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About Lance Thurner

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.

Lance's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Lance:

Science, Technology, and Society August 21, 2020

Destination Anthropocene

Science and Tourism in The Bahamas

Amelia Moore

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Despite being a minor contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, like many other small island nations, The Bahamas’s ecology and society are especially vulnerable to current and expected changes to …
Science, Technology, and Society August 17, 2020

Bring the World to the Child

Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education

Katie Day Good

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across borders, and creating a participatory learning …
Science, Technology, and Society August 14, 2020

The Good Drone

How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Hosted by Lance Thurner
The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has …
Science, Technology, and Society July 6, 2020

Mining Language

Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

Allison Bigelow

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining …
Science, Technology, and Society January 6, 2020

The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico

Matthew D. O'Hara

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Latin America – especially colonial Latin America – is not particularly known for futurism. For popular audiences, the region’s history likely evokes images of book burning, the Inquisition, and other …
Science, Technology, and Society December 27, 2019

An Ecotopian Lexicon

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy

Hosted by Lance Thurner
By choice or not, the catastrophes of global warming and mass extinction task young generations with reorienting human relationships with the earth’s systems, resources, and lifeforms. The extractavist mindset that …
Science, Technology, and Society November 4, 2019

The Birth of Energy

Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work

Cara New Daggett

Hosted by Lance Thurner
In The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke University Press, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the …
Science, Technology, and Society October 24, 2019

Coral Empire

Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

Ann Elias

Hosted by Lance Thurner
With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We …
Science, Technology, and Society October 15, 2019

Allegories of the Anthropocene

Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Hosted by Lance Thurner
While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmopolitan position is …
Science, Technology, and Society September 10, 2019

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer

Hosted by Lance Thurner
This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe …
Science, Technology, and Society August 27, 2019

Ecologics

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Cymene Howe

Hosted by Lance Thurner
This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my …
Science, Technology, and Society June 28, 2019

Infrastructures of Race

Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico

Daniel Nemser

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – …
Science, Technology, and Society June 24, 2019

Enlightened Immunity

Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason

Paul Ramírez

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico. More …
Science, Technology, and Society June 17, 2019

Divine Variations

How Christian Thought Became Racial Science

Terence Keel

Hosted by Lance Thurner
We often think of scientific racism as a pseudo-science of a bygone age, yet in both academic population genetics and popular ancestry testing, the specter of race continues to inflect …
Science, Technology, and Society May 24, 2019

Spaceship in the Desert

Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi

Gökçe Günel

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but …
Science, Technology, and Society April 4, 2019

The Ethnobotany of Eden

Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative

Robert A. Voeks

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream …
Science, Technology, and Society March 12, 2019

Carbon

Kate Ervine

Hosted by Lance Thurner
The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global political …
Science, Technology, and Society January 8, 2019

Documenting Aftermath

Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters

Megan Finn

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that survivors and observers know …
Science, Technology, and Society December 19, 2018

Difference and Disease

Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Suman Seth

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race …
Science, Technology, and Society December 6, 2018

Artisanal Enlightenment

Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France

Paola Bertucci

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French …
Science, Technology, and Society December 3, 2018

Urgency in the Anthropocene

Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to …
Science, Technology, and Society October 22, 2018

Assembling the Tropics

Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700

Hugh Cagle

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea …
Science, Technology, and Society October 3, 2018

Frontiers of Science

Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850

Cameron B. Strang

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created …
Science, Technology, and Society August 2, 2018

Virtuous Waters

Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico

Casey Walsh

Hosted by Lance Thurner
Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday …