Author Interviews, ECR Prize

Interview: Freddy Foks, History of the Human Sciences ECR Prize winner, 2023

HHS Contributor

Stephen Farthing (1999); Historians of 'Past and Present' (standing: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm; Rodney Howard Hilton; Lawrence Stone; Sir Keith Vivian Thomas; seated: (John Edward) Christopher Hill; Sir John Huxtable Elliott; Joan Thirsk); National Portrait Gallery, London.

Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) was awarded the 2023 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, why were a particular group of social historians – your article focuses on four case studies: Keith Thomas, Peter Laslett, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm ­– in Britain drawn to social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s? Freddy Foks: There are two main reasons. The first was about anthropology and its ideas and status and the second was about what the historians wanted to do with those ideas. Laslett, Thomas and Thompson all wanted to explain that social change change wasn't just determined by economic change. By the 1960s social anthropologists in Britain had been making

arguments like that for decades. Not only that but it was a pretty high-status discipline with a lot of prestige in the academy. Some big names had published big ethnographies by the 1960s: Audrey Richards, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Victor Turner etc. Those are names that might even be familiar to some historians today. So the historians saw a prestigious discipline doing something they wanted to do: they didn't want to subscribe to an economically determinist account of history (apart from Hobsbawm, who I think we’ll talk about later in the interview). Anthropologists tended to analyse religion, economy, kinship, ritual etc. as part of a whole account of a society. That's what really appealed to the historians: this focus on the small scale and moving away from political elites. HHS: Why did Keith Thomas think that engaging with social anthropology might enable historians to break with ‘vulgar Marxism’? FF: In the early 1960s Keith Thomas was frustrated with colleagues who…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize

Interview: ECR Prize 2022 winner Harry Parker on the regional survey movement

HHS Contributor

Harry Parker (University of Cambridge) is this year’s winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and winning essay 'The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain'. Congratulations to Harry whose essay will be published in full in a future issue of the journal. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your PhD project ‘Popular auto-ethnography in Britain, c. 1870-1940’ and describe how this essay relates to that larger project? Harry Parker: The essay comes from what I think is probably going to be the third chapter of the thesis, which broadly looks at various attempts within the human sciences across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. I do that through looking at a series of surveying projects across the periods that enrolled non-specialists to become observers of their own culture. I begin in the

19th century, when anthropology in particular was more oriented towards the question of the origins and the composition of the national community. I look at one of the first large scale projects to try and attempt this, which was known as the ethnographic survey of the United Kingdom. As a component of that I’m particularly interested in folklore collection, which  was a major part of that project. I then look at the photographic survey movement, which was running more or less at the same time (around the 1890s). And then I jump ahead a bit to the interwar period to look at regional surveys, which seemed to absorb much of the energies that those earlier projects set loose. The other case studies are also focused on the interwar period and look at early attempts to do community studies. So that's the ‘auto-ethnography’ bit. The ‘popular’ bit comes from my training (if you can call it that) as…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Erik Baker on entrepreneurs, libertarians, ‘philanthrocapitalists’ and the Santa Fe Institute

HHS Contributor

"This exodus from the established world of government labs and universities is reconceptualized as a form of entrepreneurship: the scientists are striking out for themselves and they have their own new creative ventures that they're really committed to and they're going to work hard to get them off the ground."

Erik Baker (Harvard University) received a commendation in this year's History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his commended essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’. HHS: First of all, congratulations on your commendation in the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize, for your essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank’. To begin with, could you briefly introduce your dissertation on ‘The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: Creativity, Leadership, and the Sciences of Labor Discipline in the United States’ and explain how this article fits into that project? Erik Baker: Thanks and thanks again to the editors of HHS for the commendation - it's a real honour and thank you for taking the time to share this work. My broader dissertation project is about the history of what I call ‘entrepreneurial management.’ That strikes some people as a contradiction in terms. Typically we think of management and managers

as faceless, gray-suited technocrat types, and we tend to think of entrepreneurs as really dynamic with innovative startups etc. But the cultural figures who typify the entrepreneur category are themselves also bosses. If you think of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, these are people who are icons of entrepreneurship, but they're also executives who command increasingly large armies of employees. What I show is that since the early 20th century, management theorists have been interested in capturing this mystique that surrounds the entrepreneur, which seems to allow entrepreneurs to command attention, loyalty and legitimacy in a way that other kinds of managers don't. And they’ve sought to propagate that entrepreneurial spirit among the managerial ranks more broadly. The result, in the United States economy, is what I call ‘the entrepreneurial work ethic’. This comes from the claim that what makes entrepreneurs effective bosses is the fact that they themselves are committed to a creative project that energizes the…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Liana Glew on psychiatric paperwork

HHS Contributor

"We can't answer the questions about how bureaucracy operates without answering questions about the effects on people's lived experiences."

Liana Glew is this year’s co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to her about her research and her winning essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it. Liana Glew: Thank you for the honour of the prize. The essay examines paperwork from US psychiatric hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My purpose in this examination is to develop methods of reading that center patient agency and disability identity. The inspirations for piece were twofold. Firstly, it was inspired by a trip to the Oregon State Archives where they've done a really beautiful and careful job archiving this challenging history.

That's where a lot of the the material comes from. Second, it was inspired by a graduate seminar taught by Ebony Coletu, which is where I first started thinking critically about bureaucracy and paperwork. HHS: Before I ask more about the piece itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates to your research more broadly? LG: The article represents the third chapter of the dissertation, edited to stand on its own. Each chapter covers one genre of text about life inside asylums in the 19th and 20th century. So the first chapter is about fiction, the second about memoir-exposes which is a sort of hybrid genre that I've identified to talk about the journalistic and memoir pieces coming out around that time about life in an asylum. This third chapter covers the same paperwork material as this essay, then the fourth chapter is on archival patient writing.…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: What do we want? Simon Torracinta on Edward Tolman’s drive theory of wants

HHS Contributor

"Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions."

Simon Torracinta, PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale, is this year's co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his winning essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’. HHS: To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce Edward Tolman and say a little about what inspired you to write about him?   ST: Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in

making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States –  for several decades. I was initially drawn to Tolman’s work because of his particularly explicit theorization of drives. But I was surprised to find that, although he was one of the most influential psychologists of his day and he’s still cited in neuroscience research today, he has mostly been neglected by historians, besides the excellent biography by psychologist David Carroll. But as I hope readers of the article will see, much of his work speaks to core concerns in the history of the human sciences. Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions. HHS: Before I ask more about the article itself, I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize

‘Mothering in the Frame’ – an interview with Katie Joice

Hannah Proctor

"Mothering came to be seen as an origin story for social science... this this 'search for origins' also chimed with the need for a historical 'blank slate' after the war. There was a hope that the calibration of mothering would create a new generation of compassionate and pacifist democratic subjects."

Composite stills from Sylvia Brody’s Mother-Infant Interaction (1967) Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Katie Joice (Birkbeck) was awarded a special commendation in the History of the Human Sciences' Early Career Prize. We spoke to her about her essay 'Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67’, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal. HHS: Congratulations on your History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize commendation for your essay ‘Mothering in the Frame. To begin with I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it. Katie Joice: Thank you. The essay introduces readers to the different ways in which film was used by anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to study mother infant interaction in the post-war period. Historians have recently become interested in the concept of the pathogenic mother, but my specific focus is on how cinematic frame analysis, or microanalysis, enabled clinicians to classify and quantify mother-love. The essay begins with a discussion

of how mothers’ 'small behaviours', the everyday, repetitive acts that no-one notices, coalesce into a new and influential causal model for mental illness. I then go on to discuss four case studies: Margaret Mead’s work on child-rearing in Bali, Ray Birdwhistell’s body language research, Rene Spitz's studies of institutionalised babies, and Sylvia Brody's classification of mothering styles. All four of them used forms of microanalysis, but in different styles, and for their own ends. In terms of inspiration, I got interested in films about mothers and babies when I first joined the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck. I was researching the visual history of psychosis and came across Spitz's film, Grief, about the devastating effects of maternal deprivation. At that time memories of my own son's infancy were fresh in my mind, and I'd already done a lot of thinking about the invisible work that goes into creating subjects or 'making people'. I realised that our humanity is not…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ – interview with Danielle Judith Zola Carr, winner of History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Essay Prize

Hannah Proctor

"The approach that I take in the essay is part of my overarching method, which is to treat the history of science as intellectual history. The goal is not just to read the history of science alongside intellectual history, but to say we can do intellectual history within the sciences."

Experimental psychiatry team tests a protocol with a lab subject. Photo by Danielle Carr.

History of the Human Sciences is delighted to announce Danielle Judith Zola Carr (Columbia University) as the winner of the journal’s first Early Career Essay Prize for her essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Katie Joice (Birkbeck, University of London) was awarded a commendation for her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: Cinematic Microanalysis and the Pathogenic Mother, 1945-67’. Congratulations to both scholars. 'Ghastly Marionettes' was included in our Special Issue on Cybernetics, published in February 2020, guest edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby. We spoke to the author about the essay, Hannah Arendt, Cold War liberalism and the place of intellectual history within the history of the human sciences. HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Can you tell

us a bit about the piece? DC: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to publish with the journal. The essay actually originated as an early 2017 post-Trump piece, when I think everyone was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was my first time reading it, and I was struck by how infused the book is– especially in its last third–with a castigation of the Pavolovian imaginary of the human, and how that imaginary of a human determined by stimulus and response was equivocated with this new Cold War concept of totalitarianism. So I started looking into that realised that nobody seemed to have written about that specifically in relation to Arendt I think Arendt is a good figure to think with, because she encapsulates this emerging Cold War common sense– what many scholars now are starting to think about as Cold War liberalism. One of the questions in thinking about Cold War political ideology is this: What is…

Author Interviews

Circuits of Colonial Knowledge

The Editors

We hope that readers of History of the Human Sciences will take away from our special issue a greater appreciation for the sometimes unpredictable ways in which European concepts facilitated colonisation globally. We also hope that readers will see how the very processes of colonisation around the world shaped the development of European thought on humanity.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) in Lappish dress. Oil painting after Martin Hoffmann. Credit: Wellcome Collection CC-BY

For the October 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, the editors are delighted to present a special issue edited by Bruce Buchan (Griffith University) and Linda Andersson Burnett (Linnaeus University) - "Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge." Here, Chris Renwick speaks to to Bruce and Linda about what the stakes of the issue - and draws out some of its central contributions. Chris Renwick (CR): "Knowing Savagery" is a brilliant special issue for History of the Human Sciences. It brings together a wide range of topics that have a bearing on questions about how our understanding of the human has been shaped. I wondered whether there was a particular spur for the special issue on the topic and you see as the main points you think a HHS audience will take away from it?  Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett (BB & LAB): Our special issue is the product of a long collaboration. We are both intellectual historians whose work explores the connections

between European traditions of thought and the experience of colonisation, both within Europe and beyond. Though we have different fields of specialisation (Linda on the history of travel, natural history and Nordic colonialism, and Bruce on political ideas with a focus on Australia's colonial history) what we share is an interest in uncovering the colonial burden wrapped up in concepts, and the words we use to convey them. Thanks to the generosity of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Sweden, we've been able to pursue this idea through a joint research project entitled 'The Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Legacies of Enlightenment'. Our special issue forms part of this project and gives a more formal shape to what we've learned by working collaboratively with so many wonderful scholars.  Linda Andersson Burnett We hope that readers of History of the Human Sciences will take away from our special issue a greater appreciation for the sometimes unpredictable ways in…

Author Interviews

Some semblance of a ‘field’

HHS Contributor

Agrippa: human proportions in square. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC-BY.

In February this year, HHS published a special issue on 'the future of the history of the human sciences, edited by Chris Renwick. That issue (and the event it drew from) brought together scholars from a wide range of backgrounds and institutional positions, to reflect on the constitution of 'the history of the human sciences' as a field - and also to think through its possible or likely futures. Representing, perhaps, different 'generational' approaches to these concerns were Roger Smith (now working independently in the Russian Federation, and a Reader Emeritus in History of Science at Lancaster University), who wrote on resistance to the neurosciences, and Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (a Vising Fellow at Weill Cornell Psychiatry, and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill) who wrote on the discovery of the unconscious. Here, Alexandra puts some questions to Roger on the past and present of the history of the human sciences as a field. Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (ABV):

Roger, how has the history of the human science - as a field - changed since you were a graduate student? Roger Smith (RS): There was no field of history of the human sciences when I was a graduate student (1967-70). Very little activity in the history of science concerned the non-physical sciences; and the separate social science and psychological disciplines wrote narrow histories for internal consumption. The phrase ‘the human sciences’ was uncommon (though in France, sciences humaines and les sciences de l’homme were well-established terms, each with its own connotation in intellectual life). The change, to which I contributed, was the constitution of some semblance of a ‘field’ of history of the human sciences in the second half of the 1980s, and the piecemeal spread thereafter of reference to the term. Then and now, the identity of the field, its novelty and its trajectory are issues open to debate. It was precisely the value of an umbrella…

Author Interviews

Time with a capital T

HHS Contributor

While we tend to view ‘modern’ time in terms of relativity theory or the triumph of clock-time (tied to experiences of industrialization and now globalization or the information economy) this research suggests that a far deeper exploration of what it means to be-in-the-world was at play in this period

Diagrams for setting-out sundials. Engraving by J. Taylor. Credit: Wellcome Collection CC-BY

In the April 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, Allegra Fryxell, from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, published 'Psychopathologies of time' - a paper that opens up the tole of time both a methodological tool and a site or clinical focus in early 20th-century psychiatry. Here she talks to Rhodri Hayward about the psychopathological functions of time in this period. Rhodri Hayward (RH): Allegra, in your article, you draw the reader's attention to a neglected tradition in Western psychiatry which sought to explore the connections between mental disturbance and the corruption of time consciousness.  In particular, you draw attention to the work of Henri Bergson and Eugène Minkowski showing how they explored the tensions between lived time and clock time to build what you call a 'futurist' psychiatry.  As I understand it, this contrasts with the contemporary psychotherapies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Janet’s dynamic psychiatry.  Whereas psychoanalysis is concerned with an individual's inability to integrate their past,

and Pierre Janet’s methods that aimed to orientate consciousness toward the present, Minkowski's followers were concerned with the idea that patients were alienated from the future.  Could you say a little more about this 'futurist' psychiatry and why you think it flourished in the interwar years? Allegra Fryxell (AF): I think it is perhaps unsurprising that a ‘futurist’ approach took root in psychiatry at the same time as a variety of avant-garde movements like Italian Futurism were engaging with ideas about the future. Many historians have understood interwar Europe and North America as a period characterised by dramatic social changes following the Great War, which catalysed a discussion about the ‘shape’ of possible new futures — particularly in Europe, where the revolutions of 1917-1919 ushered in a period of political instability. The futurist emphasis of the phenomenological psychiatrists upon whom I focus in this article is a natural facet of this socio-historical context. That being said, I…