DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interview Hosted by Keith Woodhouse

In last year’s newsletter Gerry Cadava interviewed Melissa Macauley about the long tradition of historians leading interdisciplinary departments and programs on campus. That tradition continues, so this year we are talking with Lydia Barnett, Associate Professor of European History and the current director of the Science in Human Culture Program. 

Keith: How many times have you been director of the Science in Human Culture Program?

Lydia: First time. I’m in the 1st year of a 3-year term. I’m a long-time faculty affiliate of the program since I got here 10 years ago, but this is my first time directing it. So I’m just learning the ropes.

Keith: And how's it going this first year?

Lydia: It's a lot of work! But rewarding! There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of ins, a lot of outs. It's one of the things that makes the program robust—it has an undergraduate component, a graduate component, postdoctoral fellows, and then also faculty research, which mostly comes together around the lecture series. So I think that's one of the things that makes it kind of unique and great is that it has all those parts. But it's been a steep learning curve to figure out how all those parts go together and to stay on top of them. Luckily, we have a fantastic administrator—Janet Hundrieser—who knows the program backwards and forwards, and I definitely could not have done this without her.

Keith: You’ve been a faculty affiliate with SHC long before directing it. I'm curious if you have noticed any shifts in the sorts of subjects that SHC tends to focus on, whether in terms of Klopsteg lectures, or senior theses, or postdoctoral research. Are there certain things that used to be the focus, and certain things that the program has shifted to more and more in recent years?

Lydia: That's a really good question, and it actually makes me want to go back and look at the list of Klopsteg speakers and the titles of their talks for the last decade or so. I'm sure that there are trends that reflect either the concerns of people here or broader trends in the field. I think the one topic that has become more prominent over the last decade has been work related to climate and the environment. SHC has expanded its remit, partly due to people with History of Science or Science and Technology Studies training becoming more interested in doing things that touch on environmental history, environmental studies, climate history, the environmental humanities. And I think it’s also just part of the reality of accelerating climate change that has driven more interest among researchers, students, and the public.

Keith: That makes a lot of sense. I suspect, too, that if it hasn't happened already, there will probably be more and more computer and artificial intelligence related talks.

Lydia: I think definitely in terms of the postdoctoral fellows, we're getting more and more applications, and increasingly some of the strongest and most compelling scholarly profiles have been from young scholars working on questions around data and tech. One of our recent postdocs, Ben Lindquist, works on the history of computing and artificial intelligence and is now in a tenure-track job at MIT. Our two current postdocs both work on the history and the sociology of technology broadly conceived. Edisson Aguilar Torres works on technology from below, including small-scale water technologies in Latin America, and Pariroo Rattan works on digital technologies of microfinance and surveillance in contemporary India, the US, and Europe. And Eddison recently accepted an offer to join the History department at Berkeley! Congratulations Edisson!

I don’t think it's a coincidence that so many of our current and recent postdocs are looking at technology and society in different parts of the world. People just want to know and understand how technology is transforming our lives. Students want to know. We want to know! And it's great that we have folks like them to come in and tell us more about what that looks like and how to think about it.

Keith: Absolutely. Here's another tricky question: Is your sense that undergraduates come to Northwestern with too much faith in scientific knowledge and scientific understandings of the world, or too little?

Lydia: Hmm. That's a great question. I don't know!

Keith: Or maybe neither? I ask because, you know, I'm not a science studies person, but I know that science studies used to criticize what was seen as a hegemonic faith in scientific perspectives and these days has a somewhat different view, since there's greater and greater criticism of scientific research and understandings of the world from various quarters.

Lydia: I think that there is a greater understanding of the way that scientific knowledge systems are implicated in structures of power, how it can sometimes promote harm rather than good. Most people by now know about eugenics and the atom bomb and colonial science and unethical medical testing on Black and brown women and men in U.S. history. STEM practitioners themselves are becoming increasingly aware of this history and conscious about not repeating it. But a lot of the conversations that historians of science have had is how to keep doing this important research without necessarily shaking the public's or our students' faith in science or medicine, particularly in terms of a post-COVID demonization of vaccines, of life-saving medical interventions. And now, during the second Trump administration and the really radical and arbitrary defunding of STEM research programs, right? We all want vaccine uptake and vaccine R&D, we all want STEM funding to be restored at the NSF and the NIH. Past episodes of injustice doesn’t mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm actually not sure how undergraduates feel about it, but it makes me want to have a town hall specifically to ask them. Maybe that's what I'll do in the fall. “Do you have too much faith in science or too little?” And I think it might help to disaggregate science, technology, medicine, climate. I'm guessing that if you were to do a Pew research poll of Northwestern undergraduates or American undergraduates, you'd probably get really different answers depending on which one of those you looked at. I would guess that there is still probably pretty robust faith in scientific progress, which I think is probably also shared by researchers in science studies and STS. I think there is broad support for having a functional, robust public health system, but also a lot of awareness that—especially in the US context—that's really imperiled and not working very well currently.

I don't think anybody knows how to think about technology right now. I mean, there's definitely a spectrum from total all-in booster, to total doomer/techno-apocalypse, but I think most people probably fall somewhere in between.

And then climate and environment, I mean, nobody's feeling great about how climate change is going, particularly with the way that climate science and environmental protections have been eroded and undermined, especially in the last year or so. But again, I think there is among our students and the public still broad support, actually, for climate science research and evidence-based climate policy, and for environmental protections based on that research.

Finally I guess I’d just say that it’s a bit of a misperception that historians of science and other STS folks are only ever critical of science (and medicine and technology). We see our job as putting STEM in social and historical context. It’s like what art historians do for art. They’re trying to understand art in context, how it was shaped by different cultures and in different historical moments. That’s exactly what we’re doing. Nobody thinks that art historians hate art!

What do you think?

Keith: Well, I think it's really interesting that you pointed out how it might differ from issue to issue. But I think you're absolutely right. I mean, this is purely based on my own very thin anecdotal experience, but sometimes it feels to me that, oddly, there is more optimism and even boosterism for artificial intelligence among faculty than among undergraduates. I think a lot of undergrads are skeptical of artificial intelligence. They use it, but they're skeptical of it.

Whereas I've met—you know, in our department, there's a lot of skepticism as well—but I've met faculty in other departments who are very bullish on AI, even its use in the university. It’s an enthusiasm I do not share…

Lydia: Nor do I, but it reminds me of something that our colleague Daniel Immerwahr said at a panel that the Chabraja Center hosted about AI a few weeks ago, which was that potentially one of the reasons that historians are less excited and more skeptical about AI is that at least so far, it hasn't actually proved very useful for the kinds of research that we do, and it has definitely proved to be pretty anti-useful in the kinds of teaching that we do. And so that skepticism or bullishness might represent the very different kinds of teaching and research that happen across fields.

It's interesting to hear you say that that you find that undergrads are skeptical. I don’t have a great sense of how students are thinking about it and how they're understanding it, especially being caught up in a technological revolution when, unlike us, they don't really have much of a baseline to compare it. I mean, this technology emerged while they were in middle school or high school.

It seems like there’s an opening for historians of technology in particular to talk in a broad and public way about what it's been like to live through previous revolutions in digital technologies and communications technologies, and just the experience of using something daily but being kind of aware of living at a historical juncture, right? That’s something that historians of all kinds talk about and something that we could maybe talk about more broadly: what it is like to live through a period of significant and even transformative change? And as it happens, we have a Nobel Prize-winning historian of technological change on the History faculty—Joel Mokyr—who we are proud to call an SHC affiliate!

Keith: A future SHC symposium! So, among recent SHC directors—Paul Ramirez, Helen Tilley, Ken Alder, Lydia Barnett, and Ken was one of the program’s founders—it's really been mostly historians.

Lydia: Steve Epstein in Sociology has done at least one or maybe several stints as director. But yeah, it is true that it has largely been run by historians.

Keith: Is that just a tradition, and maybe a kind of path dependency, or is there a particular reason that our department is so interested in and committed to SHC?

Lydia: That’s a great question. I would imagine that some of it has to do with, as you said, the fact that Ken Alder was a foundational figure in the emergence of the program and has been a really dedicated participant even when he wasn't leading it. And maybe it also has something to do with the fact that the History Department has had a kind of critical mass of people who are working on science, technology, medicine, the environment, or some combination. Does that mean we're the department in Weinberg that has the highest concentration of faculty who are looking at STEM from the perspective of the humanities and the social sciences? I don't know.

SHC is an interesting program, right? I think the best way of defining it is that it's about humanistic and social scientific perspectives and methodologies used to understand science, technology, medicine, engineering, and environment in context. But often done by people who have backgrounds in the natural sciences. I'm pretty sure Ken has an undergraduate bachelor of science, and it's common for historians of science to have an undergraduate or even a postgraduate scientific degree, so it's really the most interdisciplinary you can get.

And maybe historians are just extra good at being interdisciplinary. I was reading the interview that Gerry did with Melissa last year, and that was Melissa's hypothesis about why historians are overrepresented in the leadership of other units, particularly other interdisciplinary units on campus.

Keith: Programs like SHC and Environmental Policy and Culture are smaller than departments. They have less clout, they have less institutional sway, but they're also I think nimbler, more adaptable, and arguably have a stronger sense of community, or at least can have a stronger sense of community. What is it like in your experience to straddle those two worlds—to be part of a large department and also direct a very small program that is interdisciplinary but that has a vibrant community attached to it?

Lydia: I think Science in Human Culture definitely benefits from having people who are really dedicated to the program and really want to see it thrive. But that's still different, I find, from the History Department, maybe just because in the department we're united by a sense of disciplinary identity, maybe because we're united by all being in the same building, because we see each other all the time at department meetings. There’s still a different sense of the History faculty as a group as compared to the Science in Human Culture faculty as a group, particularly because SHC, I believe, is unique in Weinberg in having zero designated faculty lines. So in a sense it's like an all-volunteer fire brigade. And that means that the volunteers are really dedicated, and that's wonderful, and I think it's the thing that makes the program as strong as it is. But yeah, it feels very different as a kind of constellation of people, the History Department and Science in Human Culture.

Keith: I'm always amazed, given how small SHC is, at the success of the Klopsteg lecture series. I've talked to faculty in other departments at other universities who know it well. They admire it and maybe some of them are surprised to arrive at Northwestern and realize that SHC is, you know, just has this one little office, and it isn't a big, sprawling program or department or anything.

Lydia: Right. I feel like Science in Human Culture punches above its weight class. I'm eternally grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Klopsteg. Actually a history graduate student, Sara Simon, with the help of one of the university archivists, Matthew Richardson, recently rediscovered some of the Klopsteg files that are in University Archives. Turns out there is a wealth of information about the Klopstegs and their original gift and about the history of the lecture series. So yay for librarians and archives and historians doing archival research! But yeah, I think it is one of the things that makes the program unique. It's one of the things that makes it kind of hold together. I think it's definitely a center of gravity. And I feel really lucky to play a part in convening it.

We'd love to get more undergrads to come, if any undergrads are reading this. I know this is mostly alums, and alums are also welcome. Please come alumni! If you're in the area, you would be so welcome.

Keith: Are there any other aspects of SHC that you think we should touch on or discuss that we haven't?

Lydia: Alright, can I read this into the record? I just found my notes from the Klopsteg files in University Archives, and I found the original conception of the Klopsteg lecture series was this:

From 1974: “that the series is intended to narrow the gap between the scientific-technological-industrial segment of society and the humanities,” which I think both is a nice description of the lecture series and of the remit of the program, as well as a work in progress and a worthy goal to continue to work towards.

Keith: I say mission accomplished.

Lydia: Yeah. We do what we can!

 

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