Lunchtime Lectures

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