Friday, 3 November 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Richard Noakes, University of Exeter (UK)

“From Telegraphy to Telepathy and Back Again: Research, Creativity and British Electrical Communication, 1870–1930”

In this paper I offer a revisionist perspective on the British submarine telegraph cable industry in the decades around 1900. I discuss examples of how the industry fostered technical inventiveness and frame my account in terms of the other (apparently non-scientific) 19th and 20th century uses of telegraphic expertise that have preoccupied me as a historian.

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Richard Noakes is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Exeter (UK). He has published widely on various aspects of 19th and early 20th century sciences, including physics, psychical research, and telegraphy, as well as the place of science in the periodical press. He is the co-editor of From Newton to Hawking: A History of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professors of Mathematics (2003) and co-author of Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (2004). He is currently completing a monograph, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and British Sciences, 1870-1930.

Friday, 27 October 2017 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Caroline Frick, UT-RTF and Texas Archive of the Moving Image

“Not for the Faint of Heart: Preserving Medical Film and Video at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image”

Traditional film and television studies scholars have approached the intersection between science, medicine, and media largely in terms of representation. From the mid-twentieth century success of the Dr. Kildare series to Grey’s Anatomy, studies have focused on how doctors or scientists, and their work, have been depicted and what socio-cultural and industrial factors have contributed to such imagery. In the late 1990s, however, a new generation of media scholars began to shift attention away from Hollywood content to appreciating a larger body of moving image archival content: Industrial and training films, home movies, how-to videos, and more. For the last decade, the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, an independent 501c3 based in Austin, has traveled across the state with a “bring out your films” program particularly interested in such “orphan” films and, in doing so, has begun to construct a fascinating new history of Texas medicine and science as told on screen. This talk will offer a look at some of the archives’ highlights and will explain how cataloging some of this content (e.g., surgical films from Houston’s medical community) has proven…not for the faint of heart.

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Caroline Frick is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film and is the Founder and Director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Prior to her work in Texas, she worked in film preservation at the National Archives, Library of Congress, and Warner Bros.