FMS Colloquium Lecture Series: Alice Lovejoy "Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War”

FMS Colloquium Lecture Series: Alice Lovejoy (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature)

"Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War”

This talk traces the chemical and industrial histories that, beginning in the 1910s, made the Eastman Kodak Company  a major military contractor, ultimately bringing the company to the Manhattan Project, for which Kodak operated the Y-12 uranium separation plant at Oak Ridge. Considering the materials from which film was made; the factories in which these materials were transformed into film, weapons, and countless other chemical products; the scientists and workers who transformed them; and the corporate, military, geopolitical, and environmental questions that surrounded these materials and their transformation, the talk traces a history of safety and danger—one that entangled the twentieth century’s two quintessential technologies: film and the atomic bomb.