2024 Warren A. Sawyer Lecture to Feature Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley

Join us for this year's Warren A. Sawyer Lecture featuring a talk with Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley and a reception to follow. This event will be hybrid, free, and open to anyone. It will be held Thursday, November 7, 2024, at 5:15pm in Baruch Auditorium and virtually on Zoom.

Many efforts to develop new biomedical tools do not work out as planned. Even research pursuits that do not produce useful interventions, however, can have a significant impact on scientific institutions, disease control funding, and the intended beneficiaries of these biomedical promises. This talk will examine such effects in the history of vaccine research, specifically research on vaccines that have been incredibly difficult to develop (e.g. for malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS). In looking at what has been generated from the slow, stalled, and ongoing efforts to create these vaccines, this talk will explore what perpetual cycles of hope and disappointment can tell us about what gets valued (and what does not) in the making of biomedicine.

Kirsten Moore-Sheeley is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a Research Assistant Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California. She received her PhD in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University. Her work examines the intersection of global health, biomedicine, and medical technology. She published her first book, Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects, last year with Johns Hopkins University Press. Her new book project, Chasing the Magic Bullet: The History and Consequences of Vaccine Research, examines the history and consequences of research on difficult-to-produce vaccines and has received support from the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

The Waring Library Society sponsors this annual lecture as part of the Waring Library Society Lecture series. The Warren A. Sawyer Lecture is named in memory of Warren Sawyer who served as Director of Libraries at the Medical University of South Carolina from 1968 until his death in November 1989. Mr. Sawyer was born in Bay Shore, New York, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and earned his MS in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He contributed to local and national functions in roles as diverse as Secretary to the University Faculty and member of the Biomedical Library Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine. Mr. Sawyer was a long-time member of the Waring Library Society of which he served as president.

This event is open to the public. Virtual seating is limited and registration is required by Tuesday, November 5, 2024, at 6 PM to reserve your seat and to receive login information.