Events

The Engel Lectureship is granted annually to a Smith faculty member who has made a significant contribution to his or her field. The lecture was established in 1958 by the National Council of Jewish women in honor of Engel, its onetime president and a 1920 Smith graduate. This year there will be two Engel Lecturers. The 2021–22 Engel Lecturer Susan Levin and the 2022–23 Engel Lecturer Patty DiBartolo.

Spring 2023

The 64th Katharine Asher Engel Lecture
Golden and Gifted: Perfectionism as Hegemony

Patty DiBartolo
Caroline L. Wall ’27 Professor of Psychology

Thursday, April 6, 2023 at 5 p.m. — Leo Weinstein Auditorium, Smith College

In this lecture, Patty DiBartolo shares an emerging paradigmatic shift in her intellectual journey as a perfectionism scholar. This shift is propelled by interdisciplinary engagement, clinical and scientific literatures, collaborations with students, relationships with fellow faculty, and today’s extraordinary historical events.

Patty traces the explosion of research on perfectionism in the last 30 years. The field grew from only a handful of clinical case studies when she was a beginning undergraduate researcher to the tens of thousands of scientific books and articles published today, at a time of what some have called an epidemic of perfectionism. Why is it that the field now knows so much about perfectionism, yet the distress it spawns is more endless than ever? Might there be something we are missing?

Through data and anecdote, Patty traces how psychology’s earliest clinical conceptualizations of perfectionism centered upon privilege, generating a legacy of knowledge relatively silent on the role of race and power. Mapping the ways in which scholars from an array of disciplinary perspectives outside of psychology—including history, political philosophy, and feminist and critical race theories—provided key insights, Patty articulates how the methods, assumptions, and sociocultural and historical influences on the perfectionism field influenced and limited research and practice. To hone and address these limitations, she shares ethnographic and narrative stories in law, literature, and higher education that provide rich description of the ways in which women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals express, experience, and understand perfectionism. Within many elite and selective spaces, perfectionism serves to reinforce and recapitulate current systems of hegemony, especially when inequitable notions of standards and mistakes negatively impact those historically marginalized. As a result, the current atomistic view of perfectionism and the treatment interventions that view informs tragically underestimate how identity as well as broad historical and contextual factors give rise to this trait.

As a next step, Patty offers a currently imperfect draft of an expanded definition of the perfectionism construct. The research and practical suggestions that flow from this revision provide new directions to disrupt perfectionism and prevent it from exacting a toll from so many, especially those historically kept at the margins.

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Patty is the Caroline L. Wall ‘27 Professor of Psychology. She received her A.B. from Smith College in 1989 and returned to join the faculty after earning her doctorate in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Albany. Patty previously served as the inaugural faculty director of the sciences (2013–2017) and the associate dean of faculty/dean for academic development (2017–2020) at Smith.

Her long standing research interests focus on investigating the definition and phenomenology of perfectionism and its relationship to mental health, work first begun while she was an undergraduate. In the last 10 years, Patty’s scholarly interests expanded to include research on effective and equitable programs and pedagogy in higher ed. She has given more than 100 scholarly and poster presentations and published 45 articles and chapters, regularly including undergraduate collaborators. A 4th edition of her edited volume, Social anxiety: Clinical, social, and developmental aspects (Elsevier, 3rd ed., 2014, with Stefan Hofmann) is currently in the works and her therapist manual, Cognitive-behavioral therapy for social phobia in adolescents: Stand up, speak out (2007, with Anne Marie Albano), is part of the Oxford University Press’ Programs that Work series. Patty is often called to present her research to a variety of audiences, including teachers, parents, and mental health professionals, and her work has been featured in a range of mainstream media venues, including Time, Health, Redbook, and Psychology Today. In 2008, Patty was awarded the Smith College Kathleen Compton ’54 and John J.F. Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching and in 2015, she was elected a fellow of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

Fall 2022

The 63rd Katharine Asher Engel Lecture
Are We Essentially Information? Why Humanity’s Future Hinges on Our Answering This Question

Susan Levin
Roe/Straut Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy

Monday, November 7, 2022 at 5 p.m. — Seelye 201, Smith College

In this lecture, Susan Levin will critique transhumanism, whose advocates urge us to pursue “radical” enhancement of humans’ cognitive ability and moral attitudes, through manipulation of genes and the brain. Surpassing us categorically, the possessors of these abilities would qualify as “posthuman.” According to Susan, transhumanism is deeply misguided, both scientifically and philosophically. Transhumanists insist that cutting-edge science will deliver humanity’s self-transcendence. In actuality, their view of our genes and brain rests on a conceptualization of the real and knowable per se as “information,” crystallized in potent metaphors, such as “program” and “code.” Far from manifesting a timeless truth as transhumanists presume, this picture stems from a particular confluence of developments during World War II and its aftermath. Mounting findings in genetics and neuroscience undercut this informational frame and, with it, prospects for the discrete manipulation of capacities that transhumanists single out for elevation.

Ultimately, Susan’s objections to transhumanism are philosophical. Even if the informational picture were correct and posthumans could be “built,” we should not proceed. For, in so doing, we would eliminate what makes existence as a human being distinctive and worthwhile. Moreover, science cannot be “salvific,” as transhumanists presume, for it cannot tell us what humanity’s guiding values and ends should be. Ancient virtue ethics, adapted to liberal democracy, offers a holistic perspective on living well that is radically superior to transhumanism, which, condemning humanity as hopelessly defective, locates humanity’s worth in subserving the emergence of its own “godlike” successors.

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Susan B. Levin is the Roe/Straut Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy. In addition, she is a member of the steering committee for the Five College Program in Culture, Health and Science. Susan received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her B.A. from Pomona College. She has been a member of the faculty at Smith since 1993.

The areas of Susan’s research are bioethics and ancient Greek philosophy. Her most recent book is Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism (Oxford, 2021). The American Philosophical Association featured the book in its Recently Published Book Spotlight. Susan also discusses the book in a post for OUPblog, an article for the Institute of Art and Ideas, and a blog post in the series “The Page 99 Test.” An interview with her appears in the Summer 2021 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

Susan previously published two books in Greek philosophy, Plato’s Rivalry with Medicine: A Struggle and Its Dissolution (Oxford, 2014) and The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2001). In addition, she has published numerous articles in both bioethics and Greek philosophy.

September 14, 2022

A lecture by Lauren Duncan, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology
Rebel with a cause: Psychological motivators of activism
Seelye 201, 5–6 p.m.

October 25, 2022

A lecture by Andy Rotman, Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of Religion
Bargaining Justice: Negotiating Law in an Indian Bazaar
Conference Center, 5–6 p.m.

December 7, 2022

A lecture by Ruth Ozeki, Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities and Professor of English Language & Literature
The Book of Form and Emptiness
Conference Center, 5–6 p.m.

February 15, 2023

A lecture by Andrew Guswa, L. Clark Seelye Professor of Engineering
Ecohydrology: Roots, Canopies, and Nature's Water Infrastructure
Conference Center, 5–6 p.m.

March 9, 2023

A lecture by Bosiljka Glumac, Dwight W. Morrow Professor of Geosciences
Title forthcoming
Conference Center, 5–6 p.m.

April 25, 2023

A lecture by Nnamdi Pole, Harold and Elsa Israel Professor of Psychology
Title forthcoming
Seelye 201, 5–6 p.m.

Spring 2023 Neilson Professor
Anthony Ryan Hatch

Anthony Ryan “Tony” Hatch, Ph.D., is a sociologist and Professor of Science in Society at Wesleyan University, where he is also affiliated with the Departments of African American Studies, Sociology, and the College of the Environment. His research interests include the social aspects of metabolism, the impact of medical technologies on inequalities in health, and social theories of knowledge, power, and culture. Dr. Hatch is the author of two books: Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (Minnesota, 2016) which critiques how biomedical scientists, government researchers, and drug companies use concepts of race and ethnicity to study and treat metabolic syndrome and Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minnesota, 2019) which examines how custodial institutions like prisons, nursing homes, and the US military use psychotropic drugs to manage captive populations in the United States. He recently published research investigates a broad range of topics including the racial dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the structure of prison food systems, and the cybernetic development of the artificial pancreas.

At Wesleyan, Dr. Hatch is the founding co-Director of Black Box Labs at Wesleyan, an experimental undergraduate research lab focused on qualitative and interpretive methods, translating technoscience, and fostering justice. Dr. Hatch also serves on several national and international scientific advisory boards including the National Academies of Sciences study committee named “Creating a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation in Health and Medicine.” Dr. Hatch was the 2021-2022 Robin E. Williams Distinguished Lectureship Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and was selected as a Hastings Center fellow. He received his A.B. in Philosophy from Dartmouth College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Maryland College Park.

Lecture Dates and Titles

In his three Neilson lectures, Hatch will help us articulate a broad range of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies focused on power, health inequalities, and biotechnologies. In the first lecture, he defines three keywords (intersectionality, coproduction, and translation) and describes their theoretical contributions to cultural studies of health and to confronting social inequalities in health and practices of discriminatory design. In the second and third lectures, he will use this approach to examine two seemingly disparate yet fundamentally connected biotechnologies that center the relationships between carcerality, the production of scientific and medical knowledge, and the material transformation of bodies: automated pharmacies and metabolism cages. By tracing patterns of social inequality, discriminatory design, and poor translation in the development and uptake of automated pharmacies and metabolism cages, Professor Hatch hopes to illuminate how social structures change material bodies and social lives.

LECTURE 1. Intersectionality. Coproduction. Translation. Three Keywords for Cultural Studies of Health

Tuesday, February 28 at 5 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room

Intersectionality. Coproduction. Translation. These keywords have traveled from the social sciences, science studies, and humanities towards public health, social medicine and modalities of design practice in a scaled effort to understand patterns of social inequalities in health, unequal divisions of labor and benefit in technology design, and the diverse meanings of scientific knowledge. Yet, the uneven uptake of these keywords into diverse fields, often without sufficient attention to social power, limits their utility for generating scientific and conceptual understandings of inequality that can function as social critique. I locate and compare these keywords in terms of their promise for framing critical questions about the social structures and infrastructures that perpetuate social inequalities in health. I focus on how each framework would have us study unequal power relationships in cultural studies of health, medicine, and biotechnology and think through a few examples to demonstrate these methodological approaches to power. Based on this exegesis, I outline an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the political economies of global biomedicine and design features of technologies that structure social inequalities in health.

LECTURE 2. Automated and Intelligent Pharmacies in Global Technocorrections

Thursday, March 23 at 5 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room
Reception afterward by Provost in the Museum Atrium

Pharmacies in prisons are plagued by chronic management problems including poor record keeping and inventory systems, lack of space and well-trained personnel, and minimal regulatory oversight. Is automation the answer? Automating pharmacies in prisons involves using computer, communication, and robotic technologies to mechanize and digitize and manage the mixing, prescription, and distribution of pharmaceuticals. The market demand for automated pharmacies within global technocorrections is big and expected to grow. In this lecture, I discuss the emergence and design of automated pharmaceutical management systems and describe how they are being used across global technocorrections. I focus my analysis on the INSITE system, the first (2008) automated pharmacy system designed for use in prisons. What problems does pharmacy automation solve and create in prisons? I speculate on how social inequalities and forms of carcerality are patterned through automated data and behavioral management systems, geolocation and confinement strategies, and computerized audit systems. I analyze this case in the broader context of research that evidences the architectural, communication, and biomedical technologies that support infrastructures of carcerality.

LECTURE 3. Metabolism Cages for New World Animals, Small and Large

Tuesday, April 19 at 5:15 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room

In the mid-19th century, metabolism cages emerged as experimental scientific infrastructures in biochemistry and physiology to enable the capture, isolation and control of the metabolic processes unfolding within an animal’s body. By keeping new world animals in a metabolism cage, precisely controlling their environmental inputs and analyzing their biowaste, researchers developed new scientific knowledge about how bodies and environments interact. Metabolism cages allowed researchers to open the black box of metabolism. These new metabolic truths formed the basis of new forms of political governance, scientific norms, and cultural practices all of which transform the matter of/in bodies across species. This lecture explores the design history of metabolism cages as carceral technologies that became part of a broader scheme to establish metabolic dominance over multispecies life. This lecture describes ongoing intellectual and creative collaborations with student researchers and designers in Black Box Labs at Wesleyan University in which we deconstruct black boxes (like automated pharmacies and metabolism cages) by analyzing the power relationships that shape science, medicine, and technology.