Seminar in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

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'From Skull Science to Biometrics: The Making of the Modern Statistical Identity'
Iris Clever (University of Chicago)

In this presentation, I uncover an overlooked genealogy of biometrics, tracing it back to early 20th-century race science and the rise of statistical thinking about human identity. Before biometrics became a technology of controlling human identity, it was a science aimed at understanding human diversity, specifically racial diversity. I examine the emergence of craniometry in the 19th century and how its methodologies paved the way for a novel approach to racial anthropology driven by mathematical statistics in the early 20th century. Finally, I explore the postwar development of computerized anthropology.  

Iris Clever is a historian of science, technology, and the body, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her book project, The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science, traces the surprising origins of modern data technologies in colonial race science, revealing how the racialization of human bodies lies at the foundation of modern science. Her work has been published in Isis, Perspectives on Science, and is forthcoming in American Anthropologist.

The seminar in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology is convened by Alex Aylward (University of Oxford), Erica Charters (Wolfson College), Hohee Cho (Wolfson College), Mark Harrison (Green Templeton College), Rob Iliffe Linacre College), Catherine Jackson (Harris Manchester College), and Sloan Mahone (University of Oxford)