HGS April 2015 Event – Speaker Bios
Preliminary Schedule: All sessions are held in Bunche 6275
April 22, 12-2PM Robert Nye
How Did Honor Codes Promote Pacification and Rights?
Robert A. Nye is Emeritus Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professor of the Humanities and Emeritus Professor of History at Oregon State University. Nye’s Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (1998) was one of the first and most influential studies of masculinities in the past. Nye is presently working on a comparative history of the professions as instances of masculine culture, with a special emphasis on medicine, and on the changing historical discourses on sex and gender.
April 29, 12-2PM Yvon Wang
Sons, Brothers, and the “Missing Masturbator”: Pornography and Masculinity in China at the End of Empire.
Yvon Wang is an Assistant Professor of Chinese History at the University of Toronto, St. George. She earned her Ph.D. in 2014 from the History Department of Stanford University. Her dissertation concerned explicit sexual representation in Chinese print commodities at the turn of the twentieth century. Other research interests include same-sex relations, material culture, and popular media–both in late imperial and twentieth-century China and in a broader world-historical perspective.
May 6, 4-6PM Debora Silverman (History, UCLA)
Beset Masculinity: Militarism, Modernism, and Imperialism in King Leopold’s Belgium, 1865-1909
Debora Silverman is a Distinguished Professor of History and Art History at UCLA, where she has taught since 1981 and holds the University of California President’s Chair in Modern European History, Art and Culture.
May 13, 12-2PM Maurice O. Wallace
The Camera and the Slave: History, Technology and the Problem of Personhood in Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes
Maurice Wallace is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American Studies. He is the author of Langston Hughes: The Harlem Renaissance (Young Adult), Marshall Cavendish, 2007 and Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1993, (Duke University Press, 2002). Most recently he has co edited Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, Duke University Press, 2012.
May 29, 4PM Wilson Chacko Jacob
When a Gender Historian Goes Rogue, or, How Not to Think about Sovereignty
Wilson Chacko Jacob completed his Ph.D. in 2005 in the Departments of History and Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University. The research for his doctoral dissertation explored the intersections of gender, empire, and modernity in the Egyptian context. A revision of the dissertation resulted in his first book Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011; Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011,.He is currently engaged in a new multi-sited research project with two major components both focused on the problem of sovereignty.
May 20, 12 to 5 PM Mini Conference: Masculinity in Science
Organized with Mary Terrall and cosponsored by the UCLA History of Science Colloquium
Mary Terrall
Masculine Knowledge for the Public Good: The Scientific Household of Réaumur
Mary Terrall is a Professor in the UCLA Department of History. She is the author of The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertius and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (2002) which won the Pfizer Award bestowed by the History of Science Society “in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science.” In 2014, she published Catching Nature in the Act, Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century.
Erika Milam
Men in Groups: Anthropology and Aggression in the 1960s
Erika Milam is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. She studies the history of the modern life sciences, specializing in the history of evolutionary theory. Her research currently explores how and why scientists have used animals as models for understanding human behavior. Her first book, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology(Johns Hopkins, 2010), focused on evolutionary theory and the connections between biological investigations of reproductive and courtship behavior in animals and humans, from Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century to Sociobiology in the 1970s. Her current research addresses how and why zoological and primatological research on animal behavior came to compete with anthropological studies of human cultures as a source of reliable information about human nature in the 1960s and ’70s. Constructed as a series of chronologically parallel stories, this project explores the gendered landscape in which conversations about human nature took place.
Nathan Ensmenger
The Manly Art of Programming? A Gendered History of the Computing Profession
Nathan Ensmenger is currently a member of the faculty of the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. His current research interests are aimed at reintegrating the history of the “information revolution”—very broadly defined to encompass a wide range of 19th and 20th century scientific, technological and social developments—into mainstream American social and cultural history. In addition to his work on the social and cultural history of software and software workers and the history of computer programming, he has studied the disciplinary history of artificial intelligence and artificial life; the formation of a distinctive computing subculture and programming “aesthetic;” and the crucial and often misunderstood role of women in computing. In 2013, He coauthored with Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray the third edition of The Computer: A History of the Information Machine. In 2012, he published The Computer Boys Take Over: Computer, Programmers and the Politics of Technical Expertise and he maintains a blog The Computer Boys http://thecomputerboys.com/.
