M. Susan Lindee, Ph.D., Professor
University of Pennsylvania
Department of History and Sociology of Science
Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 S. 36th Street, Room 365
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
Telephone: (215) 898-2271
E-mail
Ph.D., Cornell University
M.S., Cornell University
B.S., University of Texas at Austin
Teaching Fields:
American science, history of genetics, gender and science, science and popular culture, science and war.
Current Research
Rational Fog: A social history of weaponized truth
This will be a book-length study of the professional struggles and strategies of scientific experts in the military-industrial-academic complex, documenting how they came to terms with the militarization of knowledge in the twentieth century.
Professor Lindee is a native Texan who received her undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a journalist for ten years, earning awards by the Associated Press, Hearst Foundation, Sigma Delta Chi, United Press International and Women In Communications. She then earned a Ph.D in History and Philosophy of Science from Cornell University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century biological and biomedical sciences, particularly radiation biology, human genetics and genomics. She teaches about science and gender, science and war, and the history of American science. She is a sea kayaker and birdwatcher.
Read Professor Lindee’s review of James Watson’s DNA
Publications
Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005
http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/3274.html
Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two Culture Divide. With Alan Goodman and Deborah Heath. Edited volume from a Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium at Teresopolis, Brazil. University of California Press, 2003.
The DNA mystique: The gene as a cultural icon. With Dorothy Nelkin. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1995; New edition, University of Michigan Press, 2004. Translations: Japanese, 1997; French 1998.
Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima University of Chicago Press, 1994. Translations, Japanese 2005.
"Crazy Quilt: Cloning Collaborations." Forthcoming, 2008, Science as Culture.
"Experimental wounds," in William LaFleur, Gerhot Bohme and Susumu Shmazono, Dark Medicine: Rationalizing unethical medical research in Japan, Germany and the United States. Indiana University Press, 2007. Published in German as Fragwurdige Medizin(2008)
"Censoring Science," in Evan Gerstmann and Matthew Streb, eds., Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century: How Terrorism, Governments and Culture Wars Affect Free Speech.Stanford University Press, 2006.
"Representing James V. Neel: Voices of the dead in the Yanomami controversy," in Francisco Salzano and Magdalena Hurtado, eds., Lost Paradises and the Ethics of Research and Publication. Oxford University Press, 2003: 27-48.
"Genetic Disease in the 1960s: A structural revolution." 30 August 2002, American Journal of Medical Genetics 115:2 (2002): 75-82.
"Provenance and the Pedigree: Victor McKusick’s fieldwork with Ellis van Creveld syndrome in the Pennsylvania Amish," in Goodman, Heath and Lindee, 2003 (see above).
"Sputnik, Cold War Nostalgia, and 9/11" (October 4, 2007)
http://www.scienceprogress.org/2007/10/sputnik-cold-war-nostalgia-and-911/
"Watson’s World." Science300 (2003): 432-434.
Current students:
Paul Burnett, PhD expected August 2008.
“The visible land: Agricultural economists, export agriculture and development in the United States, 1909-65” is a history of social science expertise and the technopolitics of farm subsidies and international development. Paul has been hired by the American Philosophical Society to prepare their Year of Darwin exhibit.
Joshua Berson, PhD expected summer 2009
“Linguistics and Language Sovereignty in Northern Australia, 1959-2008”
Josh’s work explores the emergence of the idea of endangered languages, with a particular focus on critical work in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. He is interested in how this debate intersects with more recent concerns about intellectual property and language rights. He won an NSF fellowship for his research in 2008.
Andria Johnson, PhD expected summer 2009.
"Knowledge in motion: A social study of the science of elite sport" explores both the history and the ethnography of exercise science. Andi first tracks the evolution of this discipline from a science focused on “work” (the factory and a laborer) to a science focused on elite athletic performance. Her ethnographic work on contemporary exercise science focuses on its practices, technologies, and contemporary embeddedness in the global economy and in postcolonial politics. 2006-2007 National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant; 2007-2008 she was engaged in ethnographic field work in exercise science laboratories in South Africa, Kenya, the UK and the US. She will be a CWiC Fellow 2008-2009.
Perrin Selcer, PhD expected 2009.
“Designing a world community: Science at Unesco, 1946-1973”
Perrin won a Columbia University Center for European Studies fellowship that allowed him to spend the summer of 2006 in Paris; an SSRC grant that supported his research in Europe in 2007-2008, and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2008-2009.
Roger Turner, PhD expected 2009
“Weathering Heights” explores how aviation interests cultivated meteorological knowledge in order to make flying predictable and reliable enough to revolutionize the transportation industry. Roger came to Penn with a National Science Foundation fellowship and has since won many travel and research awards.
Joanna Radin, PhD expected 2010
Joanna is interested in issues relating to expert authority, public understanding of science, and the sociology of health.
Kristoffer Whitney, PhD expected 2010
Kristoffer is interested in the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s.
Jessica Martucci, PhD expected 2010
Jessica is interested in public and scientific interpretations of infant feeding in the United States, 1920-1980.
Grants and awards:
Wenner Gren Foundation, for the October 2009 conference on the history of physical anthropology organized by MSL and Brazilian anthropologist Ricardo Santos.
NIH support through the University of Pennsylvania Center for Integration of Genetic and Healthcare Technologies (Penn CIGHT), Reed Pyeritz, PI. For an interdisciplinary study of uncertainty in genetic screening in collaboration with a study of Cystic Fibrosis with clinician Michael Mennutti. Summer 2008 and 2009.
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2004-2005.
Weiler Fellow, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 2005
Burroughs Wellcome Fund 40th Anniversary Award, 1996.
National Institutes of Health, National Center for Human Genome Research, June 1992 through December 1994
Post-doctoral fellowship, National Science Foundation, 1991.
Schuman Prize, History of Science Society, 1988.
Center for International Studies, Cornell University, research support.
