Please join us on May 2, 2016 at 2:15 for a talk by Cathy Gutierrez (New York Public Library) entitled: " The Perfect Problem: Eugenics and Utopia in Religious Discourse”. The talk will take place at the Humanities Institute, Austin, Room 301.
For many religious groups, the nineteenth century brought a heady ethos of progress, ranging from technological inventions like the steam engine to utopian ideals in which perfection itself was in reach. The focus on continual improvement in both body and soul created real opportunities for particularly women and an unprecedented public discourse about children and child rearing. In this lecture, Gutierrez looks at two religious groups, the Spiritualists and the Oneida Community, to examine how liberal American religions responded to Darwin's theory of natural selection and how that discourse turned inwards to the breeding of children. Attempting to hurry a perfect future, proponents of eugenics instead betrayed a peril in the heart of progress.
Cathy Gutierrez is a Scholar in Residence at the New York Public Library where she is finishing her new work, The Deviant and the Dead: Spiritualism and the Sciences of Crime. She was a Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College where she taught for eighteen years. Her primary research interests are nineteenth-century Spiritualism and the history of esotericism, particularly where they intersect with ideas of consciousness. She has published on the Free Love movement in America, Theosophy, millennialism, and the Freemasons. Her monograph, Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (Oxford University Press 2009), examines the American legacy of Neoplatonism in popular religious expression and she is the editor several collections, most recently the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling (2015).
The talk is part of the James Barnett Lecture Series in Humanistic Anthropology Religion and Public Discourse. These talks are sponsored by the Public Discourse Project, UConn Humanities Institute and the James Barnett Lecture Series.
For more information, contact: Richard Sosis at richard.sosis@uconn.edu