The Department of History

Upcoming 2009-10 Horning Lectures

Check back for details on the upcoming 2009-10 Horning Lecture Series, "Translation: Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures."

Past 2008-2009 Lectures

Themes in the Humanities: Understanding, Ethics, Language, and Culture

Professor Luft will talk about his research interests in ways that highlight themes he hopes to explore in future conferences, symposia, and lectures for the Horning Endowment in the Humanities. He will begin with a few remarks about the Horning Endowment and the place of the humanities in a research university, and then discuss three main themes: the relationship of the natural sciences to ethics and the humanities, the significance of translation in relation to science and modern culture, and the significance of German culture for Austrian history and contemporary Europe.

David Luft joined the OSU History Department in the fall of 2008 as Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professor in the Humanities. He is the author of Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880–1942 (University of California Press, 1980). He is currently working on a history of Austrian intellectual tradition and a translation edition of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essays on politics and culture. Luft has received numerous awards for teaching and scholarship, and has a PhD from Harvard University.

The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities is housed in the Department of History and its activities are organized and coordinated through the department. Events are free and open to the public

Do animals have a history—and why should we care?

While animals have always been a part of human history, are they participants in that history? Do they have a history of their own? How do we write a history of creatures who cannot narrate their own story? In particular, how do animals enter the narrative of the history of science? This talk will examine the meanings of human, humanism, and the humanities as well as the meaning of history and histories, written and unwritten. The possibility of a history of animals gains credence by examining the possibility of history itself.

Anita Guerrini is Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at OSU. She was educated at Connecticut College, Oxford University, and Indiana University, where she received a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from the US and abroad. Her most recent book is Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (2003). She is currently working on two projects: animals in the Scientific Revolution (focusing on Paris in the era of Louis XIV) and the role of history in present-day ecological restoration.

The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities is housed in the Department of History and its activities are organized and coordinated through the department. Events are free and open to the public.

Charles Darwin, The Man & The Myth

Thursday, February 5, 2009
Memorial Union, Room 109, 4:00 p.m.
Mott Greene, University of Puget Sound

There is an actual historical person named Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday we celebrate on February 12, 2009. There is also a great mythological figure, a culture hero (and villain) named Charles Darwin, whose birthday we will celebrate on November 24, 2009. Both of these Darwins are real, and both play important roles in the technical literature of contemporary evolutionary biology. In the broader cultural debate about the place of humankind in nature and the source of order in the universe, it is the mythical Darwin who plays the lead, while the real Darwin plays a supporting role, and sometimes just a cameo. This talk is about both Darwins, and their very different contributions to modern evolutionary, philosophical, and religious thought.

Mott Greene is the John Magee Professor of Science and Values at the University of Puget Sound. He is the author of Geology in the Nineteenth Century, Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity and a forthcoming biography of Alfred Wegener, the theorist of continental drift. He has recently published an article analyzing the genre conventions of scientific biography, with principal attention to Darwin.

The Post-Darwinian Natural Theologies of Asa Gray and Charles Kingsley

Friday, November 20, 2009
Memorial Union, Room 208 (La Raza Room), 4:00 p.m.
Piers Hale, University of Oklahoma

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) provoked both enthusiasm and opposition. Among those who were the most enthusiastic about Darwin’s work were two men who attempted to reconcile selection with their faith, seeing it as God’s chosen method of creation. The Harvard botanist Asa Gray debated his post-Origin Natural Theology with Darwin in a lengthy correspondence, although ultimately Gray could not come to terms with the contingency at the heart of Darwin’s view of selection. However, the Anglican theologian Charles Kingsley—Chaplain to Queen Victoria and author of that most evolutionary of children’s fairy tales, The Water-Babies (1863)—argued that it was in these very contingencies that a Darwinian worldview made room for the agency and free will which were central to his own personal, and very Victorian, faith.

Piers Hale is Assistant Professor of the History of Modern Science in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. He teaches classes on the social history of the life sciences, and is particularly interested in the impact of evolutionary thought and our varied responses to it. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Glamorgan in Wales and master’s and doctoral degrees at Lancaster University in England. He is currently writing a book with John Beatty (Philosophy Department, University of British Columbia) on Charles Kingsley and The Water-Babies.

Watch a video of Hale at the Dispersal of Darwin website.

Horning Visiting Scholar: John Beatty

Evolutionary Contingency and Its Broader Significance, from Charles Darwin to Stephen Jay Gould 

In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould posed the following thought experiment: If we could rewind the tape of life back to some point in the past, and then push “play,” would things turn out as before? Gould argued that we would get a different outcome every time. Beatty’s three lectures will address the idea of evolutionary contingency, from Darwin to Gould (and beyond), and also some of the broader scientific, theological, and moral issues that have been raised in connection with this sort of unpredictability.

John Beatty teaches history and philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the theoretical foundations, methodology, history, and socio-political dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology. He is a coauthor of The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Charles Darwin: “The Details Left to Chance”

Tuesday, April 14, 4:00 p.m.
Memorial Union, Journey Room

The Water-Babies (1862): An Evolutionary Parable

Thursday, April 16, 4:00 p.m.
Memorial Union, Journey Room

Stephen Jay Gould: “Replaying Life’s Tape”

Friday, April 17, noon
Memorial Union, Journey Room

The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities is housed in the Department of History and its activities are organized and coordinated through the department. Events are free and open to the public.

American Oceanography at Mid-Century

May 14-15, 2009
Joyce Powell Leadership Center,
Memorial Union

In 1959 Oregon State University founded its Department of Oceanography. Oceanography originally developed from postwar military interests, but it soon became a broadly interdisciplinary field which combined biological, geological, and physical study of the world’s oceans. In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the OSU department—now the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—the participants in this conference will look at the development of the field in the crucial early years of the 1950s and 1960s.

This conference is presented by the Horning Endowment in the Humanities and the Department of History, and is co-sponsored by the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

Thursday, May 14
4:00–5:00 p.m.
Keynote speech, Naomi Oreskes, UC San Diego
“The Crucial Experiment That Wasn't: Acoustic Tomography of Ocean Climate”
                                           
5:00–6:30 p.m.
Public Reception

Friday, May 15
9:00–9:30 a.m.
Introduction and welcome:  Anita Guerrini
Opening remarks:  John Byrne

9:30–10:15 a.m
Craig Biegel, Florida State University
“A Visionary at Work—Wayne V. Burt, the Early Years at Oregon State University”

10:15–11:00 a.m.
Keith R. Benson, University of British Columbia
“The ‘Upwelling’ of Biological Oceanography at Oregon State University”

11:00–11:15 a.m.
Break

11:15 a.m.–noon
Eric L. Mills, Department of Oceanography, Dalhousie University
“The Abyss: Resurrecting Deep-Sea Biology in the Mid-Twentieth Century”

noon–12:45 p.m.
Helen M. Rozwadowski, University of Connecticut
“How the Sea Became a Frontier: The Metaphorical Context for Oceanography in the 1960s”

12:45–2:00 p.m.
Lunch break

2:00–2:45 p.m.
Ronald Rainger, Texas Tech University
“Diverging Trajectories: Columbus Iselin, Roger Revelle, and the Impact of World War II on American Oceanography”

2:45–3:30 p.m.
Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Clemson University
“Gaming World War III at Lowestoft: Marine Scientists and Post-Thermonuclear Survival”

3:30–3:45 p.m.
Break

3:45–4:30 p.m.
Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick, UC Santa Barbara
“Is There Surf? Wave Measurement and Wave Riding”