Announcement from the Levan Institute for the Humanities
Upcoming Levan Book Chat
Thursday, December 7 | 12:00 PM | Virtual
Cristina Mejia Visperas is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California. She will be joined in conversation by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (NYU) and Anthony Hatch (Wesleyan University), moderated by Nayan Shah (USC). Coorganized by the Institute for Diversity & Empowerment @ Annenberg and the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. Registration is required.
About the Book: In February 1966, a local newspaper described the medical science program at Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, a “golden opportunity to conduct widespread medical tests under perfect control conditions.” Helmed by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor, these tests enrolled hundreds of the prison’s predominantly Black population in studies determining the efficacy and safety of a wide variety of substances, from common household products to chemical warfare agents. These experiments at Holmesburg were hardly unique; in the postwar United States, the use of incarcerated test subjects was standard practice among many research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Skin Theory examines the prison as this space for scientific knowledge production, showing how the “perfect control conditions” of the prison dovetailed into the visual regimes of laboratory work. To that end, Skin Theory offers an important reframing of visual approaches to race in histories of science, medicine, and technology, shifting from issues of scientific racism to the scientific rationality of racism itself.
In this highly original work, Cristina Mejia Visperas approaches science as a fundamentally racial project by analyzing the privileged object and instrument of Kligman’s experiments: the skin. She theorizes the skin as visual technology, as built environment, and as official discourse, developing a compelling framework for understanding the intersections of race, incarceration, and medical science in postwar America. Skin Theory received an Honorable Mention for the Society of Social Studies of Science’s 2023 Rachel Carson Prize and was a Finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present’s 2023 Book Prize. MORE
About the Author: Cristina Mejia Visperas is Assistant Professor of Communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Building on her background in molecular and cellular biology, Professor Visperas examines the politics and cultural histories of the life sciences, with a focus on race and state violence. Her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory, is an abolitionist study of postwar medical science research conducted in prisons and the emergence of modern American bioethics. Her next project addresses the political role of emotions in the Anthropocene.
About the Participants:
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and author, most recently, of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2021), winner of the PROSE Hawkins Award. Her research interests include Asian American studies, popular/visual studies, and immigration and labor studies.
Anthony Hatch is a sociologist and Professor of Science in Society at Wesleyan University with affiliations in the Department of African American Studies, College of the Environment, and Department of Sociology. He is the author of Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minnesota, 2019) and Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (Minnesota, 2016). Professor Hatch lectures widely on health systems, medical technology, and social inequalities.
Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at USC. Professor Shah is the author of three books, most recently, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022). His research covers a broad array of subjects including the history of gender, sexuality and empire; pandemics and quarantine; transnational history of science and emotions; Asian American art and politics in California; South Asian American diaspora; Queer and LGBT Studies, and Law and American Borderlands; and Biopolitics and Citizenship.
The Levan Institute for the Humanities hosts Book Chats, conversations celebrating new books by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.