The Department of Gender Studies proudly presents the launching of the lecture series
Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices
Opening remarks by John Shattuck
President and Rector, CEU
The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department's 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU's 20th anniversary.
“Men Who Believe Impossible Things: Victorian Masculinity and the Making of Science”
A public lecture by Anna Loutfi
Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies
What does it mean to speak of pseudoscience versus mainstream science in the nineteenth century? How strong was the distinction between the two? On what was it founded? This lecture will explore the ways such questions might lead us to revise the assumption that Victorian intellectual, middle-class masculinity felt confident and at ease with concepts such as ‘reason’ and ‘the scientific method.’ The lecture focuses on the gentlemen of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882.
Anna Loutfi received her Ph.D. from the Department of History, CEU in 2006. Her interests include intersections of law, politics and the body in nineteenth and twentieth century nationalizing polities. More recently, her research deals with science and culture in the nineteenth century. She is the co-editor of A Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms: Central, East and South Eastern Europe.