Book Talk: Christa Kuljian & Evelynn Hammonds

Evelynn Hammonds and Christa Kuljian will be in conversation about Kuljian’s book Our Science Ourselves, which tells the story of a trailblazing network of women scientists in the Boston area in the 1970s, 80s and 90s including Hammonds, Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women’s movement, and organizations like Science for the People and the Combahee River Collective, they began to develop feminist and anti-racist critiques of science. The book tells the origin story of feminist science studies, and also illustrates how engaging with these critiques is often difficult for many women scientists, including Nancy Hopkins, initially a “reluctant feminist.”

Christa Kuljian is a historian of science, science writer, and the author of two previous books – Sanctuary and Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins (both published with Jacana Media). Darwin’s Hunch was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Originally from the Boston area, Christa has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for over 30 years. She is a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University. In addition to her undergraduate degree in the History of Science from Harvard, she holds a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton (1989) and an MA in Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand (2007). 

Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. In 2023-2024 she was the inaugural Audre Lorde Visiting Professor of Queer Studies at Spelman College. Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race, gender and sexuality in the histories of medicine, science and public health in the United States; black feminist and queer theory and the history of disease and race.

 Please note: one lucky attendee will win a copy of Our Science, Ourselves. You can pick up your raffle ticket at the event. Good luck!

This event is co-sponsored by the Public Science Project, the Center for Humanities, the History department, the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies department, the Africana Studies Certificate Program, and the Center for the Study of Women and Society.