Event Description:
This talk will tackle the disciplinary boundaries delineated by the historiography of science and medicine, and consider what can be gained when historians engage with noncanonical fields like Black studies. By engaging with the genealogies of fields like the history and philosophy of science (HPS) and science and technology studies (STS), this talk will center the elisions performed both by archival expectations about (single) authorship and tacit assumptions about who can embody reason versus who can only signify its object of study. To understand how in the 1800s became the century of the body—as a predictive, empirical, and epistemic object of knowledge-making in medicine, surgery, anthropology, sexology, and criminology—and more specifically, how notions of modern, prototypical humanity were construed, it is necessary to study 18th-century scientific formations about the not-yet-modern human and pay close attention to colonial contexts.
Event Speaker:
Patrícia Martins Marcos, Graduate Student in History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego
Event Information:
Free and open to the public. Streaming available via YouTube. For more information, please visit the event webpage.
Hosted by the Science History Institute as part of their Lunchtime Lectures series.
