2021 sophomore tutorial community building week!

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 ...

This week, I chose to attend the event entitled “Roundtable Past and Futures: Current Challenges in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine” hosted by UCLA on Monday. Last week was an unusual week for me in terms of my schedule, so in addition to the event being one of the few that I could attend, the title of the event which listed such a broad range of topics piqued my interest as I wondered how the speakers would tackle all the subject matters listed (history of science, technology, and medicine) within the short period. Upon scrolling down and reading the description of the event, I realized that the specific subject matters that the speakers were going to cover fell into my realm of interest. Ultimately, I chose this event out of a familiarity with the general subject matters that were going to be covered, but also out of a curiosity as to how the two speakers would approach them. The legacy of racism in science is something that I find incredibly important to unmask and ...

          This past Wednesday, I attended an event on “Collecting COVID-19: Examining How Museums Have Worked With Communities to Collect And Record The Pandemic.” As I was looking through the various events, this one specifically caught my eye due to two reasons. I was specifically interested in the title’s emphasis on communities, and the event’s focus on how public institutions such as museums are working with not only individuals, but also communities. Furthermore, the idea of “recording” the pandemic was very interesting to me because it made me question how the true diversity of experiences of individuals can be fully encapsulated by museums. I was particularly interested in the definition of “record” and what it truly means to “record” the pandemic: what types of information are being recorded and what specific methods are being used? The event featured four different speakers: Andrea Hadley-Johnson and Simon Brown from the National Justice Museum an...

This week, I attended a roundtable discussion titled “Past and Futures: Current Challenges in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine”. There were two speakers present, each presenting a different challenge in the history of Science. During this talk, I was struck by the words of Dr. Terence Keel. His work focuses on the history of racism and how it connects to current disciplines such as religion, law, medicine, public health, and the biological sciences. He discussed the possibility of using the history of science as an antiracist discipline. He argued that the history of science lies at the intersection of so many different fields, methodologies, and ways of understanding the world. This puts it in the unique position to utilize interdisciplinary measures to detangle racist power structures that have been codified into the American way of life. He emphasized that his talk was not meant to be a presentation, but a provocation. It was a call to action for students and scholars...

  During the HS97 Community Building Week, I had the pleasure of attending Jack Hartnell’s talk titled “Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image. ” An art historian and Associate Professor at the University of East Anglia, Jack Hartnell mostly investigates the relationships between objects and their makers. He focuses on the original contexts and perceptions of these objects - mostly from the medieval ages. Because of my deep research interests and curiosity about the practices and traditions that medicine was rooted in during medieval times, I was excited to attend this talk! As foreseen by the title, the talk’s subject of interest was the image of the “ Wound Man ” — one of the most fascinating objects found in medical manuscripts of the medieval period. During this online lecture, Hartnell explored this figure’s journey throughout the past centuries.  Hartnell started by describing the image — it is that of a man covered in a multitude of wound...

       This week, I had the pleasure of virtually attending Jack Hartnell's lecture, Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image, by Jack Hartnell (University of East Anglia) , at the University of Cambridge along with a lot of other students from our tutorial. I wanted to attend this lecture because I was so fascinated by this grotesque depiction of the human body.  Why of all ways, was this the chosen way of depicting the human body? The lecture was centered around the ubiquitous figure of the "wound man" which was used in surgical works during the Middle Ages and the European renaissance. To further elaborate, the wound man was a depicted drawing of a gruesome body impaled thoroughly with differing knifes and arrows, featuring especially heinous looking skin lesions and rashes. The Wound Man illustrates various injuries that a person might receive through war, accident, or disease: cuts and bruises from multiple weapons, rashes, thor...

 This week, I chose to attend "Collecting Covid-19 part 1: Examining how museums have worked with communities to collect and record the pandemic," a discussion hosted by the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. The basic premise of the panel was discussing the role of the museum as a cultural space in the age of COVID — how these museums have adapted to the times, and how they're looking to the future. Speaking was Andrea Hadley-Johnson of the National Justice Museum, Imogen Clarke of the Science Museum, Stewart Emmens of the Science Museum, and Simon Brown of the National Justice Museum. Looking around, one cannot help but feel that we're living through history. From the incredible death and suffering that has accompanied this pandemic to the fundamental social realignments that will surely prove lasting, it's clear that our present moment will go down in the history books. The panel was an incredibly fascinating window into how this historical ...

This week I attended a livestream of Dr. Jenna Tonn’s “The Evolutionary Brotherhood: Manliness and Experimental Zoology in 19th-century America” talk, given as a part of the Science History Institute’s Lunchtime Lecture series. I’ll admit that my main motivation in selecting this particular talk was its ability to fit into my schedule for the week, but I was also curious as to what kind of angle was used to approach this topic of “manliness” and “brotherhood”. In my experience, the former term has taken on more negative connotations than the latter, so I was interested to see whether this would be reflected in Dr. Tonn’s work. Dr. Tonn currently teaches at Boston College, and she previously taught in Harvard’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department after receiving her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard. Her work focuses on the intersection of women and gender in STEM fields, with some of her recent projects including the history of radical feminist biology in the Cold ...

       I decided to attend the UCLA event titled "Roundtable Past and Futures: Current Challenges in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine" on February 22nd. I read the description of the event that stated Dr. Terence Keel, a professor at UCLA,  would be discussing the legacy of racism within the history of science, and I was immediately interested. With no prior knowledge of who Dr. Keel was, I discovered that some of his research explores the connection between science, racist ideologies, and religion. Dr. Keel's research is why I chose to attend the event because I hoped to explore some interests that I have not had access to before. The other speaker for the event was Dr. Cathy Gere from UCSD, who would be speaking about the climate crisis and what historians of science can do in relation to traveling. Overall, the event was created to allow Dr. Keel and Dr. Gere to speak about challenges they noticed in their academic fields.      ...

       On Wednesday, I attended an event titled “Nursing a Pandemic: Mental Health.” I choose this particular event because mental health is something that is very important to me and my family. Throughout the pandemic, there has been a lot of talk and media around physical health and how to protect yourself from COVID-19. The mental health of almost everyone I know has been, in some capacity, impacted by the pandemic. The “Nursing a Pandemic” event interested me because its purpose was to address a different side of healthcare than the one that has been in the spotlight for the past year.  The event was hosted by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and consisted of two interviews with mental health nurses. The interviewer was Catherine Gamble, the head of nursing education at the RCN. Catherine interviewed two male mental health nurses about their experience during the pandemic. The first, Douglas Hamandishe, gave his perspective as a BAME nurse during the pande...

This week, I attended a Literary Lunch Break with author Roy Richard Grinker, who discussed his new book, Nobody’s Normal , with Jonathan Lear. Roy Richard Grinker is an author and professor of anthropology at George Washington University; he focuses on mental health, autism, and psychological anthropology of children. His interviewer, Jonathan Lear, is also an author and professor at the University of Chicago; his work focuses on the philosophical understanding of the human psyche, and the ethical implications of humans. I chose to attend this event because I think it is really important to consider the impact of social factors when considering health issues; I feel like a lot of the time, mental health isn't really grouped into the same category as physical health, and I think that is, in part, because of the stigmatization of mental issues. And so, I was really interested in learning more about how society has influenced the way people perceive mental illness, and how stigmatiza...

I chose to attend the event by Dr. Jack Hartnell titled “Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image”. The title of the event immediately caught my attention, as it relates to depictions of medicine and bodies through images. Jack Hartnell is a lecturer in art history at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on a variety of topics, including medieval objects, the Middle Ages, medicine, and medieval bodies. Dr. Hartnell discussed his book, Medieval Bodies: Life, Death, and Art in the Middle Ages , as well as his upcoming book Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image . The first book looks at ways people during the Middle Ages approached physical health and disease, while the upcoming book focuses on the history of the “Wound Man”.  Hartnell’s descriptions of the “Wound Man” in particular were fascinating to listen to. Wounds and their possible treatments were things much discussed in Medieval writing by an...

The event I attended this week was called “Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image.” The speaker was Jack Hartnell, an art historian whose work focuses on how art intersects with medicine and health, particularly in the late medieval/early renaissance periods. I chose this event because I’ve recently been interested in the intersection of science with art, so I was curious to learn how a prominent scholar would approach this overlap in their own work. Hartnell’s talk revolved around his forthcoming book, which focuses on how different cultures interacted with and replicated iconography of the “Wound Man” in scientific texts from the 13th to 17th centuries. But who (or what) is the Wound Man, you may ask? The Wound Man refers to any number of images from the Medieval Period that follow a similar theme: the naked body of a man looking calmly towards the viewer as every inch of his body is pierced with knives, swords and other weapons (see figure). The lesion...