Noted anthropologist Stefan Helmreich will give the University of Rochester’s 51st annual Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture. Helmreich’s talk, “Waves: An Anthropology of Scientific Things,” will provide insights on how scientists are studying waves in nature to understand phenomena as diverse as the social sciences and climate change.
Wave science is the study of periodic, oscillating, and undulating phenomena—in different fields, from cosmology, to biology, oceanography, sport, and social science.
Helmreich, the Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will provide an ethnographic account of how contemporary ocean wave scientists comprehend and model the world wavescape.
He will detail scientists’ debates about whether climate change is modulating wave tracks, shapes, and sizes—whether waves can usefully be read as signs of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch dating to the industrial revolution during which, some geologists claim, human activity began to manifest enduring global effects.
The Oct. 22 lecture will be held at 7pm in Lander Auditorium of Hutchinson Hall on the University’s River Campus. The talk is free and open to the public.
Helmreich received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University. Helmreich’s recent book, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), won numerous awards, including the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, and The Wire.
The Morgan Lecture Series honors the memory of Lewis Henry Morgan, the distinguished 19th-century anthropologist and University of Rochester benefactor. The lecture has been presented annually since 1963. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious lecture series in anthropology in North America. Duke University Press will publish Helmreich’s lecture.
