass, the pavilion was readily celebrated as the “unexpected gem” of the fair, exemplar of a refined modernism unlike much of the technological kitsch taking over the grounds of Expo 58 in Brussels. The architecture that the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco brought to the world scene in 1958 was received as quintessentially modern—and thus at odds with the fascist regime it was called to represent. “The Spanish Pavilion makes one wonder,” as one critic put it, “is Franco now tired and allows artists unusual freedom? Or maybe this country is no longer fascist?”
 
Fascism was of course alive and well and architecture continued to be as crucial an instrument for its production as it had been in the interwar period. Only now the world stage was shifting under Cold War dynamics and with it the ideological and technological configurations of fascism. In this talk, I will chronicle how architects worked alongside intellectuals, cadres, and other technicians to redefine the technological and aesthetic registers of fascism towards what I call “holy modernism.” In its ability to blend modernist aesthetics, technological modernization, and reactionary ideologies—including those of Opus Dei, the Catholic organization that came of age in the wake of the Spanish Civil War—holy modernism proved crucial in sustaining the pastoral project of Spanish fascism and modernize its nationalist-imperial myth of Hispanidad. Opus Dei member, historian, and Secretary of Censorship Florentino Pérez-Embid fittingly coined this agenda as “Westernization in the means, Hispanization in the ends.” This talk illuminates the strategies that architects, working at the intersection of technology and aesthetic, deployed to fulfill such synthesis; one that called to perform the Reconquest, technological modernization, and a politics of affect in the very same breadth. In so doing, I offer the methods and objects of architectural history as a way to unpack some of the most insidious techniques of reactionary ideology, some of the most overlooked aspects of the politics of technology, and some insight on the historical resilience of fascism. 

Pablo Gomez, Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin

Abstract: This talk will explore the emergence in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic slaving societies of novel concepts about the quantifiable nature of human bodies. These developments, I argue, gave rise to a new epistemology that conceived of fungible and universal bodies that were measurable and comparable, as were the diseases that affected them, in quantifiable and reproducible ways in a temporal framework. Scholars have traditionally identified these ideas as related to the rise of the New Science and political and medical arithmetics in late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century English, French and northern European learned circles. My research explores how early Iberian-centered slave trade enterprises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generated, in an unprecedented manner, a gargantuan amount of data related to the mathematical measurement of human corporeality and the risks of slave bodies (and their labor) in financial terms. This history has remained mostly unexamined, especially in relation to accounts about the emergence of modern medicine, epidemiology, and demography. By focusing on the violent early history of bodily quantification in the Atlantic, my work re-locates narratives about critical events related to the value-creating nature of exchange practices as they refer to the human body and their role in the modeling of fundamental ideas for the nascent disciplines of political economy and public health in ensuing centuries.

Hiromi Mizuno, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Abstract: How can we make nitrogen visible? Can we historicize the Nitrogen Cycle? This talk, from my current book project, tells a story of agricultural modernization in Asia that challenges the familiar US-centered Green Revolution story. Imperial Japan was the world's largest producer and consumer of nitrogen, the most important nutrient for plant growth, and postwar Japan continued to be the major provider of fertilizer to Asia. Using GIS technologies and archival sources, I follow the flow of nitrogen in order to critically explore the political ecology of nitrogenous fertilizer in the twentieth century and terrestrial concerns for the future.

Fa-ti Fan, Department of History, Binghampton University 

Abstract: By a strange coincidence, China experienced a series of powerful earthquakes during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Natural disasters and socio-political upheavals dominated the tumultuous years. In response, China waged “The People’s War against Earthquakes.” The “earthquake workers” as well as the masses developed and mobilized a wide range of approaches to earthquake monitoring, prediction, and defense.

This paper discusses the ideas, practices, and institutions of earthquake monitoring and prediction in Cultural Revolution China. The focus is on the culture and politics of the senses, sensory experience, and distributed sensor-networks in the People’s War against Earthquakes. The paper demonstrates the fundamental importance of sensory politics to disaster governance in communist China.

Kylie Smith, School of Nursing, Emory University 

Abstract: Much has been written about the history of psychiatry and the history of Civil Rights, yet rarely are they studied together. In this lecture, Dr Kylie Smith will present research from her new project which explores the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on large state psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. These hospitals had been segregated for decades, with devastating effects, and resistance to integration was often fierce. Yet a series of court cases bought by committed activists and lawyers sought to end racist practices in Southern psychiatry. Despite some successes, racist ideas about the nature of the Black psyche continued to underpin approaches to mental health in the South, creating continued disparities into today. In this exploration, Dr Smith reveals narratives of oppression, abuse and neglect as well as startling bravery and survival, as psychiatric hospitals become a lens through which to view many of the South’s enduring tensions. Dr Smith will discuss the ways that her project sits at the intersection of medical, legal and disability history, and will also explain the process of creating a digital humanities, Open Access project.

Janet Greenlees, Glasgow Caledonian University

Abstract: For over one hundred years, the cities of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Glasgow, UK have struggled with some of their countries highest rates of poverty and maternal and infant mortality. While national and local efforts to address these mortality rates have varied over time, many initiatives focused on mothers and care before, during and after childbirth. Nevertheless, women living in poverty have been consistently less likely to engage with prenatal care than their wealthier counterparts. Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, when prenatal care was ‘invented’ and gradually became a recognized part of regular maternity care, this paper challenges historical debates which explain women’s increasing engagement with prenatal care as forming part of the shift from social childbirth and reactive obstetrics to the mid-twentieth century medical model or ideal of childbirth. The cities of Philadelphia and Glasgow provide case studies for demonstrating cross-national similarities of low-income women’s agency in choosing to engage or not to engage and on what terms with what became known as preventive medicine. Low-income women’s experiences of pregnancy differed from those of their wealthier counterparts and this paper reveals a common importance of not simply the type of prenatal provision, but also practitioners’ perceptions of their poor patients and maternal feelings. Both providers and prospective patients required resilience to manage the challenges of poverty and pregnancy.

Maria Gonzalez Pendas, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University 

Abstract: A vibrant interior built on a gridded structure of steel and glass, the pavilion was readily celebrated as the “unexpected gem” of the fair, exemplar of a refined modernism unlike much of the technological kitsch taking over the grounds of Expo 58 in Brussels. The architecture that the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco brought to the world scene in 1958 was received as quintessentially modern—and thus at odds with the fascist regime it was called to represent. “The Spanish Pavilion makes one wonder,” as one critic put it, “is Franco now tired and allows artists unusual freedom? Or maybe this country is no longer fascist?”

Fascism was of course alive and well and architecture continued to be as crucial an instrument for its production as it had been in the interwar period. Only now the world stage was shifting under Cold War dynamics and with it the ideological and technological configurations of fascism. In this talk, I will chronicle how architects worked alongside intellectuals, cadres, and other technicians to redefine the technological and aesthetic registers of fascism towards what I call “holy modernism.” In its ability to blend modernist aesthetics, technological modernization, and reactionary ideologies—including those of Opus Dei, the Catholic organization that came of age in the wake of the Spanish Civil War—holy modernism proved crucial in sustaining the pastoral project of Spanish fascism and modernize its nationalist-imperial myth. Opus Dei member, historian, and Secretary of Censorship Florentino Pérez-Embid fittingly coined this agenda as “Westernization in the means, Hispanization in the ends.” This talk illuminates the strategies that architects, working at the intersection of technology and aesthetic, deployed to fulfill such synthesis; one that called to perform the Reconquest, technological modernization, and affective politics in the very same breadth. In so doing, it offers the methods and objects of architectural history as means by which to unpack some of the most insidious techniques of reactionary politics and some of the most overlooked aspects of the politics of technology.

Jacob Steere-Williams, Department of History, College of Charleston

Abstract: Typhoid fever strikes about 20 million people each year, killing about 200,000 individuals annually, predominately in the Global South. Evolutionary biologists and historical epidemiologists tell us that the disease has long been inflicting human populations, but that typhoid was at its height during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. A food and water-borne bacterial infection, typhoid epitomized the pitfalls of early attempts at an urban-Industrial pipe-bound city. Before the 1840s, however, it was a disease without a name, grouped alongside a host of early modern “fevers.”  This talk is about how, epistemologically, the disease concept first named typhoid was a unique product of the Victorian period, produced by and mutually intelligible to historical actors of the nineteenth century. Typhoid was deeply understood to be part of the English environment, inexorably tied to English bodies and to British cultural identity. Drawing on material from my forthcoming book, The Filth Disease, I show that typhoid was protean in the Victorian period, flexible to popular and politicized understandings of public health, and malleable to a number of burgeoning scientific fields, including clinical medicine, pathology, veterinary medicine, epidemiology, chemistry, and bacteriology. In the years after 1900 the typhoid of the Victorians disappeared. Or, rather, it became fragmented and disjointed by laboratory science into the broader Salmonella family that we know today. This talk highlights the central features of conflicting “typhoid cultures”  during the Victorian era, when the disease emerged and before it vanished.  

Ian Burney, Center for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester

Abstract: We live in an age of innocence consciousness. Since the first US case of post-conviction DNA exoneration in 1989, national advocacy organizations have championed the cause of potentially innocent prisoners, raised public awareness, and promoted policy reform. These developments have been hailed as the dawn of a new moral, legal and scientific order – an ‘innocence revolution’ – driven by a unique set of contemporary forces: principled critique criminal justice bias, media advocacy, and most importantly the declarative power of forensic genomics. In this lecture I will rethink this claim to historical singularity by exploring a prior forensic framework of innocence centered on Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Court of Last Resort.’ Best known today as the creator of the intrepid defense attorney Perry Mason, in 1948 Gardner founded ‘The Court of Last Resort,’ a self-appointed body of experts dedicated to investigating – and publicizing – possible cases of wrongful conviction. In many respects, Gardner’s enterprise shares essential structural features of the present innocence moment. Yet Gardner’s project was profoundly influenced by the political, legal, cultural and scientific context of Cold War America, and this determined both the forensic techniques it deployed in the pursuit of innocence, and the criteria for selecting whose claim to innocence was worth pursuing.

Sigrid Schmalzer, Department of History, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Abstract: Chinese agricultural scientists are prominent actors in global movements to promote agroecological engineering and preserve agricultural heritage systems. This presentation will explore the diverse historical roots of the systems paradigm, along with the scientific and political work it accomplishes. The notion that Chinese farmers have traditionally viewed agriculture as an ecological system (expressed most famously in the mulberry dyke / fish pond system of southeastern China) has inspired proponents of agroecology around the world. However, the mapping of such farming practices as systems of efficiently functioning components—along with the more general, transnational phenomenon of systems science—is a quintessentially modern way of thinking rooted in the application of scientific knowledge for the rationalization and control of nature and society. Similar language and diagrams have been used in China since the Mao era to describe agricultural, industrial, and political processes. The overarching principles of integration, efficiency, totality, and harmony emphasized in such schematics may be read as representing environmentalism or industrialism, holism or authoritarianism—or, more productively, some combination thereof. A deeper understanding of the history and current application of systems thinking in Chinese agriculture will help us more clearly identify where it inspires respect for ecological complexity and balance, and where it serves to justify and buttress state power.