2021 sophomore tutorial community building week!

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 ...