The Lunchtime Lecture Series is a virtual weekly talk series on the history of science, technology, and medicine. We invite historians and speakers from the sciences, arts, and humanities to cover intriguing topics followed by a Q&A.
Now combined with our Saturday Speaker Series, Lunchtime Lectures take a rigorous and entertaining approach to exploring topics for scholars and anyone interested in stories about the history of science. The talks help expand perceptions of the nature of science and how it’s done.
This season, our speakers are exploring issues of gender, race, and colonialism in the history of the physical and biological sciences from the early modern period to the 21st century.
The Lunchtime Lecture Series is a project of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Science History Institute. For more information about this series, please contact lunchtimelectures@sciencehistory.org.
Recorded Lunchtime Lectures
The following Lunchtime Lectures are now available to view. Click on the title to access the video.
Tiffany Nichols
Beyond the Lab: The Role of Experimental and Theoretical Physicists in the Site Selection of the LIGO
Allison Bigelow
Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World
Patrícia Martins Marcos
Bridging Divides: Inscribing Racialized Bodies into the Narratives of Science, Medicine, and Beyond
Sabine Clarke
The Chemical Empire: Insecticides and Locust Control in East Africa after 1940
Allen Driggers
Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests: Botany, the American Civil War, and the Limits of Regional Analysis
Roger Turner
Untold Stories: Making Exhibitions More Inclusive
Hiro Hirai
Forgery and Early Modern Science: The Case of Pseudo-Paracelsus
George Elliott
Colonial Chymistry: Gershom Bulkeley and the 17th-Century Connecticut Alchemical Laboratory
Science, Incorporated: Constructing the Natures of American Modernization
This series of Lunchtime Lectures, held in May and June 2020, unpicked the diverse ways in which nature—and the study of nature—became entangled with the modernization of America, from the early origins of laboratory pedagogy to mineral prospecting by satellite. Drawing on their own original historical research, our speakers interrogated how the government department, virtuoso scientist, electronics corporation, and other contemporary agents mobilized scientific knowledge in pursuit of technological, social, and political objectives. Together they showed how these actions not only constructed knowledge of nature but also the multiple natures of American modernization.
Douglas O’Reagan
American Intellectual Reparations from the Nazis and the Myth of German Technological Superiority
Michael Rossi
Talking about Colors: Language, Perception, and American Modernity
Sarah Reynolds
Engaging Experiments: The Origins of Laboratory Instruction in the United States
Matthew Shindell
The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey: A Biography of 20th-Century Science
Benjamin Gross
A Window to the Future: LCD Manufacturing at RCA, 1968–1976
Megan Black
The Global Interior: Prospecting Mineral Frontiers from U.S. Settler Colonialism to the Space Race
Recent Lunchtime Lectures
Elise K. Burton
Shadows of Whiteness: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Racial Sciences in the Middle East
Haesoo Park
Cultures of Bioscience in Postcolonial Korea, 1980–2006
Ezelle Sanford III
Segregated Medicine: How Racial Politics Shaped St. Louis’s Healthcare System (1937–1979)
Gustave Lester
Land, Fur, and Copper: Territorial Science and Settler Colonialism in the Western Great Lakes, 1815–1854
Gina Surita
The Mysterious Muscle: Experimental Epistemologies of Force and Fuel
Ingrid Ockert
Scientific Fiction: Science Advising on Star Trek, 1964–1967
Roger Turner
Infrastructural Science: How Science without Discovery Keeps Technology Working (At Least Some of the Time)
Courtney Wilder
Chemical Inspirations: Printing and Representing “Rainbow”-Style Textiles during the First Decade of Photography
Lisa Ruth Rand
Neocolonial Space: Orbital Allocation in the Age of the New International Economic Order, 1971–1979
Yeonsil Kang
Hazardous Aid: The Growth of the Asbestos Industry and Post–Korean War Reconstruction in South Korea
Jennifer Tucker
Collecting the Future: Photography, Waste, and the Industrial Revolution
Charlotte A. Abney Salomon
The Discovery of Elements in 18th-Century Sweden
Tristan Revells
Rebuilding Rubble: Digitally Modeling China’s First Biofuel Factory
The following were presented as part of the Virtual Saturday Speaker Series:
Megan Haupt
Food Innovation: How a Global Pandemic Could Change the Way We Eat
Anastasia Klimchynskaya
Almost Magic: Edison, Electricity, and the Phonograph
Damian Niescior
Footwear for the Revolution: Shoemaking in the 18th Century