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WORK TITLE: Ruling Minds
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1983
WEBSITE:
CITY: Charlottesville
STATE: VA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://history.as.virginia.edu/people/erl2z * http://history.as.virginia.edu/sites/history.as.virginia.edu/files/Linstrum%20CV%20public%20F16.pdf * http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/psychology-helped-and-hurt-the-british-empire.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 29, 1983.
EDUCATION:Princeton University, A.B. (summa cum laude), 2006; Harvard University, A.M., 2009, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
New York Review of Books, editorial assistant, 2006-07; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, assistant professor of history and postdoctoral fellow, 2012-14; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, assistant professor of history, 2015-.
MEMBER:North American Conference on British Studies, Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:Mellon fellow, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010-11; article prize, Forum for History of Human Science, and Walter D. Love Prize, best article by a North American scholar in British Studies, North American Conference on British Studies, both 2013, for “The Politics of Psychology in the British Empire, 1898-1960”; Franklin research grant, American Philosophical Society, 2013; Kluge fellowship, Library of Congress, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, edited by Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick, Routledge, 2016. Contributor of articles and reviews to academic journals, including American Historical Review, Contemporary British History, History of the Human Sciences, History Workshop Journal, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Canadian History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Past and Present, and Yale Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Erik Linstrum teaches history at the University of Virginia. His area of expertise is the modern British Empire, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. It was a challenging period for the sprawling empire, which struggled to maintain control over a far-flung and multicultural landscape. British authorities turned to the emerging “science” of psychology for support. Linstrum describes what happened next in Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire.
The presumption of the age pointed to the power of science to justify some long-held practices and to reform others. Psychologists touted their testing methods and research findings as universally applicable to all test groups everywhere. Struggling bureaucrats, well-meaning missionary reformers, and military recruiters faced with accusations of blatant racial bias jumped at the chance to add a layer of objectivity to their policies and procedures, especially in areas where issues of racism were becoming a controversial topic. They learned that practices developed for a predominantly white, educated European culture might not be equally reliable in other parts of the world. Linstrum offers six cases that illuminate his argument that policies intended to reinforce the validity of imperial policy decisions ultimately revealed an opposite reality.
At the turn of the century, trained researchers employed psychological tests to reinforce an assumption of the racial supremacy of Australian colonial authorities over the indigenous inhabitants of the Torres Straits islands under their control. The Porteus Maze test, a nonverbal drawing test intended in part to bypass a need for language fluency, was imposed upon villagers unused to the entire concept of writing by testers already convinced of their own superiority. The conclusions did not bode well for the islanders.
In the 1920s, anthropologist Charles Seligman dispatched a team of missionaries and colonial officials to record the dreams of native people from Africa to India to China to the Pacific Islands. His stated intention was to validate the Freudian theory that the latent (and often erotic) meaning of dreams was universal. Team members bribed reluctant subjects with food and tobacco in order to unearth their most intimate dreams and fantasies, only to learn that they were remarkably similar to those of educated white Europeans—unless an “uncivilized” native chief happened to have violent nightmares about assaults by a British superior.
In the 1930s, intelligence and aptitude tests were employed in India to select the most appropriate candidates to fill exceedingly scarce educational slots or to perform most effectively on the battlefield. They relied on “standardized tests” written in English that failed to account for language differences or variation in cultural norms. They were also loaded, subconsciously or otherwise, in favor of the educated, white test subject. In the final two chapters, Linstrum addresses the potential value of psychology in military strategy, such as the application of psychological analysis to warfare in World War II. He also comments on its ramifications for the present and future of psychological warfare, including the use of torture, a topic that he hopes to explore in greater detail, according to his website at the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, as he continues to ponder “how professional communities in the imperial world—lawyers, doctors, activists, journalists—made sense of torture and other brutal acts.”
In his review of Ruling Minds in New York Magazine Online, Jack Meserve pointed out: “Science is frequently used simply to justify preexisting belief systems and power relationships,” in the case of Linstrum’s examples “to research, rationalize, and control the empire.” He explained: “Even the most modern reformers thought that imperial rule was inevitable, and merely hoped to improve and humanize it.” Catherine Coombs reported in the Canadian Journal of History that Linstrum presents “a story of incredible reach and influence on the one hand, but ambiguity and variety on the other.” Calling Ruling Minds “a rich, captivating” study on a topic too rarely addressed, M. Uebel in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries found it to be an “impressive foundational study” unlikely to be surpassed.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Canadian Journal of History, winter, 2016, Catherine Coombs, review of Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, p. 703.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, M. Uebel, review of Ruling Minds, p. 1547.
ONLINE
New York Magazine Online, http://nymag.com/ (February 16, 2016), Jack Meserve, review of Ruling Minds.
Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia Website, http://history.as.virginia.edu/ (May 29, 2017), author profile.
Erik Linstrum
Assistant Professor
(434) 924-7147
linstrum@virginia.edu
Nau 391
Office Hours: W 2:00-3:30 & by appointment
Linstrum CV public F16.pdf
Field & Specialties
Modern Britain and British Empire; science; European cultural and intellectual
Education
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2012
A.M., Harvard University, 2009
A.B., Princeton University, 2006
Publications
Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016)
“Facts about Atrocity: Reporting Colonial Violence in Postwar Britain,” History Workshop Journal (forthcoming fall 2017)
"Spectres of Dependency: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Decolonization," in Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, ed. Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick (Routledge, 2016)
Current Research
I am interested in the imperial and global dimensions of modern British history. My first book, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, offers a new perspective on the relationship between expertise and empire. Challenging the assumption that scientific knowledge always strengthened imperial rule, the science of mind sometimes fueled protests against racial hierarchies and authoritarian politics. By complicating theories of racial difference, however — by constructing universal models across groups and charting individual variations within them — psychology also opened up new possibilities for governing colonized populations. From the use of mental testing with workers, soldiers, students, and rebels to the role of psychoanalysis in development planning, psychology mattered to imperial rule in surprisingly wide-ranging ways. Ruling Minds traces researchers, missionaries, bureaucrats, and military officers from the Pacific to India, Africa, the West Indies, and Britain itself, exploring the tensions which arose from their attempts to reconcile universal models of laboratory science with the particularities of place and culture. The book has been featured in New York magazine, Libération, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications.
My next project is a study of knowledge about violence in the postwar British Empire. I ask <
Awards & Honors
Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress, 2016
Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan, 2012-15
Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, 2013
Walter D. Love Article Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, 2013
FHHS Article Prize, Forum for History of Human Science, 2013
Harold K. Gross Prize, Department of History, Harvard University, 2012
Mellon Research Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010-11
Courses Taught
I teach surveys of modern British and British imperial history and seminars on a wide range of topics, including colonial knowledge, colonial violence, London, comparative empires, and the human sciences.
ERIK LINSTRUMDepartment of History P.O. Box 400180University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904(434) 924-7147 linstrum@virginia.eduFACULTYAPPOINTMENTSAssistant Professor, Department of History, University of Virginia, January 2015-.Assistant Professor, Department of History, and Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of Michigan, September 2012-December 2014.EDUCATIONPh.D. in History, Harvard University, November 2012.Dissertation: “Making Minds Modern: The Politics ofPsychologyin the British Empire, 1898-1970.”Committee: Maya Jasanoff(chair), David Blackbourn,Caroline Elkins, and Erez Manela.Winner of Harold K. Gross Prize forbest dissertation of the year in Historyat Harvard.A.M. in History, Harvard University, June 2009.Fields of specialization: Britain and its empire since 1750, Germanysince 1750, cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe, history of psychology in modern Europe and its empires.A.B. in History, Princeton University, summa cum laude, June 2006.PUBLICATIONSRuling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016).Chinese translation forthcoming 2017.“Facts about Atrocity: KnowingViolence in the Postwar British Empire,” History Workshop Journal, special issue edited by Felix Driver, Catherine Hall, and Daniel Pick(forthcomingfall 2017).
2“Specters of Dependency: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Decolonization.” In Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, ed. Daniel Pick and Matt Ffytche (Routledge,forthcoming2016).“Britain.”In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, ed. John Stone, et al. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).“The Making of a Translator: James Strachey and the Origins of British Psychoanalysis,” Journal ofBritish Studies 53, no. 3 (July 2014): 685-704.“The Politics of Psychology in the British Empire, 1898-1960,”Past &Present215(May 2012): 195-233.Winner of Walter D. Love Article Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, and FHHS ArticlePrize, Forum for History of Human Science, 2013.“Strauss’s Life of Jesus: Publication and the Politics of the German Public Sphere,” Journal of the History of Ideas71, no. 4 (Oct. 2010): 593-616.REVIEWSAND ESSAYSReview of Michal Shapira, Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Post-War Britain, American Historical Review, forthcoming.Review of Benjamin B. Cohen, In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial South Asia, Journal of British Studies 55, no. 2 (2016): 425-426.Review of Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry, Journal of Canadian History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire50, no. 3 (2015): 626-628.Review of Rhodri Hayward, The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880-1970, Contemporary British History 29, no. 2 (2015): 291-293.Review of Jonathan Toms, Mental Hygiene and Psychiatry in Modern Britain:Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History, Journal of British Studies 53, no. 3 (July 2014): 826-827.Review of Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts, History of the Human Sciences26 (2013): 151-155.“The Critic in Exile: Rediscovering Erich Auerbach,” Yale Review96, no. 1(Jan. 2008):149-157.
3AWARDSAND HONORSWalter D. Love Prize, North AmericanConference on British Studies (for best article by a North American scholar in British studies), 2013.FHHS Article Prize, Forum for History of Human Science(for best recent articlein the field), 2013.Harold K. GrossPrize, Department of History, Harvard University, 2012.Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essay in English (“A Dream Dictionary for the World: Charles Gabriel Seligman and the Globalization of the Unconscious”), HarvardUniversity, 2012.Laurence Hutton Prize (for highest standing in History), Princeton University, 2006.Phi Beta Kappa, Princeton University, 2005.GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPSKluge Fellowship, Library of Congress, 2016.Office of the Vice President for Research and College of Literature, Science, and the Arts research grants, University of Michigan, 2014.Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, 2013.Clive Fellowship, Department of History, Harvard University, 2012.Ernest May Fellowship in History and Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011-12.Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010-11.Krupp Dissertation Research Fellowship, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 2010-11.Mid-Dissertation Grant, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2010.Dissertation Research Grant, Committee on African Studies, Harvard University, 2010.Graduate Summer Travel Grant, Center for European Studies,Harvard University, 2009.Whipple V.N. Jones Graduate Fellowship, Harvard University, 2008.Travel and Research Grant, Department of History, Harvard University, 2008.Stone-Davis Prize Fellowship, Department of History, Princeton University, 2005.INVITED TALKSAND SEMINARSNorth American Conference on British Studies, Washington, D.C., November 2016 (as commentator).Interrogations: Psy Sciences, Coercion, and Confession, workshop at Birkbeck College,
4University of London, July 2016.“Knowledge aboutViolence in the Postwar British Empire.”Center forEuropean StudiesHarvard University, November 2015.“Interrogating The Interrogator: Cyprus, the BBC, and the Performance of Violence.” BirkbeckCollege, University of London, July 2015.Movements andDirections in Capitalism Workshop, University of Virginia, April 2015 (as commentator).Roundtable on Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Las Vegas, March 2015.Science, Technology, and SocietySpeaker Series, University of Michigan, October 2014.History and Psychoanalysis during the Postwar Period, Columbia University, April 2014.Seminar on British History, Newberry Library, Chicago, December 2013.Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on the Archive, History, and Law, Harvard University, October 2013.Kandersteg Seminar, Remarque Institute, New York University, Kandersteg, Switzerland, April 2013.International Graduate Historical Conference, Central Michigan University, April 2013 (as commentator).International Security Seminar, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, May 2012.History and Economics Seminar and International and Global History Seminar, Harvard University, April 2012(as commentator).Psychoanalysis and History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, February 2011. Director’s Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, December 2010.CONFERENCE PAPERS“Subversive Currents and Frustrated Ambitions: Psychology in the British Empire.” American Historical Association meeting, Atlanta, January 2016, and Social Science History Association, Baltimore, November 2015.“Normalizing Chemical Weapons: Tear Gas and State Violence in the British Empire,1919-1981.” Rethinking Modern British Studies, University of Birmingham, July 2015.“The Counterinsurgency Laboratory: Psychological Warfare in the Postwar British Empire.” American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., January 2014.“Psychology after Empire: British Experts and the Postcolonial Personality.” North American Conference on British Studies, Portland, Ore., and History of Science Society, Boston, November 2013.“The Truth about Hearts and Minds: Counterinsurgency and Development in the Postwar British Empire.” Burdens: Writing British History after1945, University of California, Berkeley, April 2012.
5“A Tale of Two Tests: Mental Testing in the British Empire, 1920-1960.” North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, November 2011.“Psychoanalysis as Social Therapy: Strachey, Bloomsburyand the Making of a Translator.” Graduate Student Conference in Book History, Harvard University, May 2010.“The Taming of Instinct: Psychology and the Turn to Development in British Africa,1907-1952.” Mellon Conferenceon Empire, Modernity and the British Social Sciences,University of Chicago, April 2009.COURSES TAUGHTAt University of Virginia:The Emergence of Modern Britain, undergraduate lecture, spring 2015-2017.The British Empire, undergraduate lecture, fall 2015-fall 2016.London: The History of a City, undergraduate seminar, fall 2016.Spies, Scholars, and Scientists: Empire as Information, undergraduate seminar, spring 2016.The Lives of George Orwell, undergraduate seminar, fall 2015.Explaining Colonial Violence, undergraduate seminar,spring 2015.History of the Human Sciences, graduate tutorial, fall 2016.History of the British Empire, graduate tutorial, fall 2015.At University of Michigan:Inventing the Human Sciences, seminar,winter 2014.Imagining Empire in Modern Britain,seminar,winter 2013.Violence, Imperialism, and Human Rights, seminar, fall 2012.As teaching assistantat Harvard University:Germany in the World, 1600-2000, Professor David Blackbourn, spring 2010.Africa and Africans: The Making of a Continent in theModernWorld, ProfessorCaroline Elkins, spring 2010.Europe since World War II, Professor Mary Lewis, fall 2009.LANGUAGESFrench, German, and Italian (reading).
6ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL SERVICEDepartment of History, University of Virginia: graduate placement officer, 2015-16; search committee, Indian Ocean world, 2015-16.Manuscriptsreviewed: University of Chicago Press, Bloomsbury Press, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Contemporary History,Journal of the History of Ideas.Conference panels organized: “Colonial Legacies of Social Expertise in Postcolonial Britain,” North American Conference on British Studies, Portland, Ore., November 2013, and “Global Disciplines, Local Subjects: Transnational Perspectives on the History of the SocialSciences,” North American Conference on British Studies, Denver, November 2011.Steering Committee, “Hidden Persuaders? Brainwashing, Culture, Clinical Knowledge and the Cold War Human Sciences,” Wellcome Trust project directed by Daniel Pick, 2014-19.OTHER EMPLOYMENTEditorial Assistant, New York Review of Books,2006-2007.
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1
ERIK LINSTRUM
Department of History
P.O. Box 400180
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
(434) 924
-
7147
linstrum@virginia.edu
FACULTY APPOINTMENTS
Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Virginia, January 2015
-
.
Assistant Professor, Department of History, and Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of
Michigan, Septemb
er 2012
-
December 2014.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in History, Harvard University, November 2012. Dissertation: “Making Minds Modern: The
Politics of Psychology in the British Empire, 1898
-
1970.” Committee: Maya Jasanoff (chair), David
Blackbourn, Caroline Elkins
, and Erez Manela. Winner of Harold K. Gross Prize for best dissertation of
the year in History at Harvard.
A.M. in History, Harvard University, June 2009. Fields of specialization: Britain and its empire since
1750, Germany since 1750, cultural and int
ellectual history of early modern Europe, history of
psychology in modern Europe and its empires.
A.B. in History, Princeton University,
summa cum laude
, June 2006.
BOOKS
Age of Emergency:
Everyday
Violence at the End of Empire
(in progress).
Ruling
Minds: Psychology in the British Empire
(Harvard University Press, 2016). Chinese translation
forthcoming 2017.
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
“Domesticating Chemical Weapons: Tear Gas and the Militarization of Policing in the British
Imperial World, 1919
-
198
1
” (under review).
2
“The Case Study in the Colonies,”
History of the Human Sciences
, special issue on John Forrester’s
Thinking in Cases
(forthcoming 2018).
“Facts about Atrocity: Reporting Colonial Violence in Postwar Britain,”
History Workshop Journal
,
special issue on “Denial” edited by Felix Driver, Catherine Hall, and Daniel Pick (forthcoming fall
2017).
“Specters of Dependency: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Decolonization.” In
Psychoanalysis in the Age of
Totalitarianism
, ed. Daniel Pick and Matt Ffy
tche (Routledge, 2016).
“Britain.” In
Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
, ed. John Stone, et al. (Wiley
-
Blackwell, 2016).
“The Making of a Translator: James Strachey and the Origins of British Psychoanalysis,”
Journal of
British St
udies
53, no. 3 (July 2014): 685
-
704.
“The Politics of Psychology in the British Empire, 1898
-
1960,”
Past & Present
215 (May 2012): 195
-
233. Winner of Walter D. Love Article Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, and
FHHS Article Prize, Forum for History of Human Science, 2013.
“Strauss’s
Life of Jesus
: Publication and the Politics of the German Public S
phere,”
Journal of the History
of Ideas
71, no. 4 (Oct. 2010): 593
-
616.
REVIEWS AND ESSAYS
“Downsizing Empire,” review essay on Antoinette Burton,
The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to
Modern British Imperialism
, Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy (eds
.),
How Empire Shaped Us
, and
Bernard Porter,
British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t
,
Journal of World History
(in progress).
Michal Shapira,
Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Post
-
War Britain
,
American Historical Review
122 (2017): 254
-
255.
Benjamin B. Cohen,
In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial South Asia
,
Journal of British Studies
55,
no. 2 (2016): 425
-
426.
Matthew M. Heaton,
Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the
Globalization
of Psychiatry
,
Journal of Canadian History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire
50, no. 3
(2015): 626
-
628.
Rhodri Hayward,
The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1880
-
1970
,
Contemporary
British History
29, no. 2 (2015): 291
-
293.
Jonathan Toms
,
Mental Hygiene and Psychiatry in Modern Britain:
Science, Technology and Medicine in
Modern History
,
Journal of British Studies
53, no. 3 (July 2014): 826
-
827.
Daniel Pick,
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts
,
History of the Huma
n Sciences
26 (2013): 151
-
155.
“The Critic in Exile: Rediscovering Erich Auerbach,”
Yale Review
96, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 149
-
157.
AWARDS AND HONORS
Walter D. Love Prize, North American Conference on British Studies (for best article by a North
American sc
holar in British studies), 2013.
3
FHHS Article Prize, Forum for History of Human Science (for best recent article in the field), 2013.
Harold K. Gross Prize, Department of History, Harvard University, 2012.
Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essay in English (“A Dr
eam Dictionary for the World: Charles Gabriel
Seligman and the Globalization of the Unconscious”), Harvard University, 2012.
Laurence Hutton Prize (for highest standing in History), Princeton University, 2006.
Phi Beta Kappa, Princeton University, 2005.
GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress, 2017
-
18.
Eurias Fellowship, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 2017
-
18 (declined).
Office of the Vice President for Research and College of Literature, Science, and the Arts research grants,
University of Michigan, 2014.
Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, 2013.
Clive Fellowship, Department of History, Harvard University, 2012.
Ernest May Fellowship in History and Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
2
011
-
12.
Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2010
-
11.
Krupp Dissertation Research Fellowship, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 2010
-
11.
Mid
-
Dissertation Grant, Weatherhead Center for Interna
tional Affairs, Harvard University, 2010.
Dissertation Research Grant, Committee on African Studies, Harvard University, 2010.
Graduate Summer Travel Grant, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 2009.
Whipple V.N. Jones Graduate Fellowship, Harv
ard University, 2008.
Travel and Research Grant, Department of History, Harvard University, 2008.
Stone
-
Davis Prize Fellowship, Department of History, Princeton University, 2005.
INVITED TALKS AND SEMINARS
North American Conference on British Studies, W
ashington, D.C., November 2016
(as commentator).
Interrogations: Psy Sciences, Coercion, and Confession, workshop at Birkbeck College,
University of London, July 2016.
“Knowledge about Violence in the Postwar British Empire. ” Center for European Studies
Harvard University, November 2015.
“Interrogating
The Interrogator
: Cyprus, the BBC, and the Performance of Violence.” Birkbeck
College, University of London, July 2015.
Movements and Directions in Capitalism Workshop, University of Virginia, April 2015
(as
commentator).
Roundtable on Peter Mandler’s
Return from the Natives
, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Las
Vegas, March 2015.
Science, Technology, and Society Speaker Series, University of Michigan, October 2014.
4
History and Psychoanalysis d
uring the Postwar Period, Columbia University, April 2014.
Seminar on British History, Newberry Library, Chicago, December 2013.
Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on the Archive, History, and Law, Harvard University,
October 2013.
Kandersteg Seminar, Remarque Institute, New York University, Kandersteg,
Switzerland, April 2013.
International Graduate Historical Conference, Central Michigan University, April 2013
(as commentator).
International Security Seminar, Kennedy School of Go
vernment, Harvard University, May 2012.
History and Economics Seminar and International and Global History Seminar,
Harvard University, April 2012 (as commentator).
Psychoanalysis and History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, February 201
1.
Director’s Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, December 2010.
CONFERENCE PAPERS
“Subversive Currents and Frustrated Ambitions: Psychology in the British Empire.” American Historical
Association meeting, Atlanta, January 2
016, and So
cial Science History Association, Baltimore,
November 2015.
“Normalizing Chemical Weapons: Tear Gas and State Violence in the British Empire, 1919
-
1981.”
Rethinking Modern British Studies, University of Birmingham, July 2015.
“The Counterinsurgenc
y Laboratory: Psychological Warfare in the Postwar British Empire.” American
Historical Association, Washington, D.C., January 2014.
“Psychology after Empire: British Experts and the Postcolonial Personality.” North American
Conference on British Studies
, Portland, Ore., and History of Science Society, Boston, November 2013.
“The Truth about Hearts and Minds: Counterinsurgency and Development in the Postwar British
Empire.” Burdens: Writing British History after 1945, University of California, Berkeley,
April 2012.
“A Tale of Two Tests: Mental Testing in the British Empire, 1920
-
1960.” North American Conference
on British Studies, Denver, November 2011.
“Psychoanalysis as Social Therapy: Strachey, Bloomsbury and the Making of a Translator.” Graduate
St
udent Conference in Book History, Harvard University, May 2010.
“The Taming of Instinct: Psychology and the Turn to Development in British Africa, 1907
-
1952.”
Mellon Conference on Empire, Modernity and the British Social Sciences, University of Chicago, A
pril
2009.
COURSES TAUGHT
At University of Virginia:
The Emergence of Modern Britain, undergraduate lecture, spring 2015
-
spring 2017.
The British Empire, undergraduate lecture, fall 2015
-
fall 2016.
5
London: The History of a City, undergraduate seminar,
fall 2016.
Spies, Scholars, and Scientists: Empire as Information, undergraduate seminar, spring 2016.
The Lives of George Orwell, undergraduate seminar, fall 2015.
Explaining Colonial Violence, undergraduate seminar, spring 2015.
History of the Human Scie
nces, graduate tutorial, fall 2016.
History of the British Empire, graduate tutorial, fall 2015.
At University of Michigan:
Inventing the Human Sciences, seminar, winter 2014.
Imagining Empire in Modern Britain, seminar, winter 2013.
Violence,
Imperialism, and Human Rights, seminar, fall 2012.
As teaching assistant at Harvard University:
Germany in the World, 1600
-
2000, Professor David Blackbourn, spring 2010.
Africa and Africans: The Making of a Continent in the Modern World, Professor Car
oline Elkins, spring
2010.
Europe since World War II, Professor Mary Lewis, fall 2009.
LANGUAGES
French, German, and Italian (reading).
ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Program Committee, North American Conference on British Studies, 2017
-
.
Steer
ing Committee, “Hidden Persuaders? Brainwashing, Culture, Clinical Knowledge and the Cold War
Human Sciences,” Wellcome Trust project directed by Daniel Pick, 2014
-
19.
Manuscripts reviewed: University of Chicago Press, Bloomsbury Press,
Journal of Britis
h Studies
,
Journal of Contemporary History
,
Comparative Studies in Society and History
,
Journal of the History of
Ideas
,
Canadian Journal of History
.
Conference panels organized: “Colonial Legacies of Social Expertise in Postcolonial Britain,” North
Ameri
can Conference on British Studies, Portland, Ore., November 2013, and “Global Disciplines, Local
Subjects: Transnational Perspectives on the History of the Social Sciences,”
North American Conference
on British Studies, Denver, November 2011.
Graduate pla
cement officer, Department of History, University of Virginia, 2015
-
17.
6
Search committee, Indian Ocean world, Department of History, University of Virginia, 2015
-
16.
OTHER EMPLOYMENT
Editorial Assistant,
New York Review of Books
,
2006
-
2007.
Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire
Catherine Coombs
Canadian Journal of History. 51.3 (Winter 2016): p703.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
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Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, by Erik Linstrum. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2016. 320 pp. $39.95 US (cloth).
Erik Linstrum's history is one of contradiction: of psychological techniques adopted with the aim of aiding control in the British Empire, but also of their continual ability, through unexpected findings, to undermine it. This is <> Linstrum challenges the Saidian notion that expertise aided and abetted the drawing of lines of difference, instead following Susan Bayly's work on caste in the subcontinent to indicate the existence of a disputed intellectual discussion as opposed to a canon of expertise. The book demonstrates how often psychologists highlighted the universality of human experience and behaviour, cutting across racial hierarchies rather than producing research that consistently supported the plans and ideology of the colonial state. Documenting shifting and personal networks, Linstrum's overall argument offers not so much the impression of a coherent system of control as an impression of variety. What the book highlights above all is a diverse and dynamic relationship between psychological methods and the colonial state in which expectations were often thwarted but the promise of efficiency and rationalism kept psychology in vogue over the course of a century.
The book develops chronologically from experiments undertaken in the Torres Strait Islands in the 1890s to efforts to understand the insurgencies of the 1950s in Malaya, Cyprus, and Kenya. With only the space of one monograph to survey the application of psychology throughout the British Empire, the approach is necessarily one that provides snapshots taken from different areas of Empire at different times. This also valuably highlights variety and avoids the risk of portraying imperial systems in too coherent or systematic a light. Linstrum seeks to emphasize networks, not just within the British Empire but also to include the many other adherents and drivers of psychological discourse, notably in the United States. The primary network under discussion, then, is of western psychology and its observations of "the rest." However, Linstrum works against the idea of western "experts" working in tandem with the colonial state to produce and support government through his central argument: that psychology produced unexpected conclusions and challenged existing thinking throughout its relationship with the British Empire.
The arguments are illustrated through the case studies at the heart of each of the six chapters. These are richly personal, contextualizing the work of the different researchers within their backgrounds and preconceptions to highlight the multiplicity of influences and varied scientific conclusions underlying the discourse of psychology in Empire. Chapter one documents the experiments begun in 1898 in the Torres Strait by a group of researchers seeking to compare mental life of different peoples through tests of perception. Although highlighting that the presumption of racial superiority remained a potent one, Linstrum indicates how the work relied upon close human relationships between scientist and "native"; indeed, this closeness was emphasized as adding to the reliability of the test results. The differences in personality and normal human interactions that resulted effected a challenge, rather than a confirmation, to prevailing notions of separation and difference. Similarly, in chapter two, the close study of Charles Seligman's comparative research into dream imagery concludes that the results demonstrated not the difference between the supposedly "civilized" and "uncivilized" worlds, but their shared concepts of dreams as mystical or predictive. Between them, these opening chapters show an undoing of the idea of a "simple native mind," laying the groundwork for more intensive research into the native unconscious.
Chapters three and four consider the uses and challenges of mental and aptitude testing. Chapter three highlights how, as is so often the case, scientific interest followed moral beliefs, as the introduction of intelligence testing in India was considered a method that would provide efficiency and fairness in the distribution of limited educational places. The design of these supposedly depoliticized and culturally neutral tests, however, was heavily inflected with the pernicious presumptions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Similarly, in chapter four, the discussion of aptitude tests for military candidates in World War II emphasizes the focus on "character" above "intelligence," and the continued belief that an "old hand" could judge this by eye.
Chapters five and six illustrate the established reliance on psychological "experts" by the end of World War II, with their methodologies seen as key to understanding and infiltrating collective resistance to Empire. While demonstrating the pervasive influence of and belief in psychological method though, Linstrum's concluding chapters indicate the continued role of rumour, stereotype, and violent torture underlying a theoretical shift to psychological warfare. Linstrum argues that rather than providing answers and resolution, psychology's enormous and ambiguous promise bought it a consistent place in the British colonial world, even as individuals and their research exposed unexpected conclusions and challenges to existing thinking. Across changing circumstances, this book highlights a consistent but contradictory discourse underlying the late British Empire.
DOI:10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
Catherine Coombs, University of Leeds
Linstrum, Erik. Ruling minds: psychology in the British empire
M. Uebel
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1547.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Linstrum, Erik. Ruling minds: psychology in the British empire. Harvard, 2016. 309p index ISBN 9780674088665 cloth, $39.95; ISBN 9780674089150 ebook, contact publisher for price
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February 16, 2016 10:10 am
How Psychology Helped Support — and Subvert — the British Empire
By Jack Meserve
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Members of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, 1898 (Charles Seligman is second from the left). / Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
If you were told you’d have to take an intelligence test, what would you expect? Maybe some tests of reading and math, some pattern recognition? Probably not this:
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On the other hand: It doesn’t seem too hard, right? Not totally unfair? But here’s the catch: Wobbling your pencil and touching the borders will dock points, and moving toward a dead end will dock even more. Also, the test-taker is already convinced that you are less intelligent than he is, and is looking to prove this belief in a “scientific” way. Oh — and his tribe swept in a while ago and conquered your own.
That’s more or less what happened in real life. The Porteus Maze test, as it’s known, was administered throughout the world from the 1910s to the 1930s. It was created by an Australian psychology professor and used as a means of establishing the superiority of white Australians over their aboriginal counterparts.
That maze, and that dark story behind it, proves the point at the heart of Erik Linstrum’s Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire: All too often we draw a clean, hard line between science and dogma, between reforming unjust structures and validating them. In reality, <
With hindsight, it’s easy to think of psychology in the first half of the 20th century as an art rather than a science, and its place of practice as the psychoanalyst’s recliner, with the patient exploring the nature of castration anxiety, rather than as a tool embraced by government and academia. But Ruling Minds takes the reader through the largely forgotten history of how Great Britain tried to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its empire through the new “mind sciences,” a broad category that included personality and intelligence testing as well as the theories of Jung and Freud. From Uganda to India to Burma, government bureaucrats, academics, missionaries, and anthropologists used tests like Porteus’s to try <
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One such effort was undertaken by the anthropologist Charles Seligman, who tried to create a “global dream dictionary.” Seligman, a professor at the London School of Economics, worked with nearly two dozen missionaries and colonial officials to interview colonial subjects. This was no half-baked operation: He collected dreams from natives of Nigeria, Malaya, China, the Solomon Islands, Sudan, Uganda, India, and the Gold Coast. Many subjects had to be bribed with tobacco and rice — understandable since they were being asked to reveal intimate dreams to strange white bureaucrats from a foreign land. The task wasn’t made easier by the Freudian flavor of Seligman’s investigation. One of his employees, told to collect information on anal, oral, and genital behavior in children (like thumb-sucking) to supplement the dreams, wrote back, “It is dreary beyond words and unappetizing to apply anything like statistical methods to the execretory habits of the young, but I will do my best …”
This all sounds absurd, but it had real effects. At the time, natives in colonial holdings weren’t seen as having the deep inner life that psychoanalysis was supposed to plumb. As Linstrum puts it, “the myth of the ‘happy-go-lucky’ native, too simple-minded to experience depression or neurosis, was pervasive.” Sure, psychoanalysis made sense in the British salon, but not on the African plains. Seligman’s dream collection, as unscientific as it seems today, proved this wrong. Native people, it turned out, dreamed of sex, of dying, of falling — the same dreams as everyone else. Some were disturbing: One Ugandan chief dreamed over and over of being beaten by his British superior. These inner experiences led Seligman to say on the BBC, “The unconscious of all these races is qualitatively much the same” — a big deal at the time, puncturing as it did one of the myths of white supremacy.
The British government also applied the burgeoning science of psychology to the recruitment of Indian soldiers by introducing so-called “officer selection boards.” The British selection of soldiers in India had long been crudely racist, prizing Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs as supposedly “martial races” and shunning other ethnic groups. But the demands of World War II meant soldiers were desperately needed, so the Crown decided to implement boards of bureaucrats, psychologists, and psychiatrists to recruit and interview officer candidates. These applicants, if chosen, would then need to pass officer training.
This might sound pretty straightforward, but introducing psychological and personality testing into soldier recruitment was a real innovation at the time. Hubert Vinden, the British official who created these boards, introduced modern ideas like using standardized exams instead of the gut feelings of superiors. (One old test would check if a soldier “managed not to flinch when an inflated paper bag was burst behind his back.”) The idea was to weed out those likely to fail officer training, and ensure that unstable men didn’t make their way into the army. The local Indian press was enthusiastic about these changes, hoping that some fairness would finally be extended to Indian citizens.
Unfortunately, this modern vision hit some bumps. Only 27 percent of Indians selected via the boards ended up passing officer training, compared to over half of British candidates. Some of this was undoubtedly racism, but details of the process also bear the hallmarks of psychology’s failures in that era. The tests were standardized, but that didn’t mean the results weren’t completely and utterly subjective. For instance, in a “Thematic Apperception Test,” a recruit would see a picture — say, a woman turned away from a young man — and be told to write a story about it. If candidates wrote “stories about a mother objecting to her son’s decision to marry” that showed a worrisome sign of “parental dependence.” If they depicted “protagonists as passive victims of fate,” they were likely “an ineffectual person with little drive.” These kinds of interpretation were in vogue, but they probably weren’t much better at determining worthy candidates from lacking ones than the paper-bag test.
Vinden, the army official, comes across as as enlightened as anyone in the book. He believed strongly that the psychological makeups of British and Indian people were identical, and even hid religion and caste status from the interviewers to try to prevent bias. But this desire for fairness and cross-country comparability led him to import the same tests used in Britain. This meant the questions and directions were in English, applicants had to answer in English, and even the time requirements on word-association tests remained the same, despite the applicants speaking a non-native language.
This gets at the fundamental tension in Ruling Minds: As ridiculous as collecting dreams or submitting soldiers to Jungian word-association tests might sound, the men and women doing this work were trying to be reformers. They were often the only ones arguing, No, there’s no such thing as “martial races” and Yes, mental states really are identical in Africans and Europeans. But they were also working, formally or informally, for an empire that treated their subjects as subhuman. Out of that crooked timber, it was impossible for them to really be “fair” or just. There are very few heroes in these stories. Some were definite villains: Stanley Porteus, the maze creator, was a virulent racist and eugenicist who concocted reasons for why those Australian aborigines were outscoring British children at his test. Linstrum points out that <
And it’s not like these problems have passed. Academics and psychologists have always had, and always will have, a fraught relationship with governments that give them funding and influence. At worst, this can lead to the work psychologists have done supporting the torture of U.S. terror detainees. But it can also support research like the randomized controlled trials going on in developing countries to test programs like deworming or vaccination incentives, which have done much good. The history of this tension — between embracing science’s ability to improve people’s lives and being aware of its tendency to reinforce existing hierarchies — is a reminder that the line isn’t always so clear.