Guest lecture "Politics of development: Imaging the human embryo series" by Prof. Dr. Nick Hopwood
The URPP “Human Reproduction Reloaded” is delighted to announce the guest lecture "Politics of development: Imaging the human embryo series" by Prof. Dr. Nick Hopwood.
In collaboration with Laura Valterio and Virginia Marano from the Art History Department and funded by the Graduate School UZH, the talk will contribute to the workshop "The Body in Plural: The Artifactuality of Human Reproduction".
The lecture will take place on Thursday, 12 December 2024, from 4.15 to 5. 45 pm in the main building of the University of Zurich (KOL-E-13).
Abstract
Developmental series of progressively more advanced human eggs, embryos and fetuses structure knowledge of reproduction. They organize the experience and management of pregnancy in apps and ultrasound scans. They set standards in IVF clinics and for stem-cell-based embryo models. They are targets of global public health. Yet 250 years ago such series were nowhere to be seen. The talk will offer a history of how they were made to show us how we all began. It will use the difficulty of producing these serial images, and their exploitation in controversies over evolution and abortion, to make processes explicit. I will show how the series embody a progressive drive that encourages the eye to glide from one item to the next while turning failures of reproduction into representations of success. I will draw attention to the construction of identities by species, race and sex. This will account for the prominence of prenatal forms and lead me to critique some of the dominant series in use today.
Bio
Nick Hopwood is Professor of History of Science and Medicine in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Co-chair of Cambridge Reproduction. He is the author, among other works, of Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago, 2015), which won the Levinson Prize of the History of Science Society, and co-editor, most recently, of Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 2018), which is available as a highly illustrated paperback. He is finishing Dramas of Development: Imaging the Human Embryo Series and has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to write The Many Births of the Test-Tube Baby: Proof and Publicity in Claims to a Breakthrough.