Calendar of Events
Fall 2024 Colloquium Schedule
October 7th: Rose Campbell, Bioarchaeologist and Egyptologist
“Modern and Man-Made? Tracking Cancer through the Past”
Bunche 5288, 4-5:30PM
October 21st: Amir Alexander (UCLA)
Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Bunche 6275, 4-5:30PM
November 4th: Edward Polanco
“In Cintli, In Pahtli: Corn as a Cure in Nahua Communities”
Bunche 6275, 4-5:30PM
November 18th: Pablo Gómez
“Bloody Numbers: Slave Trading and the Imagination of the Human Body in the Early Iberian Atlantic”
December 2nd: Meng Zhang (UCLA)
“Edible Birds’ Nests and the Making of Medical Knowledge in Early Modern China”
Bunche 5288, 4-5:30PM
Fall 2023 Colloquium Schedule
We will meet from 4-5:30 pm in Bunche 5288. We will continue to offer the option to participate remotely but we do hope to see more of you in person. To receive the Zoom link please respond to the RSVP link circulated with the announcements for the individual talks. Everyone is welcome!
October 9th: Patricia M. Marcos (UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History and Bunche Center for African American Studies)
“ ‘True Sex’: Adjudicating Gender and the Sciences of Racial Improvement in the Portuguese Atlantic (1740-1790)”
Bunche 5288, 4-5:30 PM, in-person only
October 23rd: Michael McGovern (Resident Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School)
“Quantifying Injustice: Law, Science, and History”
Bunche 5288, 4-5:30 PM, https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArc-2opzstEtdZR2oGZedVLje5kSJsEfYl
October 30th: Isabela Dornelas (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
“From Pelvic to Abdominal: The Development of Cesarean Section in Brazil, Mid-XIX Century.”
Bunche 5288, 4-5:30 PM, https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcqceGuqTwoEtzgW66BEmH-n5pQaomBv9pB
November 20th: Danielle Carr (Institute of Society and Genetics, UCLA)
“SPACE/EARTH/BRAIN: The International Brain Research Organization and the Disciplinary Formation of Neuroscience.”
Bunche 5288, 4-5:30 PM, https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctf-ugqDMtGdUuNL8zDTZL-3AnCS_8EQgT
December 4th: Celebration of the publication of Surgery and Salvation (UNC Press Nov 2023) by Elizabeth O’Brien (UCLA History Department). Co-Sponsored by the History of Gender and Sexuality Working Group. Details to follow.
Bunche 6275, 4-5:30 PM, https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUocumtpzMoHtJy5Um1scpEEIA6oo0XsBOh
Spring 2023 Colloquium Schedule
We will meet from 4-5:30 pm in Bunche 5288, unless otherwise noted. We will continue to offer the possibility to participate remotely but we do hope to see more of you in person. To receive the zoom link please respond to the RSVP link circulated with the announcements for the individual talks. Please also RSVP if you join in person. Everyone is welcome!
April 3: Axel Jansen (German Historical Institute Washington)
“An Unlikely Partnership? The Vatican Endorses Stem Cell Research, 2000-2015”
RSVP for in person attendance here.
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April 24: Edward Halley Barnett (The Huntington Library)
“‘Music and the Mind Vibratory Mental Mechanics in the 18th Century”
RSVP for in person attendance here.
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May 1: Melissa Lo (Getty Foundation)
“How We Find Our Topics, How Our Topics Find Us: A Discussion”
RSVP for in person attendance here.
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May 8: Kate McDonald (UCSB)
“The Rickshaw Everyman: Transport and Memory in Postwar Japan”
RSVP for in person attendance here.
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May 22: Jane Moon, M.D. (UCLA)
“Pushing the Borders of Consciousness: A History of Ketamine and Dissociative Anesthesia”
RSVP for in person attendance here.
Fall 2022 Colloquium Schedule
We will meet from 4-5:30 pm in Bunche 5288, unless otherwise noted. We will continue to offer the possibility to participate remotely but we do hope to see more of you in person. To receive the zoom link please respond to the RSVP link circulated with the announcements for the individual talks. Please also RSVP if you join in person. Everyone is welcome!
October 31: Amir Alexander (UCLA)
“Euclid and Descartes on the Potomac: The Geometrical Battle for the National Capital”
In 1791 Chief Designer Pierre L’Enfant produced a magnificent plan for the new American capital. Inspired by the flawless geometrical order of Versailles, the new city would boast broad avenues intersecting at precise angles and converging on the centers of Constitutional power. But even as L’Enfant was finalizing his intricate design, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was quietly pushing for the city to be laid out as a simple rectilinear grid. And while L’Enfant’s design drew on the towering authority of Euclidean geometry, Jefferson’s was inspired by the spare coordinate system of the Cartesian variety. The choice of geometry appropriate for the national capital was not just a matter of esthetic preference: Each stood for a very different vision of the new Constitution, and the future of the young nation.
RSVP for Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkf-CorDktEtWbpPE3SD_r8vunB-irhixs
RSVP for in-person: https://forms.gle/7LKtZas191mupTUp7
November 14: E. Bennett Jones (The Huntington Library)
“‘The Indians Say’: Storytelling, Settler Colonialism and American Natural History, 1722 to 1846”
RSVP for Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEodO6vqzMuHdyICRUzt3ost8nF5jHEO8TX
RSVP for in-person: https://forms.gle/4YpigVHmijybhVYv9
This talk discusses the use of information attributed to Indigenous sources within eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglophone natural history. Early modern naturalists studying North American flora and fauna frequently sought out the expertise of Indigenous people, who they simultaneously regarded as authoritative knowers and objects of study. But diplomatic alliances, specific cultural protocols, and regional dynamics all encouraged (or prevented) information sharing between settler naturalists and Indigenous people and these contexts in turn shaped how Anglophone naturalists presented and cited Indigenous expertise in published natural history. The talk explores the relationship between evidence, identity, and colonialism and examines how ideas about extraction and information underpinned the epistemology of early modern natural history. It also gestures towards present-day manifestations of these issues within scientific approaches to TEK (traditional ecological knowledge).
