Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Secrecy and the Self

Wed, April 19, 2017
Dinner Program
Peter Galison

Historian of science Richard Galison will speak about how surveillance has shaped our current sense of self by comparing the effects of censorship during World War I on Freudian concepts of self to how we frame our sense of self one hundred years later in the midst of a massive digital infrastructure that archives and mines personal data.

Peter Galison is a professor of history of science at Harvard University where he teaches courses in history and philosophy of 20th-century physics; history and philosophy of experimentation; fascism, art and science in the interwar years; among others. His primary work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics: experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He also delves into many other scientific topics and their implications including secrecy, security, and surveillance and technoprivacy.

Galison has launched several projects examining the powerful cross-currents between science and other fields. For example, his book (with Lorraine Daston), Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007) asks how visual representation shaped the concept of scientific objectivity, and how atlases of scientific images continue, even today, to rework what counts as right depiction. Further work on the boundary between science and other fields includes his co-edited volumes on the relations between science, art and architecture.

A MacArthur Foundation Fellow, he is also a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung.

Professor Gailson will deliver the the 2017 Ricardo J. Quinones Lecture.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

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