Dr. Michael Olson, director of the Marquette Core Curriculum and teaching associate professor of philosophy, will present “Embryology, Race and Empire: A History of the Early Life Sciences,” as part of the Humanities Research Colloquium on Thursday, Oct. 30, at 3:30 p.m. in Cudahy Hall 126 and via Teams.
The origins of scientific conceptions of race as an inherited natural characteristic in Enlightenment studies of human variation have become a topic of widespread scholarly interest in recent decades. Less well known is the broader history of 18th-century life sciences within which debates about the nature of race and human difference were situated.
This talk will flesh out how the failure of 17th-century mechanistic natural philosophy to explain the processes involved in generation and reproduction and the success of Newton’s “Opticks” and “Principia” framed a debate in which human skin color was taken to be a decisive piece of evidence and so ushered in a new and highly politicized interest in defining race.
For more information and to obtain the Teams link, email Dr. Melissa Ganz.
