Friday, 23 February 2018 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102

Kimberly Hamlin (Miami University of Ohio)

“Finding Sex and Gender in the (History of Science) Archive”

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.
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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 19th 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.

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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.

Friday, 9 February 2018 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Paul Erickson (Wesleyan University) and Amrys Williams (Hagley Museum)

“Under Connecticut Skies: Exploring and Interpreting 100 Years of Astronomy at Wesleyan’s Van Vleck Observatory”

In this presentation, we will describe how we carried out an interdisciplinary public history project to research, document, and interpret a century of astronomy at Wesleyan University’s Van Vleck Observatory. Working with astronomers, librarians, archivists, students, the local stargazing club — and a trove of glass plates, lantern slides, documents, books, instruments, calculation sheets, correspondence, and photographs — we transformed the observatory library into a museum exhibition, and created new spaces and resources for doing the history of science on campus. We will discuss both the project and our research findings, and reflect on what this experience taught us about doing the history of science in collaboration and in public.

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Amrys Williams earned her PhD in the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin and is the Associate Director and Oral Historian at the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society of the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. Paul Erickson is associate professor of history, environmental studies, and science in society at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He also earned his PhD in the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of The World the Game Theorists Made (2015).