Matthew Hersch
Assistant Professor in the History of Science

“A Wing and a Prayer: Risky Design and the Space Shuttle”

Marta Hanson
Department of the History of Medicine
Johns Hopkins University
 

Terence Keel
The Department of African American Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles

“Ghosts in the Machine: Christianity, Race, and the Haunting of Biological Science”

Marcos Cueto
Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz
Rio de Janeiro...

Eden Medina,
School Of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering,
Indiana University

"Unmaking Truth After Dictatorship: Science, Memory, and the Disappeared"... Read more about History of Science Seminars: Eden Medina

Jennifer Derr,
Department of History, UC Santa Cruz 

"Origin Stories: Constructing the liver in Egypt through epidemics of schistosomiasis and hepatitis C"... Read more about History of Science Seminar: Jennifer Derr

Gastón Gordillo,
Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia

"Ambient Thickness: On the Atmospheric Materiality of the Anthropocene"... Read more about History of Science Seminars: Gastón Gordillo

Speaker: Naomi Oreskes
(Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University)
Title: Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change

Does compression have a history?

Alongside a cognitive challenge of “too much to know,” information overload poses a physical challenge of “too much to store.” Indeed, the possibilities of “big data” today are predicated on technologies that compress data into ever “smaller” sizes. On the one hand, major libraries such as the NYPL, coping with spatial shortage, have increasingly emphasized the provision of digital resources – shifting physical collections off site, and in the process sparking heated debates with researchers. On the other hand, the possibilities of digital...

How have people thought about mental illness in different cultures, and are there positive aspects associated with it, thinking historically and scientifically? Should we think of mental illness as categorically different or as deviations from the normal healthy state? What measures other than pharmaceutical medicines can be helpful for maintaining positive mental health? Join us as we take a deep dive into the biological, historical and psychological aspects of mental illness.

A panel featuring: Prof. Anne Harrington (History of Science),
Prof....

Nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, Hidden Figures is the incredible untold story of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)—brilliant African American women working at NASA, who served as the brains...

Brendan J. Meade, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences; Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, and Scott Kuindersma, Assistant Professor of Engineering & Computer Science, will talk about natural disasters, how to predict them, why we aren't properly concerned about risks of this...

Title: “AIDS Origins: Can Stories that Don’t Tell Well Still Become History?"

Speaker: Naomi Oreskes
 
Scientists are often reluctant to speak in public on contested issues, for fear that this will “politicize” their science and have a negative impact on their credibility.  In this talk, I examine these concerns, by exploring historical...

Race, Representation, and Museums Lecture Series

J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director, Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project, Duke University

Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, the term “fetish...