HPS plans for Fall 2021

After some delays getting started, we have put together what we think will be a very good program of history of science talks for the fall. You can find the full schedule by clicking on the link above.

We will once again be running all of the talks online. Although this has some obvious disadvantages, it makes it easier for us to host speakers from outside Austin. This fall we will be doing just that as we invite back four UT graduate alumni: Felipe Cruz, Rebecca Onion, Greg Cushman, and Chris Heaney. They will be speaking on successive Fridays from Oct. 22 to Nov. 12, and then after a break for the (online) History of Science/Society for the History of Technology meeting and for the Thanksgiving holiday, we will reconvene on Dec. 3 to discuss what we saw and heard at the HSS/SHOT meeting.

30 April 2021 — 12:00 noon — online

Peter Worger (UT History Department)

“Eugenics, Organizational Psychology, and Industrialization in the Soviet Initiatives of V. M.  Bekhterev”

Peter will start by presenting a general overview of the development of eugenics in Russia, starting with the publication of Vasillii Florinskii’s Human Perfection and Degeneration in 1865. Then, he will present his research on proposals to implement selection and removal of children exhibiting signs of moral or physical defects and degeneration in the development of boarding schools under the Bolsheviks, and the proposed rehabilitation of these children in agricultural collectives on the basis of the supposedly regenerative effects of manual labor and fresh air, later to become known as “physical culture.” He will then discuss the influence of physical anthropology and eugenics on the development of aptitude tests to assess the hereditary talents of workers for a conference on the Scientific Organization of Labor in 1921.

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Peter Worger is a fifth-year doctoral student in the UT History Department. His research on the history of eugenics and sexual education in the early Soviet Union has received support from the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
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Register in advance for this meeting:
https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEudOGgqjwpGtdJzAnrOJtJmwc_Siu6EtdI
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