During the 1920s, researchers from the New York natural history museum led by Roy Chapman Andrews spent nearly a decade exploring the Gobi Desert in Central Asia. But they were expelled from their base of operations in northern China when the Guomindang party created a new state in Nanjing. Whereas Chinese intellectuals accused American paleontologists of plundering their national heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaur fossils predated the creation of China, they belonged equally to all mankind. I hope to use the ensuing controversy to motivate a critical discussion about knowledge production in a global context.
Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. He recently published a book about dinosaurs, and he is starting a new project, tentatively entitled “The Ice Age: A Global History.”
Date/Time
February 5, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public
Venue/Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center