Klopsteg Lectures
All lectures for 2026-27 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 28 - Pablo F. Gómez, History and The History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality"
This talk examines how early Atlantic slave trading communities made human corporeality articulable with a new set of ideas about finance, facts, objectivity, and measurable risk that emerged in the early modern era. These communities drew on centuries of legal, commercial, financial, and maritime material customs and ideas. Through their violent procedures, Iberian Atlantic slave trading communities abstracted and assimilated groups of human bodies to numbers. They did so to protect their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks. The model for understanding human bodies these communities created foreshadows and shares basic notions with those sustaining the intellectual edifice of disciplines as varied as political arithmetic, economics, population health, demographics, epidemiology, and contemporary biomedicine.
October 12 - Kelly McDonough, Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Indigenous Science & Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them
This book talk draws from Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them (University of Arizona Press, 2024), which argues that Nahuas, native speakers of Nahuatl (common language of the Aztec Empire and more than 2 million people today), have long been rigorous observers and problem-solvers engaged with the world around them, despite persistent framings of Indigenous knowledge as static, mystical, or outside the bounds of science. Drawing on archival sources in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin alongside interviews with contemporary Nahua scholars, artists, and farmers, the talk traces Nahua science and technology across case studies including astrological and natural philosophy in the Florentine Codex, health and healing in the 1577 Geographic Surveys, sophisticated water management, adoption and adaptation of alphabetic writing, and narrative cartographies. Pairing colonial-era analysis with present-day voices, it considers how Nahua epistemology has shaped, and continues to shape, environmental knowledge, communication, and cultural survival from the sixteenth century to today.
October 26 - Pariroo Rattan, Sociology, Northwestern University
Theorizing the State in the Age of Techno-Populism: Bureaucracy, Digital Governance and the Informal Economy in Contemporary India
How are the proper boundaries, obligations, and powers of the state being made and legitimized amid contemporary populist politics and technological developments? The talk examines this question through ethnography with migrant street vendors in Delhi between 2020 and 2024, who have encountered India’s rapid expansion of biometric identification, digital payments, and digitally mediated welfare. While these technologies routinely produce friction and fall short of their promised economic inclusion, many vendors continue to regard them as signs of progress. This puzzle points to a broader transformation in the relationship between bureaucracy, citizenship, and the nation-state. The modern bureaucratic state has historically claimed legitimacy through its capacity to administer development based on formal rules, impersonality, and unbiased administration. Contemporary populist politics, by contrast, increasingly casts bureaucratic mediation as a corrupt obstacle to national progress while presenting technology as a means of establishing a more direct relationship between citizens and benevolent, personified facets of the state. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, I use the case of Digital India to ask what these transformations reveal about the moral relationships through which marginalized citizens understand the state, as well as the changing norms of what the state owes them
November 9, Britt Paris, Library and Information Science, Rutgers University
Radical Infrastructures: Is a people-centered technology possible?
In this talk Britt Paris discusses her recent book Radical Infrastructures that examines the hidden material, environmental, and political–economic foundations of contemporary technological systems and asks what it would mean to reorganize them around people rather than profit. Drawing attention away from interfaces and innovation myths, this talk foregrounds deeper concerns around Internet infrastructures as extractive, energy-intensive, and labor-dependent assemblages—built from minerals, logistics networks, land, and lives. From data centers and cloud platforms to AI pipelines and “smart” systems, these technologies are embedded in global regimes of resource extraction, environmental degradation, and racialized and gendered labor practices that are often rendered invisible, and proselytized as “neutral” “innovation”. Paris argues that these infrastructures are not inevitable or neutral. Instead, they reflect specific political and economic choices that prioritize scale, efficiency, and capital accumulation over sustainability, care, and people-centered governance. At the same time, Radical Infrastructures highlights existing practices and movements that grapple towards people-centered alternatives: cooperative and community-owned networks, repair and maintenance cultures, and solidarity-based approaches to Internet infrastructure, data, and technology. By treating Internet infrastructure as a site of collective struggle, the talk invites us to imagine—and organize for—technological futures grounded in resistance and refusal of dominant systems in favor of environmental responsibility, care, and justice.
Winter Quarter
January 11 - Daniel Shanahan, Music Theory and Cognition, Northwestern University
Charles Seeger's Tin Can: Machine Transcription and the Limits of Musical Measurement
The extraction of data from musical performance is at the heart of our listening environment, with songs algorithmically recommended based on the measured similarity of factors such as "danceability" and "acousticness," alongside features such as tempo and key. The mechanical extraction of data from performance has been debated for nearly a century. The question is what it means to take a continuous stream of music and parse it into something a machine can read, and how best to do so in a way that aligns with what a listener might find most salient. Musicologist Charles Seeger set out to capture musical performance without the interference of a human transcriber through his "melograph," a device at first consisting of a cardiogram machine held together by a tin can found in a backyard. This talk approaches Seeger's device as an epistemic thing—an object that generated the very research questions it was built to answer. Drawing on recent archival research, it reconstructs what Seeger believed his machine could do and, just as importantly, what he acknowledged it could not. I argue that, while many of the compromises made in this early work persist in the field today, they are too often positioned as technological constraints rather than as the broader epistemological impasses they were initially understood to be.
January 25 - Expertise, Trust and Democracy: An STS Perspective on Contemporary Politics
A Klopsteg Panel Discussion
February 1 - Justin Mann, English, Northwestern University
Getting Lost in the Dark: Speculations on Black Insecurity
Professor Mann traces the relationship between the aesthetics of speculative fiction and the “science” of security policy. Reading Victor La Valle and Dietrich Smith’s graphic novel Destroyer alongside the Russo Brothers’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier, show that speculation is a key narrative mode of the science of security policy even as it offers us a lens through to glimpse the possibilities, limits, and potential ends of the American security state.
February 22 - Christopher Kelty, Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles
The Internet We Could Have Had
Spring Quarter
April 5 - Tara Nummedal, History, Brown University
April 19 - Laura Martin, Environmental Studies, Williams College
Herbicides and the Politics of Plant Life
The chemical 2,4-D kills broadleaved plants while leaving grasses alive. This lecture explores how 2,4-D became a global evolutionary force. Developed by chemical warfare committees during World War II to starve enemy nations, this synthetic herbicide was repackaged by petrochemical companies in the 1950s as a miracle weedkiller for lawns and crops. In the 1960s, the U.S. military sprayed millions of gallons of 2,4-D in Vietnam in the form of Agent Orange. It next enabled the global war on drugs. Today 2,4-D remains one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, moving through fields and forests, lakeshores and lawns. The lecture concludes by asking how confronting this chemical inheritance can broaden the possibilities for biodiversity and multispecies life.
May 3 - Stevie Ruiz, Environmental Justice and Science Studies, California State University, Northridge
Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West
The history of the environmental movement—from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century—has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism. Stewards of the Land argues that environmental justice was never just a reaction to pollution in the 1970s but has a much longer history tied to land theft, labor exploitation, and the everyday struggles of frontline communities to live and work with dignity. Drawing from comparative ethnic studies and archival research and with a commitment to decolonial praxis, Ruiz recovers the stories of those who labored—often invisibly—to build, maintain, and reimagine environmental spaces in the American West.
May 10 - Danielle Wong, Science and Technology Studies, The University of British Columbia
Asian/American Biomedia: Circadian Rhythms, Pores, and Other Racial Know-How
In 1958, American dermatologist Aaron Lerner isolated melatonin, the pineal hormone now known to regulate the body’s circadian rhythms. But the discovery of this sleep hormone was an unintended result of the Yale scientist’s career-long interest in finding a “cure” for vitiligo and other pigmentary conditions, driven by the hope that, within the twenty-first century, anyone would be able to “change one’s color” at will. This talk situates Lerner's incidental discovery within a longer history of racializing homeostatic processes, connecting Cold War medicine's racial visions to today’s informationalization of circadian rhythms and epidermal pores. Wong investigates how this lesser-known connection between dermatology and modern sleep science anticipates the emergence of skincare and circadian media as forms of prosumer racial know-how in the information age. Presenting research from her new book, Racial Virtuality: Information Capitalism and the Suggestive Materiality of Asianness, Wong turns to an expired “Asians Sleeping” meme and Asian diasporic artwork, theorizing Asian/American biomediation as a critical site where informational capitalist promises of self-possessive customization are performed and contested.