Head-and-Shoulder-Hunting in the Americas: Lobotomy Photographs and the Visual Culture of Psychiatry
 

Between 1936 and 1967, Walter Freeman, a prominent neurologist, lobotomized as many as 3,500 Americans. Freeman was also an obsessive photographer, taking patients' photographs before their operations and tracking them down years — even decades — later. In this presentation, Miriam Posner details her efforts to understand why Freeman was so devoted to this practice, using computer-assisted image-mining and -analysis techniques to show how these images fit into the larger visual culture of 20th-century psychiatry.

Presenter: Miriam Posner, Coordinator and Core Faculty, Digital Humanities Program, University of California, Los Angeles

Miriam Posner is the Digital Humanities program coordinator and a member of the core DH faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. Posner frequently writes and speaks on digital humanities, as well as on the history of technology, particularly the history of medical imaging. Her book, Depth Perception, on twentieth-century medical filmmaking, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Her Ph.D., from Yale University, is in Film Studies and American Studies.

This public workshop is part of the Polonsky Foundation Graduate Student Workshops in Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods. This event is open to the public. Attendees without an NYU ID card should enter at the guard's desk in Bobst Library. View the full list of public lectures and graduate student workshops in this series on the Digital Scholarship Services blog.