Dr. Erika Milam
Campus visit and presentation Thursday, April 25
Sewanee’s “Science, Society and the Archives” working group is thrilled to support a visit to campus by Dr. Erika Milam, who has been chosen as Scholarship Sewanee’s “25th Anniversary speaker” this year. Dr. Milam is a professor of history at Princeton who specializes in the history of the modern life sciences, including the ways in which scientists have used animals as models for human behavior. Milam's first book, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology, explored the history of evolutionary theory and the connections between biological investigations of reproductive and courtship behavior in animals and humans, from Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century to sociobiology in the 1970s. Her much anticipated new book, Creatures of Cain: the Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America, charts the controversy over instinctual aggression in defining human nature in the 1960s and '70s. A major focus of Milam’s work is also how the debates (and theories) that gained currency in this period informed and were shaped by race, class and especially gender norms. At Princeton she teaches courses on “Gender and Science,” has published on “Scientific Masculinities” and recently co-organized an international workshop focused on exploring the deep connections between social and scientific explanations of human diversity (“Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex and Human Nature”). Dr. Milam's presentation will be on Thursday, April 25 (time and place TBA).
