MSWG: Miriam Rich

Date: 

Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Science Center 252

"'Protecting the National Germ Plasm': Concepts of Defective Reproduction from Nineteenth-Century Embryology to American Eugenics"

RSVP here by Monday, Sep. 21 for lunch.

This talk will focus on very early-stage material from Miriam’s archival research at the American Philosophical Society this summer. She is interested in exploring how American eugenicists (mainly Charles Davenport and his colleagues) made use of nineteenth-century embryological concepts of monstrous development. The work is one element of her larger dissertation project on the history of defective reproduction and monstrous childbirth in the U.S.