Cancelled: The Chicken Came First: Industrial Poultry Breeding and the Development of the Science of Sex Change

Please note that today's seminar is cancelled. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

A lecture by Dr Gabriel Rosenberg (Yale University) for the Environmental History and International History Research Seminar Series.

Industrial chicken farms played a surprising role in the development of sciences focused on “sex change.”  In the early 20th century, Dr. Hubert Goodale, a poultry geneticist, pioneered procedures in which he successfully grafted ovaries from live hens into juvenile roosters, resulting in what he termed “feminized cockerels” and “hencocks.” These experiments, motivated by improving the profitability of commercial egg production, came to be a signal event in experimental endocrinology. Goodale’s insights would shape knowledge about human sex development and gender medicine. Using Goodale as a launching point, this talk by Dr. Gabriel Rosenberg (Duke University) explores how multispecies ecologies constructed scientific understandings of human sex, gender and sexuality and advanced medical technologies to change sex.

The Environmental History Research Seminar is hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub and the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities.
The Centre for International History draws on the burgeoning insights of scholars in the past few decades that history does not stop at the border of the nation-state.  International history explores comparative approaches and uncovers transnational flows of commerce, politics, culture, and ideas. The Centre's research seminars and public events will display these methods while examining historical developments across the globe especially in the late modern period.

Please let us know if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: bruischk@tcd.ie