UMaine’s 2010 Geddes Simpson Lecture April 28
Judy Round, 581-5104 round@maine.edu
Photo available upon request
ORONO – The Geddes W. Simpson Lecture Committee has selected Michelle Murphy, associate professor of history and the Institute of Women Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, to give the 2010 Geddes W. Simpson Distinguished Lecture.
The lecture is scheduled for Maine Day, Wednesday, April 28, at 3 p.m. in the McIntire Room of the Buchanan Alumni House. The public is welcome. The title of Murphy’s lecture is “Avertable Life, Investable Futures: A Cold War Story of Sex and Economy.”
The annual lecture was established in 2001 by the family of Geddes Wilson Simpson, a well-respected faculty member who began his career at UMaine in 1931, to support a lecture series through which speakers of prominence that have provided significant insight into the area where science and history intersect to speak on campus. The 2010 lecture will be the ninth in the series.
Michelle Murphy’s work considers the entangled histories of technoscience, environment, and bodies in the recent past. Her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers won the 2008 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. She is also the author of Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Feminism, Technoscience, and the Biopolitics of Cold War America (Duke UP, forthcoming) and co-editor of Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments. Her current research project, The Economization of Life, explores the interlinked histories of efforts to govern and alter national economies and human biological futures. Murphy is a 2009-2010 Jackman Humanities Institute Research Fellow.