After working for a decade as a carpenter in London, New York and San Francisco, Cathy Gere undertook an M.Phil., Ph.D. and post-doc in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. Her first teaching job was at the University of Chicago, and she arrived at UCSD in the Fall of 2007. She is primarily interested in the history of the human sciences, especially archaeology and neuroscience, and she teaches classes in the histories of medicine, medical ethics, evolutionary theory and biology. Professor Gere has published on a wide range of topics including demonology, brain-banking and the sexing of bones in archaeological digs. In 2006 Harvard University Press brought out her first book, The Tomb of Agamemnon, a cultural history of the ruins of the Bronze Age city of Mycenae, which came out in a Greek edition the following year. The University of Chicago Press published her second book, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, (2009), which uncovers the manifold connections between archaeology, psychoanalysis and modernist aesthetics. Her post-doctoral work was in the history and ethics of the neurosciences, and in 2004 she co-edited a special issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science on the ‘Brain in a Vat’, which examined the famous philosophical thought experiment from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including the history of technology, film studies, aesthetics and ethics. Currently she is working on the relationship between neuroscience and political philosophy.
Cathy Gere's talk is part of the Intellectual Workshop series.