Events for December 8, 2009
December 8, 2009
Matthew Shindell, University of California, San Diego
From the Small-Town Chapel to the Cathedrals of Cosmopolitan Science: Harold C. Urey, Religion, and Isotope Chemistry
Chemical Heritage Foundation | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
This talk will consider Urey’s religious upbringing in the Brethren Church and his lifelong struggle with religious ideas. Although Urey became an atheist early in life, his work as a public spokesman for science indicates that he carried many of these ideas (and perhaps a rural attitude toward morality and family life) into his later life and incorporated them into his understanding of science’s ideal role in public and political life. Because he participated in the great demographic shift of the 20th century from rural to urban life, a study of Urey’s life and career promises to illuminate the effects that this change in lifestyle, along with participation in more cosmopolitan scientific circles at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago, may have had on the development of the 20th-century “scientific conscience.” I argue that Urey’s biography is thus an opportunity to analyze, question, and refine the presumed secularization of American society and science during the 20th century.
Matthew Shindell is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently writing a dissertation concerning the life and career of the American physical chemist Harold C. Urey. This dissertation has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the UCSD Science Studies Program.
December 8, 2009
Rosamund Purcell
Vegetable Lambs and Elephant Birds: Classifying the In-Between
Friends of the Library, Bryn Mawr College | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: Carpenter Library 21, Bryn Mawr College
Information: 610-526-6576 or SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.
Rosamond Purcell’s extraordinary photographs and installations of natural history specimens have been featured in numerous books and exhibitions that explore the interaction of art and science. Her work includes three books done in collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould, and an exhibition, “Two Rooms,” which featured a reconstruction of a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities. Her most recent book is Egg and Nest (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Some reoccurring themes in Purcell’s work include the drive to collect and classify, the decay of objects and beings, and the fluid boundaries between art and science. Her work has ranged from examining natural history collections, photographing disintegrating game dice in Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck with Ricky Jay (Quantuck Lane, 2002), exploring a junkyard belonging to an eccentric antiques dealer for Owls Head (Quantuck Lane, 2003), and recreating the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th-century Danish scholar Ole Worm. Running throughout these works is the artist’s interest in personal and scientific collections, and the choices of display and categorization which are manifested in them.
The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has written, “Rosamond Purcell is one of the great photographers. She has captured the history of objects by photographing them in romantic decline – books scourged by worms, petrified food-stuffs, biological specimens gone wrong, the inexorable entropic winding down of everything.”
Following the lecture there will be a reception and viewing of the exhibition “Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the ‘Origin of Species’ “ in the Rare Book Room of Canaday Library.
The lecture and exhibition are sponsored by the Friends of the Library. The exhibition is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Rare Book Room in Canaday Library, through February.