Past Events › HoS Lecture Series

The talk, which will serve as an introduction to my book project on worldwide contamination with radioactive fallout (currently in preparation for publication), will focus on the bilateral politics of standards for the radiological inspection of tuna as a key driver behind the rise and fall of the “atomic tuna” scare.

With a focus on communities based in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, this talk will introduce different visions of the computer as a mathematical agent, software that was crafted to animate those imaginings, and the novel practices and materialities of mathematical knowledge-making that emerged in tandem.

This talk explores the confluence, in the last two decades, between a new kind of imperial history that seeks to decenter and render more permeable the contours of individual empires in the early modern world and a similar phenomenon in the history of early modern science.

Perfumery may possibly be the second oldest business in the history of mankind. Olfaction, the sense of smell, has attracted systematic interest in scientific studies only recently, however. The discovery of the olfactory receptor genes by Linda Buck and Richard Axel in 1991 catapulted olfaction into core neurobiological research. Seldom does a discovery represent the birth of an experimental system as markedly as in the case of the olfactory receptors. Olfaction has been a fairly neglected field before, conducted only by a few but dedicated researchers throughout the past centuries.

This talk will explore how the sharp increase of printed matter and an elitist movement to unify knowledge through centralized institutions in the 1840s influenced Barnum, Bach, and Poe, therefore changing the relations of science and public in this early phase of industrialization.

First presented in 1936, the Fields Medal quickly became one of mathematicians' most prestigious, famous, and in some cases notorious prizes. Because its deliberations are confidential, we know very little about the early Fields Medals. This talk will analyze newly discovered letters from the 1950 and 1958 Fields Medal committees.

In 1928, the German choreographer Rudolf Laban announced what he believed to be an explosive development in the history of dance: the creation of an inscription system that could “objectively” record human movement on paper. The technique, known as “Labanotation,” relied upon byzantine combinations of lines, tick marks, and boxes. In this talk, Dr. Laemmli will explore two seemingly distant, but in fact closely-linked, moments from Labanotation’s history: its origins in the anxiety-ridden, vibratory atmosphere of Weimar Germany and its use in the American and British corporate office in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.