People
Rebecca Lemov
Associate Professor of the History of Science & Director of Graduate Studies
Rebecca Lemov’s research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human sciences. Her first book, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men (2006, Farrar Strauss Giroux/Hill and Wang) chronicled behavioral scientists’ attempts to engineer human society and people’s responses. The research also led her to investigate the then-obscure history of American psychology’s role in developing a “soft science” of coercive interrogation, a body of techniques that has been picked up anew during the current war on terror. Her current work, titled Database of Dreams: Making a Science of the Human 1942-1961, examines attempts to map the elusive and subjective parts of the human psyche via sophisticated and data-rich techniques. In looking at innovations in data-gathering methods, the manuscript investigates the ongoing transformation of knowledge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A parallel interest is in the current growth of neuroscience in pursuing the age-old hope of opening the “black box” of the mind.
Rebecca came to the Department of the History of Science two years ago as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Science, Technology and Society. Previously, she was a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington Humanities Center. She received her graduate degree in cultural anthropology and the anthropology of science in 2000 from the University of California at Berkeley.
Publications
Books
- How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Rationality in the Cold War (University of Chicago, Fall 2013) Lorraine Daston, Paul Erickson, Michael Gordin, Judy Klein and Thomas Sturm, co-authors.
- World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men. (New York, Hill & Wang, 2005)
Articles
- “Running Amok in Labyrinthine Systems: The Cyber-Behaviorist Origins of Soft Torture,” in eds. Stephen Collier, Christopher Kelty, and Andrew Lakoff, “Systemic Risk,” Studio (Anthropology Research on the Contemporary) Episode 2, forthcoming 2011.
- “X-Rays in Your Head: The Mid-Twentieth-Century Projective Test Movement,” special issue on the Cold War Human Sciences, ed. Joel Isaac, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming 2011.
- “Brainwashing’s Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron,” Grey Room, eds. Stefan Andriopoulos and Andreas Killen, special issue on Brainwashing, forthcoming 2011.
- "’Hypothetical Machines’: The Science-Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science,” Focus section on Reassessing Cold War Science, eds. David Kaiser and Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Isis 101, 2010, 401-411.
- "Filing the Total Human Experience: Anthropological Archives at Mid-Twentieth Century,” in eds. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michelle Lamont, Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
- "Toward a Database of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, 1947-1961,” History Workshop Journal 67, 1, 2009, 44-68.
- "The Birth of Soft Torture: CIA interrogation techniques—a history,” Slate, November 16, 2005 (lead story)
- "The American Science of Interrogation,” Op-Ed, Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2005.
Contact
- Email: rlemov@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 496-5229
Classes
- HS 150: History of Social Science
- HS 174: Critical Experiments in the Human Sciences
- HS 176: Brainwashing and Modern Mind-Control Techniques
- HS 256: Culture, Personality, and Self
- HS 271: Self as Data
