21 October 2022 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100 (4th floor of Garrison Hall)

Robert Abzug, Megan Raby, and Bruce Hunt

“Writing Biographies in the History of Science”

The panellists for this roundtable discussion will be Robert Abzug, whose biography of the psychologist Rollo May appeared last year; Megan Raby, who is at work on a biography of the American ecologist Marston Bates; and Bruce Hunt, who has embarked on writing a biography of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Together they will explore the attractions and challenges of writing history through biography, particularly in the history of science.

All of the panellists are members of the UT History Department:
— Robert Abzug is a professor emeritus and held the Audre and Bernard Rapoport
Regents Chair in Jewish Studies. Besides Psyche and Soul in America: The
Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021), he is the author
of Passionate Liberator: Thomas Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of
Reform (1980); Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of
Nazi Concentration Camps (1985); and Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and
the Religious Imagination (1994).
— Megan Raby is an associate professor and the author of American Tropics:
The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (2017).
— Bruce Hunt is a professor and the author of The Maxwellians (1991);
Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert
Einstein (2011); and Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical
Physics in the Victorian British Empire (2021).

 

7 October 2022 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100 (4th floor of Garrison Hall)

Lawrence E. Gilbert (UT)

“UT’s Brackenridge Field Laboratory — Its History, Role, and Future after 55 Years”

The University of Texas did nothing to earn the ground occupied by BFL, nor was its current use part of any long-term plan. Yet our university finds itself with an asset that anticipates the ever-increasing need of great universities to provide a secure and biologically diverse template for researchers and students to understand rapidly accelerating biological changes on planet earth. How BFL came to be and why it is important to science, education and outreach, is an unlikely tale that intertwines the history of the city of Austin, the original Austin dam, a northerner named George Brackenridge, and the University of Texas.  Without the quarry that made the dam, and without the dam’s collapse, thus smashing Brackenridge’s dream to help develop industry for Austin on his tract of land, BFL would not have happened and would not now be so interesting biologically. This talk highlights some of the research BFL has fostered and explains important synergism between students and research staff and faculty that has been enabled by this unique juxtaposition of laboratory and field so near the campus of a major university.

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Lawrence E. Gilbert is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UT and the Director of the University’s Brackenridge Field Laboratory.