Events
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Reflecting on a war against Ukraine that looks oddly “familiar” in the nuclearized history of global conflict since 1945, this event explores the legacies of the scientific excesses of the Cold War. As a “social scientists’ war,” the Cold War depended on psychology, persuasion, ideology, and propaganda in a conflict built around widely dispersed fear of nuclear weapons. The scientific and technological priorities of that era still resonate and still threaten the global order today in recursive ways.
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program presented nuclear power as a key to economic development. However, the nuclear power plants intended to facilitate peace and prosperity have now been reconfigured as potential nuclear weapons, vulnerable to fractured energy grids and hostile troops. During the “Atoms for Peace” program, “peaceful” scientific disciplines, like archaeology, benefitted from sophisticated atomic technologies and used the appeal of international heritage to collect intelligence and build informational networks for their own governments. Archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania played key roles in those strategies and deployed them internationally, advocating exchanges with Soviet Union scholars as an antidote to the Cold War nuclear threat.
This edition of “The World Today” will discuss these technical and military fusions. How do peace and violence come together to shape the global order? How do state interests shape technology, and science? What can these converging histories help us understand about contemporary and future wars?
Speakers
M. Susan Lindee is the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a scholar of Cold War science and technology. She holds a PhD from Cornell University and has taught at Penn since 1990. Her scholarly interests include the history of radiation risk and the impact of militarization on the professional experiences of scientists in the Cold War. She was previously associate dean in the School of Arts and Sciences, is currently chair of her department, and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Lindee has served as a visiting professor at universities in Singapore and Japan, including Hiroshima University’s Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation, and as chair of the board of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her 2020 book, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War, has just appeared in both Russian and Japanese editions.
Lynn Meskell is Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor, Richard D. Green Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the Weitzman School of Design, and curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at the Penn Museum. She is also AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Meskell is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and holds honorary professorships at the University of Oxford and Liverpool University in the United Kingdom; Shiv Nadar in India; and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Meskell’s award-winning book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace traces politics of governance and sovereignty and the implications for multilateral diplomacy, international conservation, and heritage rights. Building on this research, she is currently examining the entwined histories of colonialism, internationalism, espionage and archaeology.
Moderator
Thomas J. Shattuck is the global order program manager at Perry World House. He is the former deputy director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), where he was also a research fellow. From September 2016 to September 2021, he served as managing editor at FPRI. Shattuck is also a member of Foreign Policy for America’s NextGen Foreign Policy Initiative and the Pacific Forum’s Young Leaders Program. He was a member of the 2019 class of scholars at the Global Taiwan Institute, receiving the Taiwan Scholarship. His articles have appeared in the Global Taiwan Brief, Defense Security Brief, Washington Post, National Interest, American Interest, Divergent Options, Taipei Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as the peer-reviewed journals Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs by the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Strategic Vision. He received a BA from LaSalle University in history and English writing and an MA in international studies from the National Chengchi University.
COVID-19 Guidelines
Perry World House is following the University of Pennsylvania’s COVID-19 guidelines. In-person access to our hybrid events is now open to the public as well as the Penn community.
In keeping with the University’s latest update on COVID-19 protocols, masks are optional for all visitors to Perry World House. PennOpen Pass and PennOpen Campus screenings are no longer required for entry to our events.
We will continue to provide virtual access to all events planned with hybrid programming. Zoom details will be available in your order confirmation email.
Please note that our current arrangements are subject to change as guidelines evolve, and other restrictions may be put in place. We will share an email ahead of each event with the latest information on how to take part. If you have any questions, please contact us at worldhouse@pwh.upenn.edu. If you are not already on our mailing list for news and updates, you can sign up here.
