Klopsteg Lectures
All lectures for 2025-26 are free open to the public, thanks to the generosity of The Klopsteg fund. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in University Hall, Hagstrum Room 201, on Mondays 4:30-6:00pm.
Program Director: Lydia Barnett
Fall Quarter
September 29 - Town Hall - Evanston Campus - Fisk Hall, Room 217
STEM under Threat: The Past, Present, and Future of STEM Research Funding
This town hall addressed the current crisis in STEM funding by placing federal support for STEM research in the U.S. – and its current unprecedented retrenchment – in social and historical context
October 6 - Deborah Coen, History of Science & Medicine - Yale
"The Atmospheric Commons: Adaptation Science from the Old Regime 
To begin to approach the atmosphere as a commons is to recognize its finitude and its susceptibility to the influence of human activities. In this sense, reframing the atmosphere as a commons is a problem for knowledge-making as much as for policy-making. A just and sustainable allocation of a common pool resource must engage stakeholders in a process of collective learning to understand how their lives depend on that resource and therefore on the choices made by everyone else who shares it. What tools of observation and analysis could stakeholders use to understand how their actions impact others by virtue of impacting the atmosphere? This is the question that animated a forgotten tradition in the history of science, one that that made the atmosphere perceptible as a medium of connection and communication for all living things. This neglected history holds essential clues to promoting just and peaceful approaches to the challenges of adapting to climate change.
October 20 - Joshua Howe, History and Environmental Studies - Reed College and Alexander Lemons, former U.S. Marine Corps
"Warbody: "Historical Anatomy" and the Ecology of Military Exposures"
Former Marine Corps sniper Alexander Lemons and Reed College Professor of History and Environmental Studies Joshua Howe talk about the making of their innovative co-authored book, Warbody, a deep dive into the experience of war's violence that goes beyond bullets and bombs to address the less visible and often even more impactful harm facing combatants and civilians alike from toxic exposures and lasting trauma.
Cancelled - Wednesday, November 19 - Nydia Pineda de Avilia, History - UC San Diego
Filmmaking as Method for the History of Science: A screening and discussion of “American Skies"
“American Skies” is a series of eight video-essays by scholars in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Italy, and the U.S. who explore their relationship with the multi-faceted meanings of the heavens in colonial and postcolonial Latin America.
Winter Quarter
January 12 - Edisson Aguilar Torres - History, Northwestern University
The Delegatory State: Water infrastructure, Community and State Formation in 20th-century Colombia
What needed to happen so that a Colombian peasant in the 1970s could open the tap and have access to running water? This talk will offer an account of the complex set of processes, decisions, policies, practices and materials on different scales that converged to that end, following the struggle of Luis Acosta, a Colombian farmer, and his community to build and maintain a small-scale water supply system. Through that case, broader questions about the relationship between infrastructure and forms of state power will be explored, arguing that there is not a necessary relation between the size of infrastructure, state centralisation, and authoritarianism.
January 26 - Pariroo Rattan - Sociology, Northwestern University
A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India's Informal Economy
Why do citizens in democracies accept technological governance systems that break down, discriminate against them and fail at many levels? Digital India is a flagship policy of the Government of India to foster “economic growth combined with social inclusion.” Central to Digital India is the Aadhaar card, a biometric identification now distributed to 1.3 billion Indians, and a real time mobile payment technology, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), that has significantly replaced cash transactions. This technological transformation was imagined and implemented against the social backdrop of India's large informal economy. Technological promises to improve governance and economic opportunities are often not fully realized and create new sources of friction, especially for marginalized communities. Nevertheless, digital technologies have been taken up by actors in the informal economy, such as street vendors in urban cities like New Delhi. How do street vendors rationalize breakdowns in techno-economic promises? In what ways is the introduction of technology in modern governance systems changing the relationship of marginalized citizens in India to the nation-state, and with what consequences for contemporary populist politics? I draw on multi-year ethnography in New Delhi to illuminate the stakes of technological governance for contemporary democracy theory. Unlike postcolonial India where a large bureaucracy was set up to facilitate the nation's growth, I show how digitization is morally justified through a recasting of mediating institutions like the bureaucracy as a threat to the nation’s progress and invoking citizens themselves as technological nation-builders.
Wednesday February 4, 12:30-2:00pm -Kresge Hall, Room 1-515
Shira Pinhas, Jewish Studies, Northwestern University
“Petro-Palestine: Technologies of Partition in a Mandated Land"
Palestine is not commonly recognized as an oil-producing country. Yet under British rule (1918–1948), it emerged as a key hub of distillation, shipment, and automobility within the global petroleum industry. This talk examines how pipelines, the Haifa Refinery, asphalt roads, and motor vehicles linking Palestine with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan simultaneously structured spatial segregation between Palestinians and Jews and laid the infrastructural groundwork for partition. Oil, however, became Palestine’s principal energy source not only through mobility: it also permeated domestic life as the main household fuel. The local and global political economy of oil production and consumption reconfigured hierarchies between women and men, production and reproduction, Palestinians and Jews, and metropoles and colonies. Co-Sponsored with the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Isreal Studies.
February 23 - Keva Bui, Asian American Studies, Northwestern University
Spring Quarter
April 20 - Lilly Irani - Communications - UC San Diego
May 11 - Vera Candiani - History - Princeton University