Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco with the University of California, Berkeley, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-02, Section: A, page: 0611. Adviser: Vincanne Adams.

This dissertation proposes the application of rarely-used epistemological and scientific lenses to the works of four authors spanning two centuries: Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Raymond Queneau, and Michel Houellebecq. Each of these novelists engaged closely with questions of science and epistemology, yet each approached that engagement from a different scientific perspective and epistemological moment. In Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, limits of determinism and experimental method tend to demonstrate that there remains an inscrutable yet guided excess in the interactions between the protagonist Raphaël and his enchanted skin. This speaks to an embodiment of the esprit préscientifique, a framework that minimizes the utility of scientific practice in favor of the unresolved mystery of vitalism. With Zola comes a move away from undefinable mystery to a construction of the novel consistent with Claude Bernard’s deterministic experimental medicine. Yet Zola’s Roman expérimental project is only partially executed, in that the Newtonian framework that underlies Bernard’s method yields to contrary evidence in Zola’s text of entropy, error, and loss of information consistent with the field of thermodynamics. In Queneau’s texts, Zola’s interest in current science not only remains, but is updated to reflect the massive upheaval in scientific thought that took place in the last half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. If Queneau’s texts explicitly mention advances like relativity, however, they often do so in a humorously dismissive manner that values pre-entropic and even early geometric constructs like perpetual motion machines and squared circles. Queneau’s apparent return to the pre-scientific ultimately yields to Houellebecq’s textual abyss. For Houellebecq, science is not only to be embraced in its entropic and relativistic constructs; it is these very constructs - and the style typically used to present them – that serve as a reminder of the abjection, decay, and hopelessness of human existence. Gone is the mystery of life in its totality. In its place remain humans acting as a series of particles mechanically obeying deterministic laws. The parenthesis that opened with Balzac’s positive coding of pre-scientific thought closes with Houellebecq’s negative coding of modern scientific theory.

<p> By the end of the nineteenth century, the momentum for the idea of a more practical education better suited to life in a modern, technological world brought the first educational reform movements in the nation. Concurrent reform efforts at the state and national levels influenced both the historical development of Earth science education and the status of the Earth sciences in New York State&rsquo;s secondary schools. Three themes received increasing attention: 1) the nature and college acceptance of the subjects in the secondary courses of study, 2) the time allocation for the subjects, and 3) the emergence and expectation of the incorporation of laboratory and fieldwork. These themes were also prevalent in discussions within the national committees that were meeting at the time. </p><p> The historical richness of educational reform efforts during the late 1800s and the early 1900s establishes an important foundation upon which the Earth sciences are grounded. To understand the influences that shaped the Earth science syllabus into its present form, and to establish a framework upon which recommendations for future curricular development can be made, an analysis of the origin and evolution of secondary Earth science is warranted. The research presented in this thesis explores the historical framework of the individual core Earth science topics (physical geography, geology, astronomy, and meteorology), beginning in 1865 with the introduction of the intermediate level physical geography Regents examination and ending in 1910 with the loss of astronomy and geology as accepted high school graduation courses. The chronological structure of this study is intended to establish a set of specific historical events that contributed to the present curricular structure of New York State&rsquo;s Earth science course.</p><p>

This dissertation tracks the exhibition design practices developed in and around the Independent Group (IG) from the late 1940s through the 1950s. A loose affiliation of artists, architects, and critics, the IG gathered at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in the early to mid-1950s to debate the aesthetic, socio-political, and techno-scientific forces of their present (key figures included Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson). Synthesizing science-fiction, Dada, theoretical biology, and cybernetics (among many other topics) within a single mode of research, IG members formulated a non-hierarchical model of the cultural “continuum” in discussions, presentations, and most importantly, collaborative exhibition designs. The dissertation contends that exhibition design provided the IG with a timely strategy for navigating the contradictory traditions of aesthetic and technical production that came together in Britain during postwar reconstruction, from interwar avant-gardes to emergent American technocracy. IG members realized that exhibition design was the one technique that could move fluidly between the phenomenological conditions of architecture and display and the technological networks of communication, image distribution, and scientific production structuring the “continuum.” The goal was to bring these circuits and spaces—gallery, factory, laboratory, office, home, cinema, television, street—to bear on bodily experience so they might first be lived, then studied and redesigned. Chapter 1 examines Hamilton’s Growth and Form (1951), arguing that the exhibition’s apparatuses for displaying images and models of organic processes materialized a looming shift in global power structures. Chapter 2 unpacks a “Brutalist” empiricism from Parallel of Life and Art (1953), a web of photographs of cultural and technical materials. Chapter 3 investigates Hamilton’s Man, Machine and Motion (1955), which was less exhibition armature than metallic machine of production. Chapter 4 considers IG participation in This is Tomorrow (1956), a collection of propositions for artistic integration. Here, the IG met spectators, not in the realm of bodily experience, but on the plane of fantasy. Chapter 5 examines Hamilton’s an Exhibit and Exhibit 2 (1957/59), proto-Conceptual projects testing whether forms of affect, play, and chance might be fabricated within production systems no longer requiring human operators. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation examines the development of graduate training in zoology at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges under E. L. Mark between 1873 and 1934. It focuses on the changing spatial, institutional, and intellectual relationship between the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Department of Zoology as a result of university-wide educational reforms that introduced teaching and research in the biological sciences to the curriculum in the nineteenth century. Part I examines the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s relationship to the growth of elective instruction in natural history. Debates between the museum’s director, Alexander Agassiz, Harvard’s President Charles W. Eliot, and E. L. Mark hinged on the uncertain role that the museum was prepared to play as a site for undergraduate teaching. The creation of the department as an administrative unit in 1890, and the subsequent organization of the Department of Zoology, changed the balance of power between Agassiz and Mark and sparked demarcation conflicts over what counted as a teachable form of zoology. Part II explores the scientific cultures of the Harvard and Radcliffe Zoological Laboratories. It addresses the laboratory as a physical site, a disciplinary space, a pedagogical tool, and a gendered social and scientific community. I reconstruct how Mark’s students experienced his idiosyncratic pedagogical system as part of their daily lives. A significant contribution of this dissertation is the examination of the Radcliffe Zoological Laboratory, a small room in the museum that Radcliffe College converted into a space for women pursuing zoological studies. Issues related to gender and debates about coeducation on campus reconfigured access to the practice of zoology, especially for Radcliffe graduate students. Part III follows Mark’s laboratory to the field where he co-founded the Bermuda Biological Station for Research in 1903. Mark adapted his pedagogical systems to a new political and scientific environment in colonial British Bermuda. There, graduate training was understood through overlapping discourses of amateur natural history and middle-class leisure. Establishing a biological field station in an unpredictable colonial climate took priority over resistance to coeducation. This inadvertently turned the Bermuda station into an important destination for women seeking fieldwork experience in the twentieth century. / History of Science

In Africa, the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, rapidly expanding industrial and extractive economies, uncontrolled economic growth, environmental and lifestyle changes, and the rising age of populations with better access to medicine have occasioned rising rates of cancer. Rwanda’s national cancer program has been hailed as a unique example of how to build clinical oncology into a public healthcare infrastructure. Using ethnographic data, interviews, and historical archives, I address three sets of questions: 1. What historical, economic, social, and political factors have shaped the development of the country’s cancer program? 2. How do local clinicians and patients experience cancer as a treatable chronic disease? And how is that experience affected by the development of a national oncology infrastructure and new biomedical technologies? 3. As an instance of the transnational private-public partnerships characteristic of global health interventions in postcolonial Africa, what successes, limitations, and challenges does this cancer program present for envisioning oncology programs elsewhere in the global south? What are the ethical, political, and epistemological stakes involved in different models of cancer care? This project contributes to a new chapter in medical anthropology, one focused on rising rates of cancer in contemporary Africa. I argue that Rwanda’s cancer project is an exercise in the construction of a new sense of sovereignty, rendered through the politics of life as onco-nationhood; that it is an effort to create a postcolonial polity whose citizen body is gifted care of a international caliber provided by a paternal state. In a critical moment of post-traumatic social reconstruction, national biomedicine is becoming the entity through which government seeks to fuse sovereign statehood and nationhood in the cause of a healthy Rwandan future. Theorizing this relationship holds at least one key to developing an anthropology of cancer in contemporary Africa. / Anthropology

This dissertation seeks to answer two overarching questions: what was “Western knowledge” in the nineteenth century, and how did it become a global knowledge form? I do so by sketching a transnational history of the networks and practices that moved “Western knowledge” into Japan, the first non-Western country to putatively “modernize,” from the period roughly preceding the Napoleonic Wars until the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. Using archival materials from four countries and in seven languages, I contend the following: 1) that “Western knowledge” globalized primarily through the form of cheap educational print, represented by the modern textbook, rather than through major canonical works; 2) that Japan’s access to and understanding of these textbooks was mediated by multiple sites of print production across South, Southeast, and East Asia; 3) that the constant mediation of these textbooks through circulation transformed “Western knowledge” into something utterly different by the time it reached Japan. The dissertation is thus both a rehabilitation of textbooks as dynamic epistemic tools, and a deconstruction of “Western knowledge” as a series of global movements and transformations in print, thereby transcending any easy binary of knowledge “Eastern” and “Western.” In the process, I intervene in ongoing debates in intellectual history, book history, and the history of science, bringing them together in a reevaluation of the history of modernity at large. Chapter 1 begins by examining the case of a popular Dutch educational periodical as it traveled from the Netherlands, through colonial Java, and into Japan. I highlight the material transformations undergone by books during the course of their circulation, and demonstrate how the integrity of “Western knowledge” was destabilized by the fragility of the physical artifacts that carried it. Chapters 2 and 3 then examine the role of Chinese port towns in the circulation of textbooks to Japan. In Chapter 2, I trace the movement of a British textbook for deaf students to Hong Kong then into Nagasaki. The function of textbooks may be to teach, but the globalization of textbooks is often, I argue, a story of how disparate audiences give radically different answers to the question of what content, exactly, is actually being taught. At the same time, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, there are also cases of unexpected convergence between ideologically opposed actors. Textbooks, for instance, functioned as a site of convergence between Christian missionaries in China, and the nominally anti-Christian shogunate in Japan. Chapter 4 switches narrative strategies to move away from textbooks themselves, and instead focus on the lives of key actors in the textbook economy. Specifically, I recover two forgotten figures of the early Meiji period instrumental to the history of textbook circulation: John Hartley, a British bookseller in Yokohama, and Jakob Kaderli, an itinerant Swiss adventurer and textbook author in Edo-Tokyo. Finally, Chapter 5 turns to mid- and late Meiji in order to examine why textbooks, despite their importance, vanished from the record of Japanese modernity, leading to the rise of a new paradigm of Western knowledge. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Abstract not available.

In a counter-argument to the invisibility of translators and of women in the history of science, this dissertation asserts the presence and examines the influence of a set of 5 female translators of scientific materials in England from 1650 to 1850. The translators are Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Somerville, Ada Lovelace, and Elizabeth Sabine. The source languages are French, Italian, and German. These five portraits (each of which includes biographical information on the translator and source text author, contextual features, and translation samples and commentary) are considered against two main backdrops: first, the image of the "invisible translator" prevalent in modern Anglo-American translation studies, and its superimposition on historical expectations of the translator for the period 1650--1850, and second, the changing face of science in the broad wake of the Scientific Revolution (i.e., the modernization and professionalization of science, the increased use of vernaculars in science communication networks, the rise of (scientific content in) the London periodical industry, topic shifts---from heliocentric cosmology, to applied and industrial processes, to the Earth-based sciences, and language shifts---from Latin to French and English, to German). In addition, two through-running translation phenomena are highlighted and discussed: translation as repatriation, and concurrent translation. Overall, the dissertation demonstrates that female translators of scientific materials have in fact existed in history, despite modern perception to the contrary, and despite a number of historical disadvantages against their rise to visibility and influence. On these two points, a rise, peak, and fall of translator visibility is seen, especially in line with changing opportunities for learned women, yet the influence of these translators in the dissemination of scientific thought remains clear throughout. Further strengthening these portrait findings, and encouraging future research, is an appendixed set of 20 additional women (translators and authors) in science.

The institutions of representation are the target of continuous reform and repair in the United States. This dissertation examines the concepts of representation that have been used to support both representational reform and the status quo. In examining these concepts, I argue that the breadth of the public discourse on representation has narrowed over time. This has been the result of changes in three ideas that constitute the concept of representation: human nature, community, and the purpose of government. The content and relative balance of these ideas shape the concept of representation over time and thus the character of representative institutions.