MEDIA CONTACT: Wendy Leopold at (847) 491-4890 or at w-leopold@northwestern.edu

November 4, 2003

New Science of Race Is Topic of Lecture

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Harvard University Professor Evelynn Hammonds will deliver the annual Allison Davis Lecture at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, at Northwestern University. She will speak on "The New Science of Race in the U.S., 1900-1940.”

Sponsored by the department of African American Studies, the free and public lecture will take place in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum, 1870 Campus Drive, on the University’s Evanston campus. It will be followed by a reception.

Hammonds is professor of the history of science and African and American Studies at Harvard. Her research explores medicine, public health and the ways in which race and gender affect science studies. She is author of “The Search for Perfect Control: A Social History of Diphtheria in New York City: 1880-1930.”

A coeditor of “Gender and Scientific Authority,” Hammonds also is author of a chapter titled “Missing Persons: Black Women and AIDS” which she wrote for an anthology of African-American feminist thought. Her forthcoming book from University of North Carolina Press is “The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States.”

Hammonds’ lecture will honor the life and career of Allison Davis, a distinguished University of Chicago professor of anthropology who was among the first African Americans to receive tenure at a non-historically black institution.

For further information about the lecture, contact Northwestern University’s African American studies department at (847) 491-5122.