Presenters

• Prof. Marius Turda

  Marius Turda is professor at Oxford Brookes University and Director of its Centre for Medical Humanities. His main research interests include history of eugenics, scientific racism, history of anthropology and history of medicine. He has published a number of books on the history of eugenics, including Modernism and Eugenics, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective and The History of East-Central European Eugenics: Texts and Commentaries. He is the general editor of A Cultural History of Race, published in 6 volumes by Bloomsbury in 2021. He has also produced a podcast series on the current relevance of eugenics and curated two exhibitions, including the forthcoming ‘We are not alone’: Legacies of Eugenics at the Wiener Holocaust Library (21-30 September 2021).

• Francesco Cassata

  I am Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Genoa. I have published on the history of eugenics and scientific racism in Italy, on the history of the “Lysenko controversy” in Italy, on the Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso and the International Laboratory of Genetics and Biophysics in Naples (1962-69), on Primo Levi’s science fiction. Select publications: Building the New Man. Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (Central European University Press, 2011); “The Italian Communist Party and the ‘Lysenko affair’” (Journal of the History of Biology, 2012); L’Italia intelligente. Adriano Buzzati-Traverso e il Laboratorio internazionale di genetica e biofisica (1962-1969) (Donzelli, 2013); “The struggle for authority over Italian genetics: the Ninth International Congress of Genetics in Bellagio, 1948-53,” in B. Gausemeier, S. Müller-Wille, E. Ramsden (eds.), Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century, Pickering & Chatto, London- Brookfield 2013. On Primo Levi, I recently published Science Fiction? Seventh Levi Lecture (Einaudi, 2016).

• Richard Cleminson

  I am Professor of Hispanic Studies and work at the intersection between Gender and Sexuality Studies and History with a particular interest in how science and culture interact in Iberia. To this end, I have published on scientific and sexological theories of sexuality, particularly with respect to the cultural and scientific construction of male homosexuality in Spain, hermaphroditism in Iberia and the reception of eugenics in Spain and Portugal. My most recent major project, funded by the AHRC, focused on the dialogue between anarchism and eugenics in five countries, including Argentina, England, France, Portugal and Spain. I am currently working on colonialism and anticolonialism in Portugal in the early twentieth century.

• Bolaji Balogun

  Bolaji received his PhD (passed with no corrections) in Sociology from the University of Leeds and previously held a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship at Krakow University of Economics, Poland where he was a lecturer at the department of European Studies. In 2020, Bolaji moved to the University of Sheffield to take up another Leverhulme Trust Fellowship as an Early Career Fellow at the Department of Geography. Bolaji’s research focuses on Blackness and Racialisation in Central and Eastern Europe. As well as his academic outputs in this area, Bolaji has written for academic media outlets such as the Sociological Review Blog; Open Democracy, LSE Blogs, Discover Society, Baltic Worlds, and The Muslim News. Bolaji also serves as a peer-reviewer for a number of academic journals.

• Angelique Richardson

  Professor Angelique Richardson works on the history of science and literature at the University of Exeter. She is a member of staff in the department of English and the Centres for the Medical History and Victorian Studies, University of Exeter, a research associate of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Richardson leads the Hardy’s Correspondents project at Exeter, in collaboration with Dorset Museum and Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab. In 2019 Richardson contributed to the BBC documentary Decadence and Degeneration and was consulted for the BBC documentary Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal. Richardson is the editor or co-editor of nine collections or special journal issues, and editor of the book ‘After Darwin: Animals, Emotions and the Mind.’

• Maria Sophia Quine