Professor Joe Cain publishes blog posts on many subjects related to his research interests.
In a recent blog post on Lessons About Renaming University Buildings, I developed some key concepts to focus discussions about renaming commemorative objects at universities. The aim was to assist in building a strategy for More…
Summary: The argument builds on several steps. First, naming is a commemorative act. These acts support heritage stories. Conflicts over renaming really are conflicts between heritage stories. These conflicts cannot be resolved by appealing to More…
English Heritage commemorates Charles Darwin with a blue plaque located on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, central London. The “Darwin plaque” is fixed to the Darwin Building, one of the substantial science buildings of University College More…
Colleagues at the University of Puget Sound (UPS) have developed a course to explore the history and legacy of eugenics in their community. This draws on an interdisciplinary team of tutors and some highly energetic students. More…
Francis Galton was a bad piece of work. His racist, nativist, supremacist views are antithetical to UCL’s vision and values. He is no role model for me. He should be no role model for you. More…
The subject of eugenics is back on the agenda for historians of science. I’ve been involved in the UCL Inquiry on the history and legacies of eugenics within that institution. My academic department has reviewed More…
Did Professor Karl Pearson praise Hitler and Nazi ‘race hygiene’ programmes? Yes, he did. He did this in 1934, at a dinner to mark his retirement the previous year from University College London (UCL). Pearson More…
A historian colleague of mine asked if I knew anything about the genealogy of UCL’s first Professor of Chemistry, Edward Turner (1796-1837). My colleague said he had heard a report that Turner was mixed race, More…
In September 2019 I gave a paper, “Eugenics, Karl Pearson, and the Legacy of Anglo-Saxon Nativism at UCL,” at a conference organised by the Research Group on University History held at the University of Manchester. More…
In the course of my own research into activities that led to something like a “Department of Eugenics” at University College London (UCL) , I returned over and again to one work: “The origins and More…
Copyright 2021 Professor Joe Cain
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