Nov 29 Iris Clever (University of Chicago) "The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science." This talk will introduce anthropological practices that remain largely unexplored in the historical literature on racial science: biometrics. In the early twentieth century, biometricians analyzed skull measurements with novel statistical methods to demonstrate racial-biological differences. With skull-measuring instruments […]
"Industrial Accumulations: Microbes and Materials in Motion in the Late Nineteenth Century" Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, across Western Europe, North America, and regions of the globe colonized by European nations, lines of scientific inquiry on the etiology of infectious diseases and the efficacy of industrial fermentations converged with longer-standing academic […]
"From ‘Boxes’ to Containers: Containerization, Post-colonial East and SEAsia, and Re-evaluating Technology Transfer (1950-1973)" When the United States became involved in the Korean War, its primary mechanism for conveying personal goods to the scene was the Transporter, a leftover from World War II, and the CONEX (Container Express) box, a predecessor to the more recent […]
In this presentation I explore how the dense vectors of material culture and spirit possession established in the crucible of the modern era continue to inform the decisions of millions of west Africans as they navigate everyday realities at home and abroad. In the first half of this talk, I explore emerging themes in “fetish […]
“A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science.” The idea of progress frames our modern understanding of understanding itself. It offers a historical account of the development of knowledge in space and time, with the natural sciences serving as both its mark and guarantor. This account has a distinctive history all of its own. Historians […]
POSTPONED: Anthony Grafton's talk scheduled for February 9th 4-6PM has been postponed to Spring Quarter. More information will be provided in the future.
The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in pre-colonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes, collecting and cultivating African plants and mapping the landscape and natural resources of the region. He traversed this landscape with a variety of African interlocutors and guides, whose knowledge inevitably, if often invisibly, informed his collections, […]
Forcibly removed from Jamaica in 1796 after waging war against the colonial state, the Trelawny Maroons boarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia, where they struggled against the colonial government until 1800, when they were relocated to Sierra Leone. This talk follows the Maroons across these three different British colonies in order to reconsider the […]
