CHORUS colloquium, dedicated to the legacy of the “dean of the history of Russian science” Loren R. Graham (1933-2024)

 Dear colleagues,

 

On Thursday, February 20, you are cordially invited to our next CHORUS online colloquium, dedicated to the legacy of the “dean of the history of Russian science” Loren R. Graham (1933-2024). The session will feature four of Loren’s major books, presented by his students and collaborators:

 

• Michael Gordin (Princeton University), on What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, 1998)
• Paul Josephson (Colby College), on The Ghost of the Executed Engineer (Harvard, 1993)
• Irina Dezhina (Gaidar Institute), on Science in the New Russia: Crisis, Aid, Reform (co-authored with Irina Dezhina, Johns Hopkins, 2008)
• Douglas Weiner (University of Arizona), on Lonely Ideas: Can Russia Compete? (MIT, 2013)

 

Each 15-min talk will be followed by a 15-min. discussion.

The meeting will be held on Thursday, February 20, at 8 am (Los Angeles) / 11 аm (New York) / 17:00 (CET) / 18:00 (Kyiv). For access please email Slava Gerovitch (https://math.mit.edu/directory/profile.html?pid=1160) 

About the speakers:

 

Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Dean of the College at Princeton University. As a graduate student at Harvard, he studied under Loren Graham. Dr. Gordin specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian, European, and American history. He is the author of A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (2004), Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009), The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (2012), Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (2015), Einstein in Bohemia (2020), On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (2021), a co-author of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2013), and a co-editor of the four-volume Routledge History of the Modern Physical Sciences (2001), Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960 (2008), Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (2010), and The Age of Hiroshima (2020). He is currently working on a history of the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on science inside and outside of Russia.

https://history.princeton.edu/people/michael-d-gordin

 

Paul Josephson is Professor Emeritus of History at Colby College. As a graduate student at MIT, he studied under Loren Graham. Dr. Josephson is a specialist in the history of twentieth century science and technology.  He became interested in this subject through study of the Soviet philosophy of science, dialectical materialism, and its impact on the development of relativity theory and quantum mechanics within Soviet borders. He is the author of Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (1991), New Atlantis Revisited: The Siberian City of Science (1997), Industrialized Nature (2002), Red Atom (2005), Resources Under Regimes (2005), Totalitarian Science and Technology (2005), Motorized Obsessions: Life, Liberty and the Small Bore Engine (2007); Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism Under Socialism (2009), Lenin’s Laureate: A Life in Communist Science (2010), An Environmental History of Russia (2013), Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies  (2015); Traffic (2017); Chicken (2020); Nuclear Russia: The Atom in Russian Politics and Culture (2022), and Hero Projects: The Russian Empire and Big Technology from Lenin to Putin (2024). He is currently working on two books, one on race, gender and technology in the internet age, the other a global environmental history of the nuclear age. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.

 

Irina Dezhina is a leading researcher at the Gaidar Institute of Economic Policy. She was a Fulbright Scholar at MIT (1997), a Fellow at the Kennan Institute (1994 and 2013), and a visiting scholar at Stanford (2024). She has published several books and more than 350 articles on the development of science and technology in Russia and the world. Her major monographs include Government Regulation of Science in Russia (2008), Science in the New Russia: Crisis, Aid, Reform (co-authored with Loren Graham, 2008), and Transformational Research: New Priority of the State After the Pandemic (2020). Since 1995 she has been the author of the chapter “State of Science and Innovation” in the annual edition “Russian Economy: Trends and Prospects” by the Gaidar Institute. In 2016, she was awarded a title Chevalier, The Ordre des Palmes académiques (Order of Academic Palms, France) for works on Russian science and technology policy.

https://www.iep.ru/en/person/dezhina-irina-g.html

 

Douglas Weiner is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. He earned his PhD at Columbia University under Loren Graham. According to the Russian newspaper ZAVTRA, Dr. Weiner was one of the people chiefly responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union. His research has focused on examining and explaining environmental policies and the nature of environmental activism in the Soviet Union; see Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (1988) and A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (1999). Paradoxically, in light of the above, he has also written critiques of "environment" and "environmental history" as fuzzy concepts.  See esp. "A Death-defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History," Environmental History 10:3 (July 2005). He is currently working on a book, "Curiosity for its Own Sake," about the conflict between progressive education and its tsarist and Stalinist opponents, both of whom sought to "teach to the test." He loves bowling, cats, and high culture.

https://history.arizona.edu/person/douglas-weiner