This dissertation tracks a series of literary interventions into scientific debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how the realist novel generated new techniques of description in response to pressing philosophical problems about agency, materiality, and embodiment. In close conversation with developments in the sciences, writers such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner portrayed human agency as contiguous with rather than opposed to the pulsations of the physical world. The human, for these authors, was not a privileged or even an autonomous entity but a node in a web of interactive and co-constitutive materialities. Focused on works of English fiction published between 1870-1920, I argue that the historical convergence of a British materialist science and a vitalistic Continental natural philosophy led to the rise of a dynamic realism attentive to material forces productive of “character.” Through the literary figure of character and the novelistic practice of description, I show, turn-of-the-century realists explored what it meant to be an embodied subject, how qualities in organisms emerge and develop, and the relationship between nature and culture more broadly.

This thesis focuses on the commercialization of Chinese medicine in the post-Mao era, from 1977 to 2014. It looks at its social and environmental impact on local rural areas.

Today’s Chinese ethno-nationalism exploits nativist ancestral claims back to antiquity to legitimize its geo-political occupation of the entire territory of modern China, which includes areas where many non-Han people live. It also insists on the inseparability of the non-Han nationalities as an integrated part of Zhonghua minzu. This dissertation traces the origin of this nationalism to the two major waves of scientific investigation in the fields of paleoanthropology and anthropology in the Chinese frontier during the first half of the twentieth century. Prevailing theories and discoveries in the two scientific disciplines inspired the ways in which the Chinese intellectuals constructed their national identity. The first wave concerns the international quest for human ancestors in North China and the northwestern frontier in the 1920s and 1930s. Foreign scientists, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Amadeus Grabau, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Davidson Black, came to China to search for the first human fossils. With the discovery of Peking Man, they made Beijing one of the most prestigious places for the study of human paleontology and popularized the evolutionary Asiacentric theory that designated Chinese Central Asia and Mongolia as the cradle of humans. Inspired by the theory and the study of the Peking Man fossils, Chinese intellectuals turned Peking Man into the first Chinese and a common ancestor of all humans. In the second wave, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, Chinese anthropologists like Rui Yifu, Cen Jiawu, Fei Xiaotong, and Li Anzhai made enormous efforts to inscribe the non-Han people of the southwestern frontier into the genealogy of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Their interpretations of the relationship between the Han and the non-Han and between the frontier and the center were influenced by various Western anthropological theories. However, their intensive studies of the southwestern non-Han societies advocated the ethnic integration and nationalization of China’s southwestern frontier. By linking the two waves of scientific endeavor, this dissertation asserts that the Chinese intellectual construction of modern Chinese ethnogenesis and nationalism was not a parochial and reactionary nationalist “invention” but a series of indigenizing attempts to appropriate and interpret scientific theories and discoveries. / History

My dissertation focuses on the notion of “gesture” as a somatic manifestation of psychological experience. This view of movement was elaborated by late 19th-century psychologists, who gave up the metaphysical notion of the soul in favor of neuro-physiological approaches to behavior. My study shows how the new scientific discourse penetrated into a broader cultural sphere, generating wide interest in the question how the body participates in and reflects affective and cognitive processes. I examine the modes of recording, representing and interpreting body movement as “expressive.” Based on archival materials and periodicals, I chart out avenues by which the ideas and methods of physiological psychology reached artists and writers – a task, which involves evaluating institutional practices and cultural-political trends that promoted interdisciplinary engagements. Ultimately, my study demonstrates how scientific discourse transformed techniques of film acting, prompted film industries’ inquiries into spectators’ physical reactions, and spurred literary scholars’ investigations of poets’ intonation and body movement. Yet, rather than positing the direct influence of science, I attend to a variety of ways in which writers and artists reinterpreted, defamiliarized and resisted the positivist outlook brought forward by physiological psychology. In Chapter 1, I show how Viktor Shklovskii drew on William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language to discuss Russian Futurist poetry as a “ballet for the organs of speech.” Chapter 2 analyzes Boris Eikhenbaum’s essays on poetic declamation by placing them in the context of the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word. In this organization, Russian Formalists worked alongside speech therapists and psychologists, using parlograph records of poetry performances. I compare their methods of registering poetic intonations to similar endeavors by American phoneticians Edward Scripture and R.H. Stetson. Chapter 3 traces the origins of Lev Kuleshov’s system of film actors’ training, arguing that his ideas emerged at the juncture of avant-garde theater, Pavlovian reflexology, and labor efficiency movement. Chapter 4 considers psycho-physiological approaches to film spectatorship, focusing on American and Soviet efforts to assess the emotional responses of filmgoers by photographing their facial reactions and registering changes in their vital signs.

This dissertation traces the formation, development, and deployment of arguments in favor of maternal employment from the years before World War II through the mid-1990s. Drawing on academic journals, popular periodicals, government documents, feminist writings, and the personal papers of researchers, policy makers, and activists, I argue that defenses of maternal employment have taken two main forms: economic and psychosocial. Although both types appeared throughout this period, the relative influence of each waxed and waned. As a result of the legacy of depression and war mobilization, economic arguments predominated in the immediate postwar years. After a decade of sustained national growth and the rising influence of psychology and sociology, however, arguments that stressed the psychological and social benefits of working mothers became increasingly prominent. The trend reversed again in the 1970s as the economy stagnated and hostility toward the welfare state mounted. The content of these two types of arguments also changed over time. Defenses of maternal employment that were rooted in and justified by the concept of shared national good in postwar America were reframed, by the 1990s, in terms of the economic self-interest of individual taxpayers and employers. During the 1940s and 1950s, proponents of maternal employment suggested that it helped expand the middle class and foster children’s independence. Feminists in the early 1960s drew on these claims to challenge hostility toward mothers in the labor force. By the early 1970s, they hoped that working mothers, by undermining traditional sex role socialization, would help remake, rather than preserve, society. At the same time, a new set of economic claims about working mothers, based in free market economic thought, began to gain strength. Politicians attacked welfare policies that enabled poor mothers to be full-time homemakers, while some feminists tried to persuade corporations that they had financial, rather than moral, incentives for hiring and retaining mothers. The vision of the broader social good that had characterized earlier arguments for maternal employment was gone. This helps explain why, even as rates of maternal employment skyrocketed, national work/family policies in the United States have remained the weakest in the developed world. / History

Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) was one of the largest and most widely circulated works of music theory in the seventeenth century. Although his reputation has waned over the centuries, Kircher was a leading intellectual figure of his day, authoring dozens of treatises on a multitude of topics and corresponding with scholars from around the world. Kircher’s central place within the world of learning resulted in a unique perspective on music theory and musical practice within the seventeenth century. The present study investigates a number of topics from Kircher’s music treatise and provides context from within the intellectual discourse of the time. The first chapter explores the seventeenth-century conception of encyclopedias, as well as the possible meanings associated with an encyclopedia musica, a novel term Kircher uses in his preface to describe Musurgia. Kircher’s attempt to describe all that was known about music, from highly speculative theories to the most utilitarian compositional tools, results in a complex blend of philosophical and practical elements. The middle chapters disentangle a few strands from this web of ideas, tracing the development of Pythagorean traditions and speculative music theory, as well as changing attitudes regarding empirical and occult methodologies in the early modern period. The final chapter concerns Kircher’s central goal for Musurgia, an algorithmic method based on the ars combinatoria and the emerging mathematical field of combinatorics that would allow anyone to compose musical settings, including the setting of texts in any poetic meter and in any language. Kircher’s arca musurgica—a device that contained tables to generate music—was in effect a distillation of the rules of harmony and counterpoint in the seventeenth century. Its underlying syntax of standard four-part progressions stands at the juncture between old and new ideologies of music theory and composition. / Music

Between 1813 and 1825 the Boston Manufacturing Company built a textile factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. Their factory is known for many important firsts in American industry, including the first commercially viable power loom, one of the first vertically integrated factories, and one of the first join stock financed manufacturing concerns. This successful factory became the direct model for the large textile mills built along the Merrimack River and elsewhere, iconic locations of American post-colonial industrialization. This dissertation looks at the early development and success of the Boston Manufacturing Company from a geographical perspective. It argues that in order build a successful factory, the company, its managers, and its workers, had to transform their "place": a notion that I investigate from an economic-geographical and anthropological point of view, moving from site, to landscape, to geographic networks. On these grounds, I show how the logic of the factory's development was both embedded in and shaping the emerging structures surrounding it, and how, in turn, the company’s later move to Lowell as one of the iconic industrial sites depended on its having successfully learned the business of "place-making" in its foundational Waltham decade. / History of Science

Carbon Technocracy argues for the centrality of fossil fuel energy to the making of global industrial modernity and to the emergence of East Asian technocratic imaginaries in the first half of the twentieth century. It advances the premise that coal and later oil enabled not only the transformation of human society’s material foundations, but also allowed for new kinds of publics and politics. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Abstract / History

1962. Tanganyika, East Africa. In a rural boarding school on the shore of Lake Victoria, dozens of adolescent girls began to laugh and cry uncontrollably. After trying to stem these mysterious breakouts for a month and a half, school officials gave up and sent everyone home. As the girls fanned out to their homes across the region, their behaviors spread too. Over 1000 people were affected. Families and governments enlisted all kinds of experts to give them a clue about what was going on. Eventually, an official diagnosis: mass hysteria. About two years after it began, the epidemic petered out. Nobody died. Everybody recovered. / History of Science