Science Center, Hall A, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA (Please note that the Harvard Museum of Natural History & the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology will not be open during this event).
Free Lecture & Conversation – In Person & Online
Advance registration is recommended.
How have measuring systems shaped our understanding of people and the world? How can art help us grasp the complex legacies of such systems? The new exhibition Measuring Difference at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments explores how seemingly objective measurements have historically functioned as tools of authority and bias, particularly during colonial encounters in the Americas. In this interdisciplinary conversation blending history, science, and art, Pablo Gómez, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez will examine Euroamerican measuring systems and their role in constructing racial hierarchies and power structures that persist in Latin America and the United States today. By tracing the history of measuring human bodies—from its roots in the transatlantic slave trade to its lasting influence on modern perceptions of race and identity—and by exploring art that addresses the complexities of multi-layered identities resulting from colonial legacies, this program invites participants to see, understand, and challenge the biases embedded in the measuring systems that shape our modern world.
The lecture begins at 6:00 pm. Guests can visit the exhibition Measuring Difference at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (1 Oxford Street) starting at 5:00 pm or after the lecture, from 7:00 pm until 8:30 pm.
Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage.
Presented in collaboration with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
ArtsThursdays is a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts.
About the Speakers
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores migration, identity, gender, cultural memory, and the impact of colonization. Her current project, an intersectional feminist visual novel, combines paintings, sculptures, objects, and mixed media to weave narratives of hybridity and cultural ownership. Her work has been exhibited at renowned institutions, including the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Sheldon Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has received prestigious accolades such as the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting and a Smithsonian Artist Fellowship. Her art is featured in notable collections such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá.
Pablo F. Gómez is Associate Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a historian of the African diaspora, slavery, and the history of medicine and science. He is the author of the prize-winning The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic and several articles and edited volumes. Gómez’s forthcoming monograph, Bloody Numbers: Slave Trading and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality in the Early Atlantic, examines the early history of the quantifiable bodies of modernity and their origins in the slave trading societies of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. Among other endeavors, he is starting research on a new project on the imagination of alternative histories of value, bodies, labor, and subjectivity in the eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean Black world.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. Her current research interests interrogate knowledge production and circulation between Mexico and India; medical professionals and social movements; and science and development projects in the twentieth century. Her first book, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill, won the Robert K. Merton Book Award in Science, Knowledge, and Technology of the American Sociological Association. Her second monograph, Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico, examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators. Her latest book project seeks to renarrate histories of twentieth-century agriculture development aid from the point of view of India and Mexico. She has held numerous grants, including those from the Ford, Mellon, Fulbright, DAAD, and Gerda Henkel Foundations. In 2019, she received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard University.
