Women, Gender and Sexuality in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Don Opitz "Gender History of Science". 

A DePaul alumnus, Prof. Opitz (he/him) has devoted his career to advancing the education of nontraditional learners who seek to be leaders and agents of change in their professional, public, and personal spheres of life. He has held a range of administrative positions, and he currently serves as Director of Cannabis Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member of American Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, and an affiliated scholar in History. ​

His ongoing research in the history of science focuses on women, gender, and sexuality in science, and science in British imperial culture during the “long” nineteenth century. He is an editor of two books and author of more than 40 papers, including refereed journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. His book-in-progress is provisionally titled, Daughters of Ceres: The Scientific Advancement of Women in Horticulture. He is editor-in-chief of Endeavour​, a leading journal in the history and philosophy of science, a volume co-editor of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, and a general co-editor of the series, Gender, Colonialism, and Science​ (Routledge). ​

Richardson, Sarah S. The maternal imprint: The contested science of maternal-fetal effects. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Margaret Andersen "Gender, Nation, and the Family in the Post-War Era: Artificial Insemination in Question"

Carlo Sariego "“Is Daddy Having a Baby?” Speculation and Race-Making in 20th-century Histories of Male Pregnancy""
password: carlo2024

Yingchen Kwok
Doctoral Candidate
University of Pennsylvania
History and Sociology of Science Department
"The Gender Politics of Sexual Reproduction as a Source of Hereditary Variation"
 

For September, we will be reading and discussing Emily Martin's "The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles." Signs: journal of women in culture and society 16, no. 3 (1991): 485-501. and Rene Almeling's “What Biological Stories are Americans Telling About the Egg and the Sperm? A Study Inspired by Emily Martin 30 Years Later.” Gender & Society 37: 750-773.

Leah Malamut, "Sisters of the Beekeeping Fraternity: American Women in Apiculture, 1870-1900"

Reading Group: 
Alaniz, Rodolfo John. "Havelock Ellis, Sexology, and Sexual Selection in Post-Darwinian Evolutionary Biology." Journal of the History of Biology (2024): 1-24.
We will be reading and discussing Dr. Alaniz's recent article in JHB. 
 

Lucas René Ramos, "From Sodomy to Heterosexual Incapacity: Governing “Sexual Deviancies” in Italian Catholic Sexology (1952-1978)"

Co-sponsored session with the HSS Women's Caucus
This month, we will hear from Rebecca Onion, a visiting scholar of history at Ohio University and a senior editor at Slate.com. Dr. Onion is the author of Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the culture of popular science in the United States. UNC Press, 2016. She will speak to us about writing history of science for a wider public audience. 
We will also use this time as a workshop for public pitches. If you have an idea you would like to pitch to a popular press, join us as we think about how we can work to get history of science, and especially issues of women, gender, and sexuality, to a wider audience. 

Aisling Shalvey, "'I didn't think I could survive it... The bleeding was stopped completely': The role of women, gender and sexuality in biomedical experiments during National Socialism"

Yingchen Kwok, "Can Protozoa Die? On Heredity and Reproductive Futurity in Late Nineteenth-Century German Biology"

Nelson Jiajie Meng, "Beyond Cultural Translation: Syphilis Medical Advertisement in Shun Pao"

“Being Natural”: Science, Environment, Sexuality and the Life of Marston Bates"
Megan Raby

"Classification Challenges: Precarity, legibility, and gendering expert labour"
Drew Danielle Belsky

"“The Sun Tells Its Own Story:” Seeing and Unseeing the Environment Through Maria Mitchell’s Solar Photographs"
Allison Fulton

"Visceral Attraction: Dissection and Desire in Japan, 1879-1930"
Kandra Polatis

"Bringing the History of Mathematics Home: Entangled Practices of Domesticity, Gender, and Mathematical Work"
David E. Dunning and Brigitte Stenhouse

Melina Packer shares a work in progress from her new project, a critical race feminist history of hunting dog breeding and training called Bred in Captivity. 
 

"Mutual Influence: Anna Weber-van Bosse, the “Self-Organized” Network and Conceptions of Species Associations 1868-1899”
Emily Hutcheson