About this Event
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by Whitney E. Laemmli
In the early twentieth century, human bodily movement garnered interest among researchers who were convinced that understanding and controlling it could help govern an increasingly frazzled, fragmented world. Making Movement Modern traces one movement visualization technique, Labanotation, from its origins in expressionist dance, Austro-Hungarian military discipline, and contemporary physiology to its employment in factories and offices a half-century later. Frustrated by societies that seemed plagued by regimentation and alienation, the users of Laban-inspired systems—from artists and scientists to factory owners, politicians, lawyers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and computer scientists—hoped to provide opportunities for individual expression while simultaneously harnessing movement to serve the needs of larger communities, businesses, and states.
Making Movement Modern reveals how Labanotation’s creator, choreographer Rudolf Laban, and his acolytes offered this system to a surprising variety of individuals and groups. It was a technique that promised liberation through expressive movement; it was also a means of organizing fascist displays of pure “Aryan” culture. The book explores these political ambiguities as Laban-based systems entered postwar society in the United States and the United Kingdom, where they were used to document disappearing folk cultures, treat Holocaust survivors, and make even the dullest, most repetitive work feel spiritually meaningful. Central to these efforts were vast programs to collect and store new kinds of personal movement data, and this history also has much to tell us about mass data collection today. This is a book for anyone interested in the relationship between art, science, data, and the human body across the tumultuous twentieth century.
About the Author
(Society of Fellows 2016–2019) is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute. She is a historian of science and technology with a special focus on the relationship between technoscience, the human body, and modern life. Her first book, Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion (University of Chicago Press, 2026), explores how and why human movement became a central object of technoscientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century. Other publications and projects have investigated the material history of the ballet pointe shoe, the sexual rehabilitation of paraplegic WWII veterans, and the relationship between modern technology and religion. Laemmli has also begun work on a new book which explores a contentious set of twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about whether the whole body–and not merely the well-studied brain–played a role in generating, storing, and communicating thoughts and emotions.
About the Speakers
’s (Governing Board, 2023-present) work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the Enlightenment. After being trained as an architect at Istanbul Technical University and Harvard Graduate School of Design, she received her Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at M.I.T. Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), a history of an alternative mode of knowing that gained saliency in the nineteenth century and informed the epistemological logic of modernism in the German-speaking world.
, Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University, focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard (1994, 2000) and an M.Phil. from Cambridge, after which he taught at Columbia for twenty-three years. Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present.
(Society of Fellows 2025-2028) received her PhD in French, with Designated Emphases in both New Media and Renaissance & Early Modern Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2025. Prior to matriculation at UC Berkeley, she received degrees from Duke University and the École normale supérieure in Paris, France. Her current book project, Gestures of Enlightenment: Theatricality and Embodiment in 18th-Century France, investigates the influence the "Age of Reason" exerted on the development of theatrical techniques and literary accounts of bodily expression and gesture in France.
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Event venue & nearby stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
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