Associate Professor
History; History of Science, Medicine, and Technology and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
UW-Madison
Lead Coordinator of the Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy in the Sciences and Medicine, part of the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative
Abstract
This seminar will introduce the Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy in the Sciences and Medicine project, a 3-year undertaking that began in January 2021 housed at the UW and funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. HEAL seeks to improve equitable access to higher education by drawing on humanities research to advance anti-racist practices and pedagogy in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. PI Elizabeth Hennessy will give an overview of the project and invite participants to discuss potential collaborations.
Bio
Elizabeth Hennessy is an associate professor of History, History of Science, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. Her work combines political ecology, environmental history, science and technology studies, and multispecies studies to examine how histories of the life sciences have shaped the political economy of development and environmental governance in Latin America. Her first book, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden (Yale University Press, 2019) was a finalist for a PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She is the PI of the Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative project Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy in the Sciences and Medicine (HEAL). Her work has also been funded by the U.S National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU-Munich.