4:30 PM

Friday, May 2, 2025

Malgova Auditorium, SLC, NCBS

 

Abstract:

This talk focuses on an as yet overlooked case of two women biologists—one British-American and the other Asian—bonding over science transnationally, and on the fringes of institutions in a colonial setting. It sheds light in particular on the struggles encountered and strategies adopted by a highly accomplished, but little-known, trail-blazing British-American biologist, Eileen Jessie Whitehead Erlanson (1899-2001), later Macfarlane, in finding a livelihood commensurate with her education and research experience during the Great Slump. Eileen’s life in the 1930s, serves as an object lesson, even a role model, on how forging robust connections across national and disciplinary borders were crucial to ‘inventing’ a multi-faceted scientific career, at a time when employment opportunities were especially grim for women, let alone scientists. The highlight of the talk will be the screening of a recently discovered and restored short film by Macfarlane (3 minutes long), made during her first stint in India.

 

Bio:

Dr Savithri Preetha Nair is the Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science, 2024-25 (https://archives.ncbs.res.in/OS). She is a Historian of Science, and her research spans a fascinating range of topics, including the history of science, modernity and enlightenment at the turn of the nineteenth century, history and politics of collecting for science, the sociology of knowledge, the public museum, and women in science in colonial and post-colonial India. Among her notable publications are Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist: E. K. Janaki Ammal, A Life: 1897-1984 (Routledge, 2022), Science and the Changing Environment in India: A Guide to Sources in the India Office Records, 1780-1920 (co-authored with Richard Axelby, British Library, 2010), and Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore, 1786-1832 (Routledge, 2012).