History of Science, Technology, the Environment, and Medicine

What to do when the main topic you are looking for — for example, women, sex, or gender — does not appear in archival finding aids, databases, or indexes?  This is a particular problem in historical subfields, such as the history of science, in which men predominate and from which women have been excluded. In this interactive talk, Professor Kimberly Hamlin reflects on her experiences researching women’s responses to evolutionary theory, the role of gender in shaping the U.S. reception of Darwin, and the links between Darwinian evolution and sexology/sex reform. Hamlin’s research attempts to restore women and women’s voices to scientific history and challenges the gendered binary supposedly separating “science” from culture.

––––––––––––––––––––––––

Kimberly Hamlin is Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, as well as a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholar.  Her research on Darwin, gender, and women has earned multiple fellowships and awards, including the History of Science Society’s Margaret Rossiter Prize and the 19^th Century Studies Association’s Emerging Scholar Award. She is the author of From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2014), the first full-length study of American women’s responses to evolutionary theory. Hamlin is currently writing the biography of Helen Hamilton Gardener, the freethinking feminist who donated her brain to science to prove the intellectual equality of women. Hamlin is past co-chair of the History of Science Society’s Women’s Caucus and co-founder and former chair of the American Studies Association’s Science and Technology Caucus. She earned her PhD and MA in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin where she co-chaired the Gender Symposium in 2003-2004.

-––––––––––––––––––––––

Professor Hamlin’s visit to Austin is co-sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium, the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality, and Department of American Studies.