Research Interests: History of biology; Postwar U.S. history; Cold War science; history of the American family; 1970s U.S. activism; feminist science studies.

An anthropologist by training, Nayanika’s research brings together histories of Cold War science, postwar biological determinism, and science critique. Her dissertation re-examines the 1970s-1980s US sociobiology debate as a site from which emerged a political critique of science that retheorized scientific objectivity and value neutrality. The sociobiology debate was prompted by the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. Amid political disruption in the Cold-War United States, Sociobiology popularized gendered evolutionary theories of male dominance, xenophobia, hierarchy, and violence. When critics in an organization called Science for the People mobilized their resources to oppose what they argued was a return to Nazi genetic determinism, a larger conflict, that lasted well into the 1980s, ensued between two camps of scientists who clashed over whether or not science could be racist, sexist, and/or elitist. In documenting the opposition to sociobiology, Nayanika posits that a new tradition of science critique emerged from the efforts of scholars and non-university actors embedded in feminist, antiwar, labor, and antiracist activism in the 1970s. She ends this history in the late 1980s, when, from this critique, emerged reformulations of scientific objectivity and value neutrality. Ultimately, she argues that the sociobiology debate is not only a story of postwar genetic determinism from which emerged a powerful tradition of science critique but also that it offers a window into understanding the place of American science in a Cold-War, postcolonial world order. Her work has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. During 2023-24, she will be based at the American Philosophical Society as the John C. Slater Predoctoral Fellow in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Presentations:

“Seeing Red: Biological Determinism and Anticommunism against Science Critique in Postwar United States.” History of Science Society (HSS) Annual Meeting, Portland OR, November 9-12, 2023.

“Sociobiology, Racism, and Anticommunism: Science for the People versus the Committee Against Racism in Postwar United States.” Science Against Racism in the Twentieth Century: Contexts, Debates, Engagements, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy, October 26-27, 2023.

“Evolutionary Theory, Gender, and Nation: Biological Determinism in the Service of the Postwar American Family.” Gender and Intersectionality in Science, Technology, and Medicine: Historical Perspectives, University of Granada, Spain, June 2-3, 2023.

“A Crisis of Critique: Science for the People and Sociobiology.” Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology (JAS-Bio), Yale University, New Haven CT, April 14-15, 2023.

“Exclusion: A History of the Schism between Science and Ideology in Postwar United States.” History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Chicago IL, November 17-20, 2022.

“Sociobiology as Cold War Propaganda: What Can the History of Nuclear Science Offer the History of Organismic Biology.” Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology (JAS-Bio), jointly hosted by Harvard University and MIT, April 8-9, 2022.

“Synthesizing Sexual Selection into Mainstream Evolutionary Theory: Sociobiology vs. Academic Feminism in the History of Biology.” Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology (JAS-Bio), University of Pennsylvania, April 9-10, 2021.

Previous Degrees:

BA (Psychology-Anthropology), St. Xavier's College, Mumbai (India)
MA (Anthropology), Queen's University, Belfast (UK)