We are pleased that Dr. Nayanika Ghosh will be joining “Sharing Ground” throughout the year as the seminar’s Humanist in Residence.
The Humanist in Residence position keeps with the seminar’s focus on the impact of humanistic approaches to academic freedom on university life and practice. Nayanika will participate in seminar meetings while also developing a year-long project on the theme of “Sharing Ground.” This project will use humanistic approaches to mediate between the often inert or sequestered materials of archives and lived experience, doing so in ways that invigorate practices of free expression in the university. Nayanika’s project will also be a collaborative effort with students, faculty, and potentially even the wider community. One of the seminar’s concluding sessions will be devoted to exhibiting Nayanika’s project.
We look forward to sharing more details as Nayanika’s project takes shape!
In the meantime, click the icon to learn more about Nayanika and her background.
Dr. Nayanika Ghosh recently completed her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University, where she specialized in the history and politics of modern biology, the history of scientific racism, the history of academic freedom, and science and social movements, particularly in the twentieth-century United States. She previously trained in social anthropology and the philosophy of biology.
Dr. Ghosh is currently working on her first monograph, tentatively titled The Backlash Against Radical Science. The Backlash Against Radical Science bridges critical scholarship on Social Darwinism and histories of academic anti-communism. Specifically, it examines the suppression of “radical science” in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s by expanding the archive of a nature-versus-nurture controversy called “the sociobiology debate.”
Dr. Ghosh has published journal articles and book chapters on science and gender, race and genomics, and the reception of biological determinism in the U.S. academy after the Second World War. Her work has been supported by the departments of English and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University, the American Philosophical Society, the Science History Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the departments of the history of science, and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Harvard University.
