January 13, 2004 - Evelynn Hammonds  Professor of the History of Science and Afro-American Studies - Harvard UniversityKane Hall, Room 120 at 7pm.

The Marginalization of Experience:  Women Scientists of Color in the United States

This lecture explores the ways in which the voices of women scientists of color have been marginalized in current efforts to improve the status of women and minorities in science.

Professor Hammonds’ research areas include topics in the histories of science, medicine and public health in the United States; race and gender in science studies; and feminist theory in the United States. Professor Hammonds is the author of Childhood s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). She co-edited with Barbara Laslett, Sally G. Kohlstedt, and Helen Longino, Gender and Scientific Authority (University of Chicago Press, 1996). She has published articles on the history of disease, race and science, African American feminism, African-American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS and analyses of gender and race in science and medicine. Her most recent article is “Gendering the Epidemic: Feminism and the Epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the United States, 1981-1999” which appears in Science, Medicine, and Technology in the 20th Century: What Difference Has Feminism Made? (2000). Professor Hammonds’ current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race in the United States. She is completing a history of biological, medical and anthropological uses of racial concepts entitled, The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850-1990. She is also completing the MIT Reader on Race and Gender in Science co-edited with Rebecca Herzig and Abigail Bass. Professor Hammonds was recently named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2003-2005) by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Hammonds has also been a Visiting Professor at UCLA and Hampshire College.

Professor Hammonds earned a Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University; an S.M. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S. in physics from Spelman College. She taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for ten years before coming to Harvard. While at MIT she served as secretary of the MIT faculty for three years and as a member of the Council on Faculty Diversity. She was the co-organizer of the Black Women in Academy Conference in 1994. This conference was the largest gathering of African-American women academics in the history of American higher education. She also served as the founding director of the MIT Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine. The first research institute of its kind dedicated to the study of diversity in the scientific and technical fields and related areas. She believes that few other Afro-Am scholars are studying the impact of science on the experience of blacks. She is at work on a book in which she quotes the late economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who declared as long ago as 1944 that "the concept of the American Negro is a social concept, not a biological one." Yet in medicine, public health, anatomy, physical anthropology, and biology, she finds, "the end of 'race' is not as close as some observers might have us believe."