3 March 2023 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

John Lisle (UT)

Book launch: “The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare”

At this gathering, we will celebrate the forthcoming publication of John Lisle’s new book, “The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War
II Secret Warfare,” due out next week from St. Martin’s Press. In it, John tells how Lovell and other scientists at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, developed secret weapons, devised spy gadgets, and plotted the assassination of foreign leaders during World War II, while also paving the way for some of the CIA’s most notorious later misdeeds.

Here’s a link to the publisher’s website: The Dirty Tricks Department.

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John Lisle earned his PhD from the UT History Department in 2019 with a dissertation on science and espionage during World War II. After a stint teaching in a cybersecurity program at Louisiana Tech, he is now back in Austin and teaching history of science courses in UT’s Core Texts and Ideas program. He was recently awarded a grant by the NEH’s extremely competitive Public Scholars program to support work on his next project, in which he will draw on a trove of documents from the famed civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh to shed light on the CIA’s shadowy MKULTRA program, which used unsuspecting
Americans as guinea pigs for experiments on mind control and related techniques.

10 February 2023 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100 

Emma Pask (University of Chicago)

“Scientists on the Range: Ecological Fieldwork’s Place in Texas”

This presentation draws on material from the first chapter of my dissertation, which explores the idea of “the range” as a mythical geography in Texas and as a particular kind of ecological object. The dissertation as a whole asks: how does the history of Texas as a political unit and its attachment to land shape ecological research in the state? And how does ecological research, both in terms of its fieldwork and its theoretical propositions, in turn shape how Texans come to imagine this land? I go about trying to answer these questions in the first chapter by way of a historical and ethnographic analysis of “biogeography” as the backbone to much of ecology as a science. From the 1890s to the present, biogeography in Texas and more broadly has been preoccupied with determining species’ ranges. The rangeland management of different biological specimen is also crucial to solidifying certain economic and property regimes in Texas, from cattle ranching to cotton farming. This presentation sketches out possibilities for thinking more about “ranges” through a series of historical and contemporary examples, from turn-of-the-century biological surveys to contemporary cross-border research projects, with a special attention to bat species.

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Emma Pask is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, currently doing research here in Austin.