Visiting Fellow Archive (2000-2001)

Barbara Herrnstein-Smith

ABOUT

2000-2001 will be the inaugural year of the annual Institute for the Humanities External Fellow Seminar Series. For two to three weeks each year, this program brings to the University of Illinois at Chicago community a scholar whose innovative work has played a crucial role in reconceptualizing the disciplines of the humanities. Seminars are open to faculty and advanced graduate students.

The 2005-2006 Institute for the Humanities Visiting Fellow is Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Duke University, will be the first External Fellow, in residence from Friday, February 16 to Wednesday, March 7, 2001. She will offer two seminars open to faculty and advanced graduate students on the topic “Scandalous Knowledge: 20th-Century Reconceptions of Science.” Please see the facing page for full details, including how to register for these seminars.

She will also deliver a keynote address at the 2000-2001 “Covering New Ground” Graduate Student Conference. This address, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations,” will take place on Friday, February 23, 2001. The exact time will be announced.

She will be in residence at the University of Illinois at Chicago from February 27 to March 10, 2006, offering two seminars and a public lecture. The two seminars are open to faculty and advanced graduate students. Preregistration is not required but it is highly recommended for the seminars. The lecture on March 9 is open to the public.

With an eye on misunderstanding reflected in and generated by the so-called Science Wars, the seminar will have a double focus: first, significant theoretical and methodological problems leading to critiques of classical realist/positivist conceptions of scientific knowledge, method, objectivity, and progress; second, the development of alternative constructivist/pragmatist conceptions of the formation and stabilization of scientific knowledge and the relations between scientific and other cultural practices. Suggested readings will include selections from Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact; Thomas S. Kuhn,The Structure of Scientific Revolution; Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture; Bruno Latour, Science in Action; and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy.

EVENTS

Seminars:

Wednesday, February 21, 2001 from 12:30-3:30 p.m.
Fleck and Others: The Emergence of Constructivist (Anti-) Epistemology

Friday, March 2, 2001 from 12:30-3:30 p.m.
Bruno Latour and the Practices of Irreduction