S01E08 | Sex, Power, and Nineteenth-Century Science: a conversation with Kyla Schuller

C19: America in the 19th Century

Today, we associate the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin. But in America in the nineteenth-century, and well into the twentieth, the evolutionary theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck were far more influential than Darwin's. In this episode, Kyla Schuller (Rutgers) and Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst) discuss the ways that Lamarckian thought influenced attitudes toward sentimentalism, child development, physiology, and race. Schuller takes up these topics in her book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke 2017), and here she expands on them and asks how we adapt our thinking about biopower to the Age of Trump. Episode produced by Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst). Post-production help from Mark Sussman.