Klopsteg Lectures
All lectures for 2024-25 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: Ken Alder
Fall Quarter
October 7 - Elise Burton, Science and Technology Studies, History of Biological Sciences - University of Toronto
"Excavating Asian Races: Postwar Japanese Science and Diplomacy in the Middle East"
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Japanese archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists made their first forays into Iran and Iraq to conduct scientific fieldwork. Contemporary publications and media coverage depicted this moment as a Japanese scientific rediscovery of “West Asia,” a region to which Japan was connected not only through the deep time of human evolution and the prehistory of civilization, but also through more recent shared political experiences as “Asians.” This presentation focuses on the 1956-1966 Tokyo University Iraq-Iran Archaeological Expedition and a 1968-1974 program of medical science collaboration between Tehran University and Gifu University. The archaeological research was accompanied by diplomatic spectacle, as postwar Japan sought to resume bilateral relations with Middle Eastern countries. The medical research was supported by Japan’s Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency to strengthen political as well as scientific ties with Iran. Accordingly, these scientific collaborations were forged using extensive rhetoric about shared Asian cultural and even racial kinship. Yet the actual experience of Japanese scientists in the Middle East, and their published outputs, tended to reinforce their significant differences with Iraqi and Iranian colleagues in understanding racial identity. Using scientific publications, archival documents, and media reports, I analyze how these scientific collaborations simultaneously produced knowledge about human ‘races’ and enacted racialized national identities within Asia.
October 28 - Dean Chahim, Envoirnmental Studies, New York University
"Maintaining Abandonment: Engineering Mexico City’s Sewers after the Implosion of Modernism"
The engineers who manage Mexico City’s vast combined sewer and drainage infrastructures are constantly improvising new ways to cajole water to flow through the crumbling system even as the city sinks due to anthropogenic land subsidence. Their labor to maintain the system amid decades of deferred maintenance and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions might be seen as positive acts of care for the present and future. And yet these engineers instead understand their work as a necessary but inadequate response to a condition of state abandonment, manifest in ever-insufficient budgets. Engineers find themselves today treading water in the shadow of fading modernist plans from a mid-20th century period when “solutions” to the city’s persistent flooding – however flawed we now understand them to be – were still imaginable. And their creative work to keep the city (if only every partially) above water makes the breakdown of the drainage system so ordinary that it ceases to galvanize political attention. Paradoxically, by keeping the system running just “well enough,” they make it possible for the government to continue to deny the budgets necessary for the restoration of the system, leading to ever more flooding for the poor. The talk suggests a critical rethinking of the political function of both maintenance and adaptation and asks what we might recover from the modernist dream amid the devastating conjuncture of austerity and anthropogenic environmental change.
November 11 - Whitney Laemmli, Science and Technology, Pratt Institute
"The Measured Gesture: The Science of Movement from Weimar Germany to Corporate America"
In 1928, the German choreographer Rudolf Laban announced an explosive development in the history of dance: a byzantine system of lines, tick marks, and boxes intended to capture the four-dimensional complexity of bodily movement on paper. Despite its initial association with Expressionist dance and fascist moment choirs, “Labanotation” quickly moved beyond the art world, finding a home in the clinics, boardrooms, factories, and laboratories of post-World War II Britain and the United States. This talk traces Labanotation’s story from the anxiety-ridden cities of Weimar Germany to its use by management consultants in mid-century American and British white-collar offices, and, finally, to the robotics laboratories of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it will examine how writing down movement functioned as a means of understanding and manipulating human behavior, promising to reconcile freedom and control, the individual and the group, and the body and the machine at moments of social and political upheaval.
November 18 - Corrina Schlombs, History, Rochester Institute of Technology
"Data Entry, Labor, and Gender: Office Automation in Capitalist and Socialist Economies"
In 1949, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener warned US labor leader Walther Reuther that, in the US capitalist economy, automation technologies would cause massive unemployment. But a closer look at labor changes from computing technologies reveals a more complex picture: electronic computing also required new manual routine labor for data entry. Data occurred on paper, such as checks, insurance contracts or phone notes, and before it could be processed by a computer, it needed to be transferred into a computer-legible format—often punch cards or tape. In my talk, I examine mid-twentieth century office automation in capitalist and socialist economies, with a focus on the East German financial sector. In an economy promising full employment and lacking sufficient numbers of workers, officials promoted automation technologies with the goal of releasing workers. However, computing technologies were implemented in ways that heavily drew on women’s labor for data entry. Investigating how questions of technological change, employment, labor, and identity played out in different economic contexts, the talk calls technological promises into question at a time when artificial intelligence technologies are (again) expected to uproot the balance between human and machine labor.
Winter Quarter
January 13 - Benjamin Lindquist - History, Northwestern University
In the middle of the twentieth century, some engineers came to the paradoxical conclusion that before computers could become more “human,” they first had to become less “rational.” In particular, the birth of machine learning hinged on the notion that an unpredictable element was necessary for computers to beat a Turing test or simulate creativity. My study reveals how a perceived link between creativity and chance led to the creation of the first “random” neural networks in the 1950s. This association between randomness and creativity hailed from the art world, where original thought had long been linked to chance operations, divergent thinking, and even mental illness. At the time, rationalist critics attacked random neural nets as careless and chaotic. Historians of computing have followed suit by overemphasizing the tradition of Boolean algebra and deductive logic. In contrast, my work uncovers a faint but perceptible trace of disorder that was central to the rise of machine learning. Rather than viewing the notorious hallucinations of large language models as a recent phenomenon and a deviation from computing’s historical norms, I map the contested meanings of chance to highlight the ongoing political stakes involved in the use and governance of stochastic systems.
January 27 - Sarah B. Rodriguez - Global Health, Northwestern University
“Skillful attendance during labor itself: Maternal Mortality and the State, 1750-1990"
In 1987, following the first global conference on maternal mortality, the United Nations launched the Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI), a global campaign to reduce maternal deaths. A core part of this effort was for more births to be assisted by skilled attendants. Though it was not until 1987 that a global conference was held on ways to reduce maternal mortality, individual countries had been attempting to do so since at least the 1750s when Spain, for example, required midwives to pass an oral exam and be licensed by the state. During the more than 200 years between Spain’s actions and the launching of the SMI, a central focus of state and then global efforts to reduce maternal deaths has been on training and regulating birth attendants. In this talk, I will consider this history through a series of cases illustrative of the concentration on the training and oversight of childbirth attendants, themselves most often female. I will further consider how these two interventions arose from and reinforced the medicalization of childbirth, and how they arose from and reinforced the belief that a route for a state modernizing was through the oversight of female bodies.
February 17 - Nick Winters, Classics, Northwestern University
"Rival Arithmetics of Ancient Greece"
The origin of European theoretical mathematics is usually placed by historians in Ancient Greece. While this attribution irresponsibly (and harmfully) minimizes the intervening and more substantive contributions of, for example, the Islamic Middle Ages, it also ignores the irregularity of Greek mathematics itself. In fact, only one of the Greek mathematical traditions gained a foothold in the practices of modern Europe, and that was for reasons more social than mathematical. In this lecture, I will survey the evidence for four different styles of arithmetical theory, which coexisted in Greece between the 4th century BCE and the 3rd century CE. I will show how rival philosophical loyalties and an agonistic intellectual culture informed the vocabularies, methods, and stylistic conventions of these arithmetics, and I will briefly explain how one of them came to be adopted by the European Renaissance, while the others faded to near obscurity. In the process, we will see samples of Euclidean geometry, Babylonian astronomy, Pythagorean mysticism, early concepts of infinity and very large numbers, commercial and pedagogical counting systems, and mathematical poetry.
March 3 - Shireen Hamza - History, Northwestern University
"Down by the Water: Medicine and Religion in Waterside Spaces"
Medieval stepwells and bathhouses, stunning and ornate structures that facilitated access to fresh water, still dot the landscape of the Middle east and South Asia. How were these and other waterside spaces crucial to life in the medieval period? Water’s necessity to life is emphasized in the Quran and developed across many textual genres in these regions. And waterside spaces, built with patronage from elite women and men, were crucial for both the physical and ritual regulation of the body. Drawing together textual, architectural, and art historical sources as well as histories of science and religion, I examine the sensory and embodied experiences of these spaces. Medical and religious texts and practices help us understand the implications of these spaces for health and illness across the medieval Indian Ocean world.
Spring Quarter
April 7 - Dagmar Schäfer - History, Max Planck Institute
"Rich Times: Global history, Technology and Yuan Silks"
In this lecture, Professor Schäfer explores the possibilities of rethinking time—one of the core concerns of historical research—through the study of Yuan dynasty artifacts, both excavated from tombs and preserved in museum collections. Over the past decades, scholarship has increasingly recognized the temporal complexity of historical moments, emphasizing the coexistence of multiple temporalities that shape both past and present. This invites reflection on how historians inquire into and narrate time within distinct chronologies and how global history has developed through synchronous comparisons across cultures.
Moving beyond such synchronic approaches, she introduces an asynchronous comparative method—one that takes a similar technical phenomenon as its starting point rather than a fixed moment in time. Through a case study of silk reeling in early fourteenth-century Yuan China and Renaissance Italy around the turn of the sixteenth century, she demonstrates how looking across time rather than within a shared chronology can yield new insights into technological change and global connections. This approach is not only a way to decolonize time in history — and to restore the theft of history bemoaned by an earlier generation of anthropologists and historians. It a fresh perspective on both historical and contemporary understandings of innovation, adaptation, and exchange in a global context.
April 21- Taylor Moore - History, University of California Santa Barbara
"Living Fossils: Anatomies of Race and Reproduction in Egypt"
This talk traces the scientific afterlife of the mummy Queen Henhenit from excavation to examination and display at the Naguib Mahfouz Museum of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Cairo's Qasr al-Ainy Medical School. Henhenit's story highlights the production of race science by "colonial" and "nationalist" doctors that created a fictive link between ancient and living women's bodies. These women became objects of scientific observation and study largely without their consent. The talk illuminates the violent, material histories of race and reproduction forged through the measurement of pelvic bones, quantifications of reproductive labor power, and invasive gynecological surgeries in early twentieth century Egypt.
May 5 - James E. Dobson - English, Dartmouth University
"Neural Network Computing Before GPUs"
High-speed, high-memory, multicore graphics processing units such as those sold by Nvidia Corporation are the dominant enabling technology for contemporary deep learning. These specialized computing devices offload mathematically complex operations from general purpose CPUs. While these devices seemingly appear as novel technologies designed for the generative AI age, they have been around for decades as part of the development of computer graphics and visual computing, a history recounted in Jacob Gaboury’s recent Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics. This talk places today’s latest GPUs in a parallel genealogy, that of the more than seventy-year-old search for alternatives to general purpose digital computers based on neural network architectures. That project runs through the development of early learning machines including Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron and Tobermory to Hopfield network-inspired systems in the 1980s and 1990s such as the massively parallel high-performance computers produced by nCUBE, MasPar, and Thinking Machines. Despite these developments and the success of contemporary technologies, the tendency in computing has been toward simulation and general-purpose computers. In tracking the material history of specialized processors alongside today’s popular artificial neural network architectures, we may better understand their interrelation and the prospects for the continued relevance of these devices.
June 2 - Clare Kim - History and Global Asian Studies, University of Illinois Chicago
"Datafied Subjects: Race, Computation, and Japanese American Incarceration"
Following the events of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a series of U.S. presidential proclamations and executive orders designated the US West Coast a “theater of operations” and a war zone. They also enabled the removal and subsequent incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps. This talk considers how the Asia-Pacific conflicts of World War II contoured the entanglements between computational work and Asians and Asian Americans residing in the U.S. Recounting the setup of statistical laboratories established to track and manage Japanese American incarceration, it examines how the problem of surveilling these populations necessitated the treatment of militarized carceral spaces as information environments, where the classification of Japanese and Japanese American residents as enemy alien, citizen, or an alternative legal status could be adjudicated. Evolving datafication practices were collapsed and equated with bodies that were racialized as the yellow peril, which paradoxically effaced other subject positions to which Japanese Americans came to occupy at the time: in particular, the invisible labor to which they furnished to statistical work as technical experts themselves.