Marking the birthday of two historic figures,
both born on  Feb. 12, 1809

Darwin-Lincoln Birthday Forum
[Click here to view video of forum.]

Friday, February 10, 2012,

Massachusetts Darwin Society

MIT School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences

MIT Biology Department

MIT School of Sciences

The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT

Speaker biographies:

Professor Christopher Capozzola, an Associate Professor of History and Acting Dean in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, specializes in the political and cultural history of the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. He graduated from Harvard College and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002. At MIT, he teaches courses in political and legal history, war and the military, and the history of international migration. In 2009, he won the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Jonathan King is a Professor in the Biology Department at MIT. His research laboratory focuses on protein folding and the role of crystallin proteins in the formation of cataracts in the human eye. Professor King developed and directed the Massachusetts Darwin Bicentennial Project, which has since become the Massachusetts Darwin Society. The goals of this program are to provide opportunities for collaborations between high school teachers and university faculty, promote engaging and active-learning techniques for high school teachers, and support teaching of evolutionary concepts in the high school classroom.

Harriet Ritvo, the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT, teaches courses in British history, environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010); she is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Professor John Stauffer writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and visual culture at Harvard University.  He is the author of seven books and more than 45 articles, including The Black Hearts of Men:  Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002), which won four major awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Award, and the Lincoln Prize runner-up.  His essays have appeared in Time Magazine, Raritan, New York Post, 21^st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, and The Harvard Review; and he has appeared on national radio and television shows. His new book, GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, was published in November 2008 by TWELVE.