Donna Haraway, Ph.D., an internationally recognized theorist and historian of science and technology, is visiting the Department of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis as a Hurst Professor Monday, Feb. 22, through Friday, Feb. 26.
As part of her visit, Haraway, a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will give a talk at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24, in Whitaker Hall, Room 100.
Her talk opens a lecture series, which is free and open to the public, titled “21st Century Science Studies: Agents of Overlap in Biology and the Humanities.”
Steven Meyer, Ph.D., an organizer of the lecture series and an associate professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, said that, over the past several decades, traditional divisions among areas of inquiry, and in particular the supposed “two cultures” of the sciences and humanities, have increasingly come under challenge.
In the lecture series, Haraway and two other leading figures in contemporary science studies will discuss their work at the cutting edge of the life sciences and the humanities.
Haraway, who is considered one of the most important practitioners in a field that ties together science and technology studies, anthropology and animal studies, will speak on “Staying with the Trouble: Becoming Worldly with Companion Species.”
Haraway has been at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since 1980, where she teaches feminist theory and science studies. She also is an affiliated faculty member in the feminist studies, anthropology and environmental studies departments.
She earned a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College with majors in zoology, philosophy and English in 1966 and a doctorate in biology in 1972 from Yale University, with an “interdisciplinary arrangement” with the departments of Biology, of Philosophy and of History of Science and Medicine.
Haraway explores the ties between technical and popular worlds and between nature and culture. She is committed to supporting practical collaborations and intellectual exchange between working scientists, especially biologists, and scholars in the arts, social sciences and the humanities.
Considered a leading thinker about people’s love/hate relationship with machines, Haraway wrote the classic essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” which was first published in 1985 in the Socialist Review and then published in her 1991 book “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.”
She is also the author of “Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology” (1976), “Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science” (1989), “Modest_Witness @Second_Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™” (1997), “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness” (2003) and “When Species Meet” (2008).
In September 2000, Haraway received the J.D. Bernal Prize, the highest honor given by the Society for Social Studies of Science for lifetime contributions to the field.
‘Agents of Overlap in Biology and the Humanities’
The lecture series continues with William C. Wimsatt, Ph.D., professor emeritus of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Wimsatt will discuss “Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings as Natural Agents in a Real World” at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 17, in Rebstock Hall, Room 322.
He explores the issue of biological complexity and offers new perspectives to deal with emerging natural and social complexities versus eliminative reductionism. His work centers on the philosophy of the inexact sciences, the history of biology and the study of complex systems.
Wimsatt, who is on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality” (2007) and “Modelling — A Primer (or: the crafty art of making, exploring, extending, transforming, tweaking, bending, disassembling, questioning, and breaking models)” with J.C. Schank (1993).
Carl F. Craver, Ph.D., an associate professor of philosophy in WUSTL’s Department of Philosophy and in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program, both in Arts & Sciences, will discuss “Levels of Explanation in the Neuroscience of Memory” at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 1, in the Alumni House living room.
A philosopher of neuroscience, Craver’s interests include the philosophy and history of neuroscience and psychology, philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. He is the author of “Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience” (2007).
He also has edited a special issue for Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences.
The lectures are being held in conjunction with a joint English/biology course that Garland Allen, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Meyer are teaching this semester titled “The Ascendancy of Biology.” The lecture series speakers will visit the class.
Haraway will also visit the joint English department/Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, “Daughters v. Mothers: Feminist Affects,” taught by Anca Parvulescu, Ph.D., assistant professor in English and in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, and Kate Fama, a graduate student in English and in American Culture Studies, all in Arts & Sciences.
The time is right to have such a lecture series, said Meyer.
“The life sciences are now sufficiently developed and sufficiently central to the understanding of science — this wasn’t always the case — that one can focus on them as emblematic of science in general and at the same time demonstrate ways in which they may be said already to overlap with the humanities rather than seeming to stand alone, with the humanities struggling to remain visible whether due to the shadows or the light emanating from the remarkable growth of the life sciences in the past half-century,” Meyer said.
“The story — that the humanities and the sciences should be regarded as more mutually illuminating than they are often said to be — is an old one; this way of telling it is new.”
The lecture series is sponsored by the departments of English, Biology and Philosophy and the Center for the Humanities, all in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the course “The Ascendancy of Biology.”
For more information on the lecture series, call (314) 935-5576 or e-mail cenhum@artsci.wustl.edu.
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