SCHEDULE


The 56th Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology


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Jointly held by the Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology (MIT), and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS)and Department of the History of Science (Harvard University)


Friday and Saturday, April 8-9, 2022
 

https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/jas-history-biology

 

Friday 8 April 2022

 

4:30pm Welcoming Remarks
 

4:45pm

Guest Lecture

 

Kenneth R. Manning
Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and of the History of Science, MIT
Black Apollo of Science: The Life of E. E. Just--A Retrospective

Social Event, Breakout Rooms

 


Saturday 9 April 2022

 

9:00-10:30am

Biology on the Inside

 

Chair: Harriet Ritvo

Anin Luo, Princeton
Animals between Universality and Locality: The Emergence of Experimental Biology in Republican China

Gina Surita, Princeton
Cellular Power Plants: An Overview of Postwar Mitochondria Research

Libby O’Neil, Yale University
Dream Laboratories and Psychical Microscopes: On Psychoanalysis as an Experimental Science

10:30-11:00pm Break
 

11:00am -12:30pm

Evolution as Explanation

 

Chair: Henry Cowles

Anna Christensen, Harvard University
“In the End is the Beginning”: Speculating about Deep Evolutionary Pasts and Futures with Dougal Dixon

Sam Franz, University of Pennsylvania
Adaptation as Learning: John Holland and Evolutionary Computing at the University of Michigan

Nayanika Ghosh, Harvard University
Sociobiology as Cold War Propaganda: What Can the History of Nuclear Science Offer the History of Organismic Biology

 

12:30-1:30pm Lunch Break

 

1:30-3:00pm

The Body Politic

 

Chair: Susan Lindes

Jessica Hester, Johns Hopkins University
“We the people’ would soon decide for them”: Resurrection, Dissection, Democracy, and Race in 19th-Century Philadelphia

Margo Williams, Washington, DC
Biopolitics and the Bacillus: Sinophobia in an Epidemic of Bubonic Plague in Sydney, 1900-10

Katherine McLeod, NYU
The Call of the Hoatzin: Ecology, Evolution, and Eugenics at the Bronx Zoo

BREAK

3:15-4:15pm

Microbes, Megafauna, and Gender

 

Chair: Angela Creager

Meg Perret, Harvard University
“Why Do Pandas Have So Little Sex?”: Scientific Representations of Giant Panda Reproduction in Zoo Captive Breeding Programs, 1985-2020

Caitlin Kossmann, Yale University
“I have contributed to science because twice I quit my job as a wife”: On the pedagogy and reluctant feminism of Lynn Margulis

BREAK

4:30-5:00pm

Special Session on Museums

 

Guest speaker John Durant, MIT
“Invisible Biology”

 

Wrap up and Goodbye 'til 2023