Twentieth Century Think Tank


2009-03-03 13:00: High science: hill stations and modern astrophysics (Professor Simon Schaffer)

2010-02-09 13:00: The constructive idea: art and science in '30s London and Cambridge (Boris Jardine (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge))

2010-11-16 13:00: The virtual object of public health, or: the problem of 'life' in China, 1911–1937 (Malcolm Thompson (University of British Columbia))

2011-10-18 13:00: The event in the syndemic: state and subject formation in the two Manchurian pneumonic plague outbreaks (1910–11, 1920–21) (Christos Lynteris (CRASSH))

2011-11-01 13:00: The palace of cats and falcons: 21st-century fauna in a 20th-century skyscraper (Michal Murawski (Department of Social Anthropology))

2011-11-15 13:00: A mould discarded: abortion and class in 1930s rhetoric and fiction (Fran Bigman (Faculty of English))

2011-11-23 13:00: The politics of STS: instituting science studies in the age of Cold War (Elena Aronova (University of California, San Diego))

2011-11-29 13:00: Good practices in rural landscapes: J. Entrican and the rediscovery of indigenous medicine in colonial Burma (Atsuko Naono (School of Oriental and African Studies))

2012-01-31 13:00: The case of social interaction in bioscience laboratories: a multi-site ethnographic study of design intent and user experience (Alison McDougall-Weil (Engineering Design Centre))

2012-02-14 13:00: The challenge of the asylum mortuary in early 20th-century Central Europe (Leslie Topp (Birkbeck, University of London and CRASSH, Cambridge))

2012-02-28 13:00: The narcissist and the coquette: contesting figures of sexual sociability (Julie Walsh (Department of History and Philosophy of Science))

2012-03-13 13:00: Principles, pluralism and 'moral experts': reassessing the history of bioethics (Duncan Wilson (University of Manchester))

2012-05-01 13:00: Preserving scientific heritage: collaborating with scientists (Lydia Wilson (Department of History and Philosophy of Science))

2012-05-08 17:00: Bunkers and other risk assessments: (im-)material calculations of military and natural disasters (Michael Guggenheim (Goldsmiths, University of London))

2012-10-11 13:00: Heredity under the microscope (Soraya de Chadarevian (UCLA))

2012-10-25 13:00: Wanting your own words: writing in the first person about sexuality and feminism (Katherine Angel (University of Warwick))

2012-11-08 13:00: The Peckham Experiment (Boris Jardine (Science Museum, London))

2012-11-22 13:00: Joseph Rotblat: physics, the Bomb and some consequences (Martin Underwood (University of Oxford))

2013-01-24 13:00: The training and practice of English medical professionals in ophthalmia neonatorum, c. 1900–13 (Anne Hanley (Faculty of History))

2013-02-07 13:00: The fall of Johnstown: exhibiting disasters at the turn of the 20th century (Anders Ekström (Uppsala University))

2013-02-21 13:00: Scientific uncertainty and 'sufficient knowledge': the development of a European-wide research programme on acid rain (Rachel Rothschild (Yale University))

2013-03-07 13:00: Atomic energy and Britain's position in the world, 1954–56 (Martin Theaker (Faculty of History))

2013-04-25 13:00: Digital maps and minimal animals in movement ecology (Etienne Benson (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin))

2013-05-02 13:00: Science, sexuality and transnational networks in South African AIDS activism, 1994–2001 (Mandisa Mbali (University of Stellenbosch))

2014-01-30 13:00: Framing the nuclear: the psychology of British governmental nuclear decision making (Richard Maguire (University of East Anglia))

2014-02-13 13:00: Acid fallout: the 1980s US scientific and political debates on the atmospheric transport of sulphur dioxide (Milena Wazeck (University of East Anglia))

2014-02-27 13:00: 'The monster'? The British popular press and nuclear culture, 1945–1960s (Adrian Bingham (University of Sheffield))

2014-05-01 13:00: X-rayed maize and mutant marigolds: a history of early plant biotechnologies (Helen Curry (Department of History and Philosophy of Science))

2014-05-15 13:00: A sociology of algorithms: high-frequency trading and the shaping of markets (Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh))

2014-10-30 13:00: Brownian motion pictures (Charlotte Bigg (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris))

2014-11-13 13:00: Visual STS (Peter Galison (Harvard University))

2014-11-27 13:00: Indecent science: religion, science and movie censorship, 1930–1968 (David A. Kirby (University of Manchester))

2015-01-22 13:00: Poster display tactics as photographic arguments (Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University))

2015-02-05 13:00: 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' – the myth of the mad scientist in early horror films (Vanessa Toulmin (University of Sheffield))

2015-02-19 13:00: The epidemiologist as culture hero: visualising humanity in the age of 'the next pandemic' (Christos Lynteris (CRASSH, Cambridge))

2015-03-05 13:00: Performing and mediating science on television (Tim Boon (Science Museum, London))

2015-03-12 13:00: The 'Aeroplane Gaze': looking up in 1909 (Patrick Ellis (University of California, Berkeley))

2015-04-30 13:00: Bypassing the brave new world: reporting transgenic mice in the early 1980s (Dmitriy Myelnikov (Department of History and Philosophy of Science))

2015-05-14 13:00: Intolerant bodies: on biological individuality and writing with scientists (Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney))

2016-02-04 13:00: The impact of machines (Henry K. Miller (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL))

2016-02-12 15:30: Are we tackling the causes of global warming effectively? (Sir David King (Foreign Secretary's Special Representative on Climate Change))

2016-02-18 13:00: Brainwashing the cybernetic subject: The Ipcress File and fantasies of interrogation in the 1960s (Marcia Holmes (Birkbeck, University of London))

2016-03-03 13:00: 'A day of comparatively small things': spatial anxiety in the high British Empire (Tom Simpson (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge))

2016-04-28 13:00: Builders of the vision (Daniel Cardoso Llach (Carnegie Mellon University/Cambridge))

2016-05-12 13:00: Unveiling the world? Aerial photographs and the social sciences in interwar France (Serge Reubi (Humboldt University, Berlin/Cambridge))

2016-05-19 13:00: The pre-history of peer review: refereeing practices at the Royal Society (Aileen Fyfe (University of St Andrews))

2016-10-06 13:00: Images as artefacts: film, photography and repatriation in Kenya (Sloan Mahone (University of Oxford))

2016-10-20 13:00: Comparative uncertainties: comparing comparisons in anthropology and animal behaviour science (Matei Candea (Division of Social Anthropology))

2016-10-27 13:00: A controlled environment: phytotrons, Cold War life science, and the making of the experimental plant (David Munns (John Jay College))

2016-11-17 13:00: A science in translation: homoeopathy in colonial Bengal (Shinjini Das (CRASSH))

2016-12-01 13:00: Imaging the cytoskeleton – re-defining a biological entity with fluorescent antibodies (Hanna Lucia Worliczek (University of Vienna))

2017-02-02 13:00: The greening alliance: environment, development and the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (Simone Turchetti (University of Manchester))

2017-02-09 13:00: 'The Grammar of the Semi-Exact Sciences': Norbert Wiener in India, 1955–1956 (Poornima Paidipaty (Faculty of History))

2017-03-02 13:00: Disappearing big cats and multiplying man-eaters in the Indian Anthropocene (Nayanika Mathur (University of Sussex))

2017-03-09 13:00: The Anthropocene seen by the Anopheles: fighting malarial mosquitoes with chemicals in modern China, 1910s–1960s (Shen Yubin (Georgetown University))

2017-05-04 13:00: Shifting formats, changing priorities in the modern Chinese materia medica genre: from Zhao Yuhuang's single items to drugs in acupuncture channels (Lena Springer (Needham Research Institute))

2017-05-11 13:00: Listening to scientists' stories: using the British Library's 'An Oral History of British Science' archive (Ruth Wainman (University of Kent))

2017-10-05 13:00: German émigré scientists and engineers and aeronautics in India (Jahnavi Phalkey (King's College London))

2017-10-19 13:00: A struggle for the Soviet future: the birth of scientific forecasting in the Soviet Union (Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (Kingston University))

2017-11-09 13:00: Neuro-empire: rise of a medical-scientific discipline in modern Japan (Bernhard Leitner (University of Vienna))

2017-11-16 13:00: The structure of structure: how Kuhn establishes that science requires historical explanation (Paul A. Roth (University of California, Santa Cruz))

2018-01-18 13:00: Ether: the multiple lives of a resilient concept (Jaume Navarro (University of the Basque Country))

2018-02-01 13:00: People's vital minimum: canteens and nutrition science in industrial China (Seung-joon Lee (National University of Singapore))

2018-02-15 13:00: The homelands of the plague: Soviet disease ecology in Central Asia, 1920s–1950s (Susan Jones (University of Minnesota))

2018-05-03 13:00: Number, probability and community: the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern data model, Monte Carlo simulations and counterfactual futures in cricket (Siva Arumugam (Cambridge))

2018-05-17 13:00: Science, scientific method and rationality: Nehru's engagement with Ayurveda (Renny Thomas (University of Delhi))

2018-05-30 17:00: Before Trump: the neoliberal–illiberal alliance of the IMF and WTO with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Sonja Amadae (MIT))

2018-10-11 13:00: How US science moved west: Boulder, Colorado and the development of US space sciences in mid-20th century America (Joe Bassi (University of Texas, El Paso))

2018-10-25 13:00: A city of future past: urban planning and urban construction in northeast China after the Communist Revolution (Koji Hirata (Emmanuel College, Cambridge))

2018-11-08 13:00: Anticipations of the ocean: technological futures of the Cold War ocean (Sam Robinson (University of York))

2018-11-22 13:00: 'The American soldier' in Jerusalem: on measurement, travel and translation (Tal Arbel (Tel Aviv University/University of Edinburgh))

2018-12-20 13:00: The thaw in the Pole: Cold War science and showcasing at the Siberian science-city and Antarctic expeditions (1955–1964) (Ksenia Tatarchenko (University of Geneva))

2019-01-17 13:00: Decolonising the history of science curriculum (Mary Brazelton, Simon Schaffer, Charu Singh and Richard Staley (University of Cambridge))

2019-01-31 13:00: Constructing the field: power, persona and paper tools (Freddy Foks (Faculty of History))

2019-02-14 13:00: A political history of apolitical science (Audra J. Wolfe (Independent Scholar))

2019-02-28 13:00: Making difference: queer activism and anthropological theory (Paolo Heywood (Department of Social Anthropology))

2019-05-09 13:00: How wide and how tall? Genome Wide Association Studies in debate, from height to educational attainment and back (Ulrika Björkstén (Clare Hall; Sveriges Radio))

2019-05-16 13:00: Thinking/researching/teaching race, genetics and intelligence in HPS and STS (Jenny Bangham (HPS), Marta Halina (HPS) and Ernesto Schwartz Marin (University of Exeter))

2019-10-17 13:00: Making a name in mid-century mathematics: individuals, institutions and the open secret of Nicolas Bourbaki (Michael Barany (University of Edinburgh))

2019-10-31 13:00: The science of childhood: postcolonial development in India, 1950s (Arathi Sriprakash and Peter Sutoris (Faculty of Education))

2019-11-14 13:00: 'The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers': Weizenbaum, Pygmalion and the implications of gendering AI (Sarah Dillon (Faculty of English))

2020-01-23 13:00: The tempo of modernity: rethinking the history of modern time (Allegra Fryxell (Pembroke College))

2020-02-06 13:00: Non-Han bodies: anthropology, visuality and biopower in China's southwest borderland during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) (Zhu Jing (University of Warwick))

2020-02-20 13:00: Scientific naturalism and the modern empirical occult: historiographical and practical issues (Andreas Sommer (Department of History and Philosophy of Science))

2020-03-05 13:00: Medical heritage as cultural property: pan-African politics and global IP precedents in the 1960s and 1970s (Helen Tilley (Northwestern University))