Dr. Robert Brain

Robert Brain’s (History) general teaching and research interests concern science, technology, and medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. He is currently working on two research projects: 1) The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology, Aesthetics, and Avant-Garde Arts ca. 1900, an examination of physiology and early modernism in the arts; 2) Protoplasm: Biography of a Scientific Object, an examination of early attempts to create a “synthetic biology” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  • “Self-Projection: Hugo Munsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship”, SCIENCE IN CONTEXT, vol. 25, pp. 329-353, 2012.
  • “Genealogy of Zang Tumb Tumb: Experimental Phonetics and the Invention of Free Verse and Modernist Sound Art,” Grey Room 43 (Spring 2011), 88-117.
  • “Protoplasmania: Huxley, Haeckel, and the Vibratory Organism in Fin de Siècle Visual Cultures,” in Fae Brauer and Barbara Larson eds., The Art of Evolution:  Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Cultures (University Presses of New England, 2009).
  • “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008), 393-417.
  • The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015.

 

Robert Brain, Department of History
Associate Professor (B.A. UC Berkeley, M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D. UCLA)
Office: Buchanan Tower 1101
Telephone: (604) 822-5409
Email: rbrain@mail.ubc.ca
Website: http://www.history.ubc.ca/people/robert-brain

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