The Maternal Imprint – reading and discussion with Professor Sarah Richardson

Date: 

Tuesday, March 22, 2022, 3:00pm to 4:30pm

Location: 

Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall 110 and hybrid over Zoom

Please join WGS for a reading and discussion with Professor Sarah Richardson for her book, The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effectsfollowed by a discussion with Rene Almeling (Yale) and Natali Valdez (Wellesley). Moderated by Naomi Oreskes (Harvard).

March 22, 2022 at 3:00pm
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall 110
and hybrid over Zoom
Registration required for Zoom link

This event is cosponsored by the Department of the History of Science.

Sarah S. Richardson is Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. A historian and philosopher of science, Richardson is a leading scholar of gender and science whose work argues for conceptual rigor and social responsibility in scientific research on sex, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. She directs the Harvard GenderSci Lab, a collaborative, interdisciplinary research lab dedicated to generating concepts, methods, and theories for biomedical research on sex and gender. Richardson serves on the Standing Committees for Degrees in Social Studies and for the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard.

Richardson is the author of The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects and Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome. She has published two edited volumes, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age and Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome, articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, BioSocieties, the Hastings Report, and Biology and Philosophy, and commentaries in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Her work has also appeared in popular forums such as Slate, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.

Richardson's research has been supported by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Association of University Women. She has served on the Governing Board of the International Association for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology and is a member of the editorial boards of Signs and Bulletin of the History of Medicine.


Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned geologist, historian and public speaker, she is a leading voice on the role of science in society and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Oreskes is author or co-author of 7 books, and over 150 articles, essays and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014), Discerning Experts (University Chicago Press, 2019), Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change, (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name produced by participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics, and has been translated into nine languages.

Rene Almeling is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University with research and teaching interests in gender and medicine. Using a range of qualitative, historical, and quantitative methods, she examines questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, medical markets, and individual experiences. She is the author of Sex Cells, an award-winning book that offers an inside look at the American market for egg donors and sperm donors. Her new book, GUYnecology, examines why there is so little attention to men’s reproductive health and analyzes how this gap affects medical knowledge, health policy, and reproductive politics.

Natali Valdez is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is an anthropologist who specializes in feminist and ethnographic methodologies. Her work lies at the intersections of feminist techno-science, reproduction, and biomedicine and draws on feminist science studies to explore the entanglements between nature-culture, science-society, and the human-nonhuman. Valdez’s current book project Weighing the Future -- one of the first ethnographic examinations of epigenetics in practice -- explores the clinical translation of epigenetics in randomized clinical trials that experiment on pregnant bodies.