MacKay Lecture Series

 

2002-03 

Origins

This series considers three instances of how ideas about origins focus our sense of who we are. The first lecture focuses on the challenge that technologies of assisted conception offer to our sense of the natural in the event known as birth. The second examines how ideas about tradition construct a usable past.

Lecture One - Embryonic Origins

Sarah Franklin, Professor of Anthropology of Science, Lancaster University, February 12, 8:00 p.m. 

Sarah Franklin’s research on new reproductive and genetic technologies combines ethnographic fieldwork with the analysis of popular, visual, and public culture to develop an interdisciplinary approach to science as a contemporary cultural domain. She is the author of Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (1997), and co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception (1999) and Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). In 2000 Franklin received a Leverhulme Fellowship to support a project on cloning, Dolly Mixtures, which extends her interests in theories of kinship and gender, the embodiment of progress, and new forms of genetic capital.

 

Lecture Two - Tacit Knowledge: Tradition and Its Aftermath

Michael McKeon, Professor of English, Rutgers University, February 27, 8:00 p.m.

Michael McKeon, the Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University, is the winner of the Modern Language Association’s 1987 James Russell Lowell Prize and the 1991-92 Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research. He is the author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600- 1740 (1988 & 2002) and Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (1975). He is currently working on a project entitled “The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge.”

 

The MacKay Lecture in History

"Class, culture, and consciousness: the African experience in South Africa, 1870-1920."

Dr. Shula Marks, OBE. Distinguished Senior Research Fellow, School for Advanced Study, University of London. May 29th.

Born in South Africa in the 1930s, Shula Marks's childhood coincided with the creation of the apartheid state by the National Party in 1949. Ten years later, as a young woman, she left South Africa and came to Britian as a political émigré. During the 1960s she established a career for herself at the same time as she established a place for the history of Southern Africa within the Western academy. From a very early date, she distinguished herself not only as an accomplished historian and intellectual leader, but also as a wonderful communicator.

Her broadcasts on the BBC World Service were powerful tools in challenging the widely disseminated propaganda of apartheid. Her academic work was also an important part of that arsenal. Author of five books, among them Apartheid and Health, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa, and 'Not Either an Experimental Doll': the Separate Worlds of Three South African Women, her work has profoundly influenced a whole generation of historians of Southern African. Her profound understanding of colonialism and its legacies offers Canadians an important angle of perspective on our own history as a settler dominion defined as "white."