Princeton University History Department

Erika Milam studies the history of the modern life sciences, specializing in the history of evolutionary theory. Her research currently explores how and why scientists have used animals as models for understanding human behavior. She graduated with a biology major from Carleton College (1996) and subsequently earned an M.S. in Biology (Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology) from the University of Michigan (1999), where she developed an interest in the history of science. She then completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in the History of Science (2006). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, Germany, she taught at the University of Maryland for several years. Professor Milam joined the Princeton History Department in 2012.

Her first book, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins, 2010), focused on evolutionary theory and the connections between biological investigations of reproductive and courtship behavior in animals and humans, from Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century to Sociobiology in the 1970s. Her current research turns to the controversy over instinctual aggression in defining human nature in the 1960s and '70s.

Barely Human: Aggression and the American Search for Human Nature

Barely Human addresses how and why zoological and primatological research on animal behavior came to compete with anthropological studies of human cultures as a source of reliable information about human nature in the 1960s and '70s. Constructed as a series of chronologically parallel stories, this project explores the gendered landscape in which conversations about human nature took place. Thanks to a Scholar’s Award from the National Science Foundation (SES-1057586) Professor Milam was on leave pursuing this research for the 2011-12 academic year.

Masculinities in Science / Sciences of Masculinity

Milam is also working on a co-edited volume with Professor Robert Nye of Oregon State University. Given the ubiquitous presence of men as scientists, engineers, and physicians throughout history, this volume asks what are the consequences of changing the kinds of questions we ask about the scientific enterprise from, for example, “why did scientists think X?” to “why did male scientists think X”? Or, more exactly, what does it add to our understanding of science if we factor in the masculine social and cultural perspectives of time and place? The tools for understanding complex gender dynamics and the importance of gender in the everyday lived experiences of scientists and engineers have been amply demonstrated by the substantial literature on women in science and on gender studies of science. The challenge is to bring to light the ways that scientific masculinities have operated over time, and within different cultures, without re-enacting history by excluding women or femininity from the story.

Professor Milam has previously taught courses in the history of science, the history of biology, gender and science, the history of scientific animals, and science fiction. She will be teaching an undergraduate lecture course on the history of evolutionary thought in Spring 2013.

“Making Males Aggressive and Females Coy: Gender Across the Animal-Human Boundary,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37/4 (2012): 935-959. 

“Salmon, Gulls, and Baboons? Oh My” [Object Lesson], Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4/3 (2011): 361-367. 

“The Equally Wonderful Field: Ernst Mayr and Organismic Biology,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40/3 (2010): 279-317. 

“Beauty and the Beast: Conceptualizing Sex in Evolutionary Narratives,” in Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins, ed. Denis Alexander and Ronald Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 276-301.