Meet Me for 4S 2017 in Boston and Hear Me Talk about Intersectionalities

The second conference I signed up for this year is 4S in Boston, August 30 through September 2. I organized what should be an excellent panel on: “Working with/against the Politics of Benevolent Neuroscience.”

Giulia Anichini, Marisa Brandt, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Oliver Rollins, and myself will give talks. Check out the panel abstract:

Continue reading

Meet Me at Cheiron 2017 and Learn about the Multiplicity of Neuro-Centrisms in Handedness Research around 1900

My paper “Left-Handed Complements: Forging Connections between Handedness, Speech Ability, and Brain Asymmetry around 1900” was recently admitted for presentation at Cheiron 2017, to be held at Mississippi State University in Starkville, MS, June 22 to 25.

The program is absolutely terrific!

Check out the (long) abstract of my own talk, to be recycled for Chapter 1 of my dissertation on anatomical theories of handedness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Continue reading

DH and Me

I’m in Indianapolis for HILT 2015. The digital-humanities workshop on “Large-Scale Text Analysis with R” sounded as if it can help me to finally surmount the obstacle of several thousands of neuroscientific articles I will have to analyze in order to continue my project on adult neurogenesis. Mark Algee-Hewitt from Stanford’s Department of English is an awesome instructor and thus far, I’ve understood everything and was even able to ask a not-so-stupid question during the first session. (Why does R return “character” when I ask about the class of a vector whose contents are characters—and not “vector”?)

I know I promised to continue this post a long time ago—odds are that it will happen soon.

CfP and Invitation: “Sorting Brains Out,” University of Pennsylvania, Sept. 18–19, 2015

Please spread the word about “my” conference, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science, Sept. 18–19, 2015: “Sorting Brains Out: Tasks, Tests, and Trials in the Neuro- and Mind Sciences, 1890–2015.” Please publicize this announcement as widely as possible via faculty and grad student listservs, weblogs, newsletters, etc.

We will have graduate student and postdoctoral presentations on Friday. The list of confirmed speakers for Saturday includes Dr. Cathy Gere (University of California San Diego), Dr. Katja Guenther (Princeton University), Dr. Nicolas Langlitz (The New School), Dr. Emily Martin (New York University), Dr. Francisco Ortega (Rio de Janeiro State University), Dr. Tobias Rees (McGill University), and Dr. Matthew Wolf-Meyer (University of California Santa Cruz). All visitors are welcome to listen and discuss with us on both days.

Graduate students or postdoctoral scholars wishing to participate in the Friday sessions should submit an abstract of no more than 400 words to pennbrains2015@gmail.com by May 31, 2015. With your abstract submission, please indicate if you need any form of special accommodation.

If you have any questions, refer to the more detailed call for papers and/or contact us at pennbrains2015@gmail.com.

“A Critical Moment”: Sex/Gender and Brain Science Conference @ UCLA, 10/23–24

Here is a conference announcement I should have shared with you months ago: the Foundation for Psychocultural Research at the University of Californa in Los Angeles (FPR-UCLA) is hosting a conference titled “A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersection of Culture, Brain, & Behavior” this October, Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th.

Here is the announcement: Continue reading

HSS 2014 Brain Panel on Twitter

HSS 2014 was a phenomenal conference, and I have to admit that I liked my own panel best. My fellow panelists contributed fascinating papers and were just the nicest people to learn from (and with). It was a hitherto unprecedented opportunity to talk brains for me, having five brain papers on the same panel. We saw that several topics kept coming up (such as the economization of brains or minds and the animal/human divide, for instance). I gave you the panel information before; here is what made it to Twitter: Continue reading

Upcoming Talk at the HSS Annual Meeting

Join me and many other scholars in history of science / STS for the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Chicago, Nov. 6–9. I will be presenting new insights into my ANG project of which I will provide a summary here as well. But even more important than my talk is the rest of my panel (in this case “my” in two meanings of the word, since I am both the organizer and a presenter): Continue reading

There WAS Plasticity in Brain Sex Difference Research!

JAS-Med 2014 at Baltimore was a fantastic conference. The papers were of really high quality, the talks engaging, and the attendees kind and curious.

As you may have assumed already, I presented parts of my research project on the intersection of adult neurogenesis (ANG) research and the neuroscientific quest for sex/gender differences in brains. As mentioned earlier, it is puzzling to read the standard account of ANG history—or, more broadly, of brain plasticity—and then realize that none of these ideas of malleable brains have had influence on rigid neural and social sex/gender classifications, as Rebecca Jordan-Young, Catherine Vidal, Cordelia Fine et al., and others argue. Continue reading