Tara Abraham

Campus: Guelph
Office: 1003 MacKinnon Extension
Email: taabraha@uoguelph.ca

Tara Abraham is interested in the history of modern life sciences and human sciences, with particular interests in the history of biology and the history of the sciences of brain and mind in the 20th century, the relationship between the physical and life sciences, and the role of theoretical modeling in science.

She holds an Honours undergraduate degree in Biology from McMaster University (1992) and received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the University of Toronto in 2000. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and taught in the Science and Technology Studies Programme at York University.

Her current work explores the role of cybernetics in the transformation of the sciences of mind and brain in mid-20th-century America and in the emergence of the cognitive sciences, focusing of the work of neurophysiologist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Her general interests are in the history of 20th-century American science, the history of the philosophy of science, interdisciplinarity, scientific practice, and gender and science.

Selected Publications

  • [forthcoming] “The role of negative feedback in cybernetics” to appear in Peter Hammerstein, Manfred D. Laubichler, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.) Regulation: Historical and Current Themes in Theoretical Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • 2004 “Nicolas Rashevsky’s mathematical biophysics” Journal of the History of Biology 37(2): 333-385.
  • 2003 “From theory to data: representing neurons in the 1940s” Biology and Philosophy 18(3): 415-426.
  • 2003 “Integrating mind and brain: Warren S. McCulloch, Cerebral Localization, and Experimental Epistemology” Endeavour 27(1): 32-36.
  • 2002 “(Physio)logical circuits The intellectual origins of the McCulloch-Pitts neural networks” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 38(1): 3-25.