with Stefanos Geroulanos
New York University

Presented by the Department of Rhetoric, in conjunction with the Berkeley Center for New Media's History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by the Department of History.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.

Stefanos Geroulanos is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Transparency in Postwar France (2017) and An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010); co-author, with Todd Meyers, of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (2018); and co-editor, with Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Nicole Jerr, of The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (2017). He is also a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

With Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Professor of History, UC Berkeley, as moderator

About the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series
The History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media, these events are free and open to the public.

We are pleased to present the following lectures as part of this year's 2018-2019 season:

2018

September 12 | 6:30 — 8:00 PM | 112 Wurster Hall
Architectural Intelligence
Molly Wright Steenson, Carnegie Mellon University
In partnership with the Department of Architecture

October 4 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 310 Moffitt Library
Learning To Interact: Cybernetics and Play
Timothy Stott, Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology

2019

Mar 20 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | 310 Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Safiya Noble, University of California, Los Angeles
Co-sponsored by the CITRIS Policy Lab

Apr 03 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Undergraduate Library
The Human Computer in the Stone Age: Technology, Prehistory, and the Redefinition of the Human after World War II
Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University