All posts by Bruce Hunt

11 April 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

John Lisle (UT)

“The Irony of MKULTRA: How the CIA’s Failure in Mind Control Facilitated Conspiracy Theories”

During the Cold War, the CIA launched the MKULTRA project to develop methods of mind control. Experiments conducted as part of MKULTRA involved sex, drugs, hypnotism, chemical comas, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation. Most of the experiments were unsuccessful, but because Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKULTRA, destroyed the project’s files upon retiring from the CIA in 1973, anyone can fill in the gaps in the record with their wildest imagination. MKULTRA can be (and has been) misconstrued as a project that traffics young women, controls popstar Britney Spears, and hosts human hunting expeditions for government officials. John Lisle will explain the history of MKULTRA and its undying influence on conspiracy culture.
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John Lisle has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas, where he now teaches courses on the history of science. His new book, Project Mind Control (due out next month from Macmillan) uses dozens of newly discovered depositions to tell the inside story of MKULTRA. He has received research and writing awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Institute of Physics.

7 March  2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Sharrona Pearl (TCU)

“Bodies and Borders: The Long History of Biometric Surveillance”

The number of false positives in facial recognition technology has gone down dramatically. That doesn’t mean that it has improved. We should be increasingly concerned about the more effective and accurate incursions on our privacy as we develop ever more effective ways to track people across time and space. In this talk, Professor Pearl discusses the long history of biometric surveillance, charting the analogue precursors to today’s digital versions, showing the deep biases embedded in the tracking of humankind by their bodies. She explores the experiment that trades privacy for security and offers neither.
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Sharrona Pearl is the Andrews Endowed Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at TCU. A historian and theorist of the face and body, Pearl has published widely on Victorian history of medicine, media and religion, and critical race, gender, and disability studies. Her recently released book Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Superrecognition with Johns Hopkins University Press, is the third in her face trilogy, following Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard UP, 2010). She also just published a trade book entitled Mask with Bloomsbury Academic. Pearl maintains an active freelance profile, with bylines in a variety of newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Lilith, and Real Life Magazine.