September 7-10, 4pm, Clark Kerr and Wheeler Hall

For more details go to: http://ies.berkeley.edu/cbs/scottishromanticism/conference.html

Writing the History of the Psychological Subject in Twentieth-Century Britain
Mathew Thomson , Dept. of History, University of Warwick

This paper reflects on the challenge of writing a history of the nature and impact of psychological thinking in twentieth-century Britain: Psychological Subjects  (Oxford University Press, 2006). It sets the study in relation to previous historiography and outlines its main ambitions, sources, and conclusions. It also discusses unresolved difficulties. Finally, it sets the study within the context of an emerging historiography that might be seen as constituting a psychological turn in the writing of modern British history.

Thomson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, where he has taught modern British history since 1998. He is also a member of the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick, serving as Director of the Centre in 2005-6.

He has written The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, 1870-1959 (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2006). He is now working on two new projects: an intellectual biography of the writer and popular social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905-85) and a study of the landscape of the child in post-war Britain.

Social Science Research on Stem Cell Science: A View from the UK
Dr Steven Wainwright & Dr Clare Williams
King’s College London, University of London

In this paper we outline some aspects of the current state of UK social science research on stem cell science. We begin with an overview of the Economic & Social Research Council Stem Cell Initiative (ESRC SCI), which will invest some £3 million in this field between 2005-2008. We then turn to a brief overview of our own research programme, and our current ESRC SCI interdisciplinary research on the scientific, medical, social and ethical issues around embryonic stem cell research and treatment in the fields of diabetes and liver disease (and especially liver cell and islet cell transplantation). This research explores how a new biomedical technology may be encouraged or prevented from diffusing from ‘bench to bedside’. In the final part of the paper we focus on one element of this research. We report on how biomedical scientists, in both the UK and the USA, view the scientific literature and their own experimental research in the emerging field of human Embryonic Stem (hES) cell research. We focus on the genetic manipulation of stem cells to make specialised (beta) cells as a potential cure for diabetes. We draw on Gieryn’s notion of boundary work as an analytical motif, and suggest this is a productive way to theorise boundary crossings in the shifting landscapes of expectations in the field of new medical technologies. We argue that initial expectations of a revolution in regenerative medicine have been damped down by the difficulties of making insulin producing pancreatic beta cells from stem cells. We contend the consequent shifts in expectations has led to the emergence of other more radical experimental strategies (such as using oncogenes) in the search for potential cures for Type-1 diabetes. In conclusion, we argue that regenerative medicine is a fruitful example of the shaping of contested biomedical landscapes and we contend that embryonic stem cells are a productive case study of the interactions between science and society.

Dr Steven P. Wainwright, King’s College London, Senior Lecturer, Division of Health & Social Care Research, University of London

Dr Clare Williams, King’s College London, Reader in Social Science of Biomedicine, Division of Health & Social Care Research, University of London

September 26, 2006, 4 pm, Moses Hall 201

Co-sponsored by Science & Technology Studies Consortium, UCB

CBS Fourth Annual Fall Reception
Join us for drinks and hors d’oevres to celebrate the academic year!

September 27, 5pm-7pm, Women’s Faculty Club

Aztecs and Earthmen: Declining Civilizations and Dying Races at the Victorian Freakshow
Nadja Durbach, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Utah

In 1853 a new act appeared on the freak show circuit in Britain under the title “the Aztecs.”  “The Aztecs” sparked considerable interest among scientists and the general public in the 1850s not merely because their exhibition fed the desire for glimpses of exotic others.  Rather, this act also served as an object lesson in the decline of civilizations and the extinction of inferior races.  As such it helped to articulate mid-Victorian Britain’s understanding of its own position vis-à-vis other empires, peoples, and civilizations.  For, “the Aztecs,” advertised as the last two specimens of a great civilization now extinct, were exhibited just two years after the Great Exhibition promoted Britain to itself and to the world as the pinnacle of industrial prowess, national progress, and imperial might.  “The Aztecs” thus served as a cautionary tale of degeneracy, decline, and the end of civilization, but at the same time threw into stark relief the many reasons why imperial Britain was destined to evolve, expand, and ultimately endure.  In the 1850s, “the Aztecs” functioned as living proof of new racial theories that justified colonial expansion and ultimately the decline and disappearance of indigenous peoples that accompanied British settlement of new territories.  That the act survived for half a century indicates the enduring appeal of this narrative, but also mirrors growing concern in Britain about its own potential for decline.  By the 1880s and 90s anxieties over “national efficiency” and “race deterioration” had become central to debates over domestic and imperial policies. In the final decades of the nineteenth century then, “the Aztecs’s” act remained popular precisely because it preyed on Britain’s own national insecurities, offering tangible evidence of degeneration, and thus serving as a sensational warning of the potential for even the greatest civilization to go the way of the dodo.

Durbach is a Visiting Associate Professor in the History Department and the Center for British Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907, was published by Duke University Press in 2005.  She is currently completing a book about the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British freak show.

October 5, 2006, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

Co-sponsored by the Dept. of History.

MUTINY: ASIANS STORM BRITISH MUSIC
Directed by Vivek Bald; Produced by Claire Shanley & Vivek Bald

FILM SCREENING AND TALK
(Free Admission)

Featuring Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, DJ Ritu, Talvin Singh, Fun^Da^Mental and many others....

The director, Vivek Bald will be present to speak about the film and answer questions after the screening

Combining music documentary and social documentary, MUTINY: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian music in 1990s Britain focusing particularly on the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Shot independently on digital video over the course of seven years, MUTINY features Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Fun^Da^Mental and a host of other British musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent, presenting these artists and their music at extreme close range. Through its dynamic mix of live performances, candid interviews and seldom-seen archival footage, MUTINY presents the story of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s, defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation became some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents' cultures with electronica, hip-hop, reggae and punk and producing unique and powerful new sounds.

More info: http://www.mutinysounds.com/film/

About the Director: Vivek Bald is a New York based documentary filmmaker and electronic musician who has been one of the key figures in NYC's South Asian cultural scene over the past fifteen years. In addition to Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music, Bald's film work includes Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994), which documented the lives, experiences, and activism of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City and Bengali Harlem (in production), which uncovers the hidden history of a group of Bengali Muslim men who jumped ship from British merchant marine vessels in New York in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s and settled among Harlem's Puerto Rican and African American communities.

October 11, 2006, 6pm, 141 McCone Hall

Co-sponsored by Center for British Studies, Center for South Asia Studies, Asian American Studies Program, Department of English, ASAPA

Industrialisation, Measurement and Revenue in Eighteenth Century Britain
Will Ashworth , University of Liverpool

The British Industrial Revolution is traditionally seen as a prime moment when knowledge, the arts, and manufactures combined in a powerful manner. This talk does not challenge the importance of these themes, but claims that the more mundane role of state regulation was, perhaps, of much greater significance. In 1700 England/Britain had very little industry. Within the space of 100 years, through a system of tariff protection and nurturing, it had quickly industrialised. Having a sound manufacturing base was crucial to eighteenth century revenues with 56 percent of all state income coming from the excise by the Seven Years War (1756-63). The excise pursued two objectives: Firstly, it was intended to nurture English backward industries to improve their products to meet continental and illicit rivals (superior choice and the black market obviously lost the state a considerable sum of money). And, secondly, it had to overcome rival calculating strategies. The eventual method and form of gauging established a correlation between the product, its quality and the revenue demands of the state. This frequently required both the space of production and the actual product to be reconfigured to meet the criteria of the excise's form of measurement. As this talk will show this was a contested, mutable and ambiguous process.

October 16, 2006, 4 pm, 140 Barrows Hall

Co-sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley) and the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)

Mrs. Henry Hobhouse Goes to War: Mother Love and the Politics of Conscience in WWI Britain Seth Koven (Dept. of History, Rutgers)

Is militant patriotic motherhood compatible with a commitment to safeguarding the rights and dictates of conscience in time of war?  Koven explores how and why the patriotic wife of a great landed gentry magnate and mother of three officer sons on the Western front, Mrs. Henry Hobhouse, became Britain's most effective defender of the rights of conscientious objectors during World War One.  In seeking to love and protect her frail oldest son Stephen from dying in prison as Britain's most celebrated conscientious objector, Mrs. Hobhouse assembled a lobby of powerful supporters across the political spectrum -- from Bertrand Russell and John Galsworthy to Jan Smuts and Alfred Milner. She embarked on a remarkable public and private campaign that threatened to bring Lloyd George's war cabinet to a halt until her son was freed from prison.  Koven shows how one mother's devotion to her Christian pacifist son transformed public debate about conscience in wartime Britain.

October 16, 2006, 4pm, 3335 Dwinelle Hall

An Archival Love Story: The Match Girl and the Heiress in Early Twentieth Century Britain
Seth Koven (Dept. of History, Rutgers)

October 17, 2006, 5pm, 4104 Dwinelle Hall

Sponsored by the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond Working Group

The Reasons for Ireland’s Economic Miracle and its Unfinished Business
Paul Sweeney, Economic Advisor to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and author of books on the Irish economy and business

Paul Sweeney explains how Ireland, one of the poorest European countries, soared to become one of the richest economies in the world in just 16 years. It moved from mass emigration to become a magnet for job seekers, especially those from Central Europe. Since 1990, the number of net new jobs grew by a staggering 80 per cent, possibly the fastest job creation of any country in the world. And real incomes for workers rose by 50 per cent in the 10 years to 2005.

Sweeney is the author of the first book on Ireland’s economic miracle, the Celtic Tiger, Ireland’s Economic Miracle Explained. This was followed by another book on the Celtic Tiger and many newspaper articles. Sweeney is the Economic Advisor to the Irish trade union centre, the Irish Congress of Trade unions, which plays an important role in Ireland’s unique form of social partnership.

October 18, 2006, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

Sponsored by the new Irish Studies International Speaker Series. Co-sponsored by Center for British Studies, Consul General of Ireland, Western Institute for Irish Studies, Department of History, Celtic Studies.

Science and Satire in Early Modern England
Mordechai Feingold , California Institute of Technology

Modern scholars are cognizant of the acute need felt by members of the Royal Society for a work of propaganda that could fend off criticism and galvanize new support for the frail new institution. However, most scholars failed to recognize that the most serious challenge came not from university critics, or religious conservatives, but from the prevalence of satire aimed at the Society in fashionable circles from its very inception. Undoubtedly, in part this vogue is attributable to the general temper of the age, which savored wit and a clever repartee. Yet it was the disparity between the seemingly ludicrous scientific activities of the Fellows on the one hand and the grandiose rhetoric concerning the long-term significance and utility of their endeavors on the other, which provoked such a profusion of satire. My lecture will attempt to address the nature of the satirists¹ hostility to the new science, and the effect of such satires on the practice of science.

Co-sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley) and the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)

When All Intellectual Property was Theft: The Nineteenth-Century Assault on Patenting and Copyright
Adrian Johns, University of Chicago

We are all familiar with the loud and bitter conflicts over intellectual property that command attention in today's realms of digital media and biotechnology. Because these are proclaimed to be revolutionary fields, we often assume that the conflicts themselves are unprecedented. This is false. In fact, they inherit concepts, convictions, and arguments from a nineteenth-century crisis of patenting and copyright that was at least as profound as our own, and that took place at an equally pivotal moment in the history of the sciences. I aim to restore this prior crisis to the place that it warrants in our historical perceptions. Rival conceptions of science, industry, and imperialism were at stake in deciding its outcome. And when it came to an end, it left behind it the concept of intellectual property that has continued to prevail until our own day.

Co-sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley) and the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)

History, Historians, and Conservatism
Reba Soffer, Prof. of History, Emeritus at California State University, Northridge

I am interested in the nature, substance, and contents of small ”c” conservatism, not always associated with the Conservative Party, in 20th-century Britain from 1913 through the 1960s. This paper explores the assumptions underlying definitions of “conservatism” and my reasons for concentrating upon particular conservative historians as exemplars and shapers of conservative thought. Any attempt to grasp the meaning of ideas and the contexts in which they occur tends to be frustrating because ideas are intrinsically enigmatic. Concepts are embedded within amorphous traditions of analysis, judgment, and memory, especially in the study of political thought. Within any branch of historical study, the most satisfying, least distorted, most probable resurrection relies on eclectic, imaginative methods that are diverse and, occasionally, idiosyncratic. In testimonies to the reality of conservative ideas, different scholars have chosen very different methodologies to study those ideas. It seems to me that intellectual history and its sub-genre of historiography is especially rewarding in understanding and explaining British conservatism in the 20th century.

My exploration concentrates on two groups of historians who were self-consciously conservative.
The first group flourished in the interwar decades as committed conservative polemicists, while the second group although equally and deeply conservative, were essentially apolitical. In common the thinking and activities of both groups were demonstrably influential in defining and popularizing conservative ideas and their anticipated consequences. The subjects that they chose and the explanations that they provided for events reflected not only that particular historian’s interests but also the larger tendencies and controversies that animated their societies.

Reba Soffer, Professor of History Emeritus at California State University, Northridge, has written extensively about 19th and 20th-century British intellectual history. A Guggenheim Fellow and past President of the North American Conference on British Studies, she is the author of two prize-winning books, Ethics and Society in England.  The Revolution in the Social Sciences, 1870-1914  and Discipline and Power.  The Universities, History and the Making of an English Elite, 1850-1930 .   Her History, Historians, and Conservatism in the Twentieth Century is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

November 9, 2006, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

Co-sponsored by the Dept. of History.