Friday, May 30, 2025
1:20 – 2:25 pm
J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)
On Friday, May 30 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Joanna Radin.
A zoom option or recording may be available for members of the campus community who cannot attend in person. Contact Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) to request access.
Tales From the Crypt: Craniometry, Computers and Mass Culture in 1960s Cambridge
This is a story about what happened when an enterprising Ivy league, pre-med majoring in anthropology encountered a machine he was told could, among other miracles, transform the spoils of generations of racial conquest into anti-racist science. It is a cautionary tale, not unlike the ones this pre-med would become best known for when he abandoned medicine for mass-market publishing and Hollywood. I narrate this account not as a thriller, adventure, or mystery, but as a bad romance. Or more specifically a necromance, born out of opportunistic relationships to the dead and mass cultural movements to refuse civil rights. The story unfolds between Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, MA in the 1960s. Specifically, collections of skulls at Cambridge University and the gender and racially segregated halls of Harvard College. It traces the intersections of Black Power and the power of computers—specifically the IBM 7090–as a strategy for intervening in entrenched ideas about human racial and sexual difference. I follow the consequences of this skullduggery into the present, after calls for the release of human remains from Anthropology’s crypts amidst the Black Lives Matter movement during the twilight of Affirmative Action.
Joanna Radin, Associate Professor of History of Medicine, Yale University,
Joanna Radin is Associate Professor of History of Medicine at Yale University, where she is a core member and Director of Graduate Studies of the Program in History of Science and Medicine. She also holds appointments in the Departments of History and of Anthropology and is an affiliate of the Programs in American Studies and in Religion and Modernity. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017) and with Emma Kowal, the co-editor of Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017). Her most recent publication is an essay in The Yale Review, “Is Celebrity Real?”
Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.