Category: Events

You Know You Want To!

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Join us on Friday, April 1 (tomorrow and no joke!), for the second in our spring speaker series: Rachael Gillibrand.

Throughout the summer of 2021, Rachael was employed by the Medical Heritage Library as the Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies. The purpose of her fellowship was to use the Medical Heritage Library’s digital collections to produce a primary source dataset relating to the theme of ‘Disability and Technology’. In this lecture, Rachael will talk about her time with the Medical Heritage Library and will elaborate on some of her more curious findings. Expect to hear about the development of patents for artificial breasts; how vulcanite rubber drew dentists into gunfights; and why a Victorian gentleman might be found with hippopotamus in his mouth!

See more details and sign up for free tickets right here!

Spring Speakers 2022: Rachael Gillibrand

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Join us on Friday, April 1 (no joke!), for the second in our spring speaker series: Rachael Gillibrand.

Throughout the summer of 2021, Rachael was employed by the Medical Heritage Library as the Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies. The purpose of her fellowship was to use the Medical Heritage Library’s digital collections to produce a primary source dataset relating to the theme of ‘Disability and Technology’. In this lecture, Rachael will talk about her time with the Medical Heritage Library and will elaborate on some of her more curious findings. Expect to hear about the development of patents for artificial breasts; how vulcanite rubber drew dentists into gunfights; and why a Victorian gentleman might be found with hippopotamus in his mouth!

See more details and sign up for free tickets right here!

Spring Speakers 2022: Aja Lans

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We’re pleased to announce the first of our Spring Speaker Series, Aja Lans.

Aja Lans completed her PhD in Anthropology at Syracuse University in 2021, where she concentrated in historical archaeology and cultural heritage preservation. Her dissertation traces the long history of violence against Black women in the United States by merging skeletal data with archival resources. These various archival traces shed light on the ways biocultural processes in the past continue to shape daily life, health, and well-being in the present. Aja is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. She continues to pursue decolonizing research while focusing on the ethics of museum collections, the objectification of human remains, and the history of race. Aja was a fellow for the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. during the summer of 2021.

Her talk is titled Uncovering the Roots of Racism in Medicine: A Practice in Reading Against the Archival Grain:

As an anthropological archaeologist, I utilize an expanded notion of archives that includes artifacts housed in museums, including human remains. I read against the archival grain while investigating the links between racism and the professionalization medicine and physical anthropology over the long 19th century. To do so, I consult a variety of archival texts and documents, as well as their links to collecting and curating human remains. This requires a deep understanding of the historical context in which collections were assembled and supposedly objective scientific studies performed. In this way, we might identify inherent biases, which were often intimately linked to scientific racism.

Sign up to attend here!

From Our Partners: Upcoming Archives Talk: Toward a History of Black AIDS Activism

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~Post courtesy Polina Ilieva, head, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Library.

Join historians Dan Royles and Antoine Johnson for a conversation about the long—and little told—history of responses to HIV/AIDS in African American communities. They’ll discuss Royles’s book To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, Johnson’s research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Bay Area’s Black communities, their favorite finds in the UCSF archives, and more.

Register to get a link for this online event.

Dan Royles is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami, where he teaches courses on United States, African American, LGBTQ, public, and oral history. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, was published in 2020 by University of North Carolina Press. He also runs the African American AIDS History Project, a digital archive of responses to HIV/AIDS in Black America.

Antoine Johnson is a History PhD candidate in UCSF’s Humanities and Social Sciences program. His dissertation examines Black AIDS activism in the Bay Area and ways structural racism increased African Americans’ disease vulnerability. His dissertation is tentatively titled, “The Other Epidemic: AIDS, Activism, and Anti-Black Racism in the Bay Area, 1981-1999,” which he will be defending next April.

Spring Speaker Series 2021 Videos: Nora O’Neill

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We’re delighted to be able to announce the first of the recorded and captioned videos from our spring speaker series held back in March and April of this year. Our first speaker was Nora O’Neill, a first-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine. She is pursuing a combined MD-PhD in the History of Science and Medicine. In 2018, she completed her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in the History of Science, focusing on the intersection of disability rights and reproductive justice. At Yale, she plans to study the social constructions of disability in medical and social activist spaces. As a physician historian, she hopes to engage in patient-centered care while also unraveling the historical complexities of the patient-doctor relationship. Her talk is titled “Carry On: The Depiction of Post-War Disability in Government Propaganda and Consumer Culture, 1919-1925.”

Join us 4/23 for “The Animal Soul between Peter Scheitlin and Charles Darwin” with Elizabeth McNeill

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Fri, April 23, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EDT
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-elizabeth-mcneill-tickets-143312530637

The 19th-century origins of studying animal behavior is commonly traced back to Darwin’s experiments in the late 1830s at the London Zoological Gardens with the aim of researching mental evolutionism. Inthis talk, McNeill complicates this origin story by re-situating it within the 19th-century history of psychology in the German-speaking world and, more specifically, the slow, contentious rise of animal psychology as a viable object and mode of scientific study. By tracking the shift from the question of the “animal soul” to that of the “animal expression of emotions” over the course of the 19th century, she draws into relief the tenuous position of “the animal” (and those who wished to study its inner life) in emerging psychological fields, as the positivist, experimental natural sciences gradually dethroned natural philosophy.

Speaker

Elizabeth McNeill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Speaking (of) Animals in the Life Sciences and Literature of 20th-Century Germany,” tracks the various knowledge practices at work in the constellation of animality, language, and experimentation from the mid-19th to the late-20th century in the German-speaking world. “Speaking (of) Animals” ultimately reorients well-known scientific and literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Wilhelm Wundt, Robert Musil, and Konrad Lorenz in the context of once popular but today mostly forgotten or disqualified scientific discourses about animal intelligence and communication.