Cold War Science, Technology, and Medicine: Global Perspectives
University of Pennsylvania, Nov. 9-11, 2000

The Cold War was fundamentally a technical and scientific war, fought over technical secrets, by technical means. It had a major impact on practices and institutions of science, technology and medicine, and on relationships between the state, the academy, military and industry in the latter half of the twentieth century. Much scholarship on Cold War science and technology has focused on nuclear and space sciences in the United States and Russia. But as newly opened and increasingly accessible archives around the world make clear, the Cold War was a global battle that drew on and shaped many systems for the production of natural knowledge. Cold War sciences included oceanography, agriculture in Africa, anthropology in Brazil, pathology in Japan, mathematics in Canada and public health in India. Indeed, the vast consequences of this war for knowledge production in many fields and many locations are only now becoming clear.

This workshop, to be held in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, will bring together graduate students, recent PhDs and faculty for an intense two-day presentation of papers and discussion of critical issues. With support from the Penn Research Foundation, we can provide some travel funding. We will also arrange low-cost or free accommodations for all graduate students attending, and provide lodging for all those who are giving papers. We are modeling this meeting on the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology: Graduate students, recent Ph.Ds, and junior faculty will give papers, faculty will comment.

Organizing committee: M. Susan Lindee (Dept. of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania); Mark B. Adams (Dept. of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania); Manfred Heinemann (Center for the History of Education and Science, University of Hannover, Germany); Nikolai Krementsov (St. Petersburg Branch, Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences); and John Krige (Center for Research in the History of Science and Technology, La Villette, Paris).