2021 sophomore tutorial community building week!

The event I attended this week was called Roundtable Past and Futures: Current Challenges in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. The two speakers participating in the event were Terrence Keel and Cathy Gere. Terrence Keel is an associate professor at UCLA and teaches in the Institute for Society and Genetics, and in the department of African American Studies. Keel studies and writes about biomedical science, religion, law, and modern thought. Cathy Gere is a professor at UCSD and teaches classes in the history of medicine, biology, neuroscience and medical ethics. I chose the event because it seemed relevant, broad, and informal. I was intrigued by the roundtable format and the discussion regarding the future of the discipline and scholarship of the history of science, something that seemed to differ more from a typical Harvard seminar, and something that felt important to be engaged with as a History of Science concentrator.   The event was split up into two sec...

  This lecture on “Evolutionary Brotherhood” was led by Professor Jenna Tonn, a visiting professor at Boston College in Science and Technology Studies. Jenna is an alumnus of Harvard’s History of Science department where she received her Ph.D. Her research focuses on the cultural elements surrounding the history of science. She specializes in analyzing the role women played in stem fields throughout history. So, it makes sense that Tonn would know to teach a lecture on “manliness” in the field of zoology as this would be adjacent to her area of Focus.     Even though I don’t have any experience or interest in the field of zoology, I chose to attend this lecture because of my curiosity about the concept of “manliness”. It was interesting to have the word manliness present in the same sentence as “Experimental Zoology” because manliness in the 21st century is usually associated with physical strength and athletics. It’s not a concept that is thought to be synonymous with th...

On February 24th, I had the opportunity of listening to a lecture given by Harvard alumnus and Boston College assistant professor, Jenna Tonn. The reason for choosing to listen in on this discussion was the topic itself: what it meant to be a  man  of science in the 19 th century. Focusing particularly on the field of evolutionary biology over a century ago, professor Tonn used the personal correspondences of famous leading biologists as a lens to view the private and social environment that these men worked in. Interestingly, albeit not entirely surprising, the social conditions that these scientists constructed was somewhat of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it could be viewed in a positive light like the culture of brotherhood that we typically see developed within athletic teams on college campuses. However, on the other hand, this same environment was one that potentially ostracized those that did not fit in ideally; a characteristic which continues to adhere to t...

Reuploaded as I had unknowingly posted my original blog under the name "unknown." This week, I enjoyed listening to Harvard alumnus and Boston College assistant professor Jenna Tonn's lecture regarding "evolutionary brotherhood" - what it meant to be a man of/in science in the 19th century. I was particularly interested in attending her lecture as I had written about sexism in science for my HS100 final paper and wanted to perceive that same topic through a seemingly juxtaposed perspective. Furthermore, as I often observed the term "brotherhood" used in the context of sports, I was curious to listen about how that would be used within science and whether or not the social aspects of brotherhoods in sports would also apply to those in science. By depicting "manliness" in science through multiple zoologists, Tonn provides a unique view into the social and working environment of the lab when completely dominated by men. To explore the social asp...

**To clarify, when talking about "gay rights", I'm using "gay" as a catch-all for the LGBTQ community, as that's what the movement was called at the time. When referring to individuals, "gay" means male identifying individuals who are attracted to men.**      I attended Sexual Health, Activism, and the Arrival of HIV/AIDS: The Story Behind "It's a Sin" , hosted by the University of Cambridge in England. The two speakers were Richard McKay, a professor at the University of Cambridge, and George Severs, a PhD student at the university. I decided to attend the event in the first place because I'm really interested in LGBTQ health and how queer people dealt with the stigma that accompanied HIV/AIDS, in addition to what they did about it.      The event was split into two parts: a history of HIV/AIDS and the gay sexual health movement pre-1970s, and a history of radical activism in England surrounding HIV/AIDS. I found the first part e...

  This week I attended a talk on the history of gay sexual health which was organized by the University of Cambridge. I decided to attend this event because I wanted to fill the gaps in my knowledge surrounding the activism that was so essential to bringing about an end to the AIDS crisis. I listened to two presentations: one by Richard McKay, a fellow at the University and the other by George Severs, a PhD student in the History department. McKay's work seeks to contextualize the AIDS crisis by considering the various relationships gay men in America and Britain had to sexual health in the decades leading up to the epidemic. In the 1960s, more and more gay men contracted syphilis — a phenomenon which cast doubt on the dominant thought then that gay sex presented no risk to men. At the time, scientists were baffled. But McKay believes that today it is clear that one factor responsible for this uptick in venereal disease was the mass exodus of gay men to cities after World War II. G...

          On Wednesday, February 24, 2021, I attended the first part of a speaker series on “Collecting Covid-19.” This event sought to chronicle the ways in which museums in the United Kingdom are telling stories about the current pandemic, particularly regarding their interactions with local communities. In the past, I have learned about museums and their changing roles in the 21st century, which inspired me to attend this event. During the event, there were two sets of two guest speakers. The first two guest speakers, Andrea Hadley-Johnson and Simon Brown, respectively Artistic Program Manager and Project Curator, were affiliated with the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Hadley-Johnson and Brown described their experiences working with the general public on projects such as “Letters of Constraint” during the first pandemic lockdown in the U.K. These 64 letters were written by members of the general public in the U.K. over the course of six weeks ...