We cordially invite you to a public lecture by Prof. Sarah Richardson. Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women (Harvard University, USA)

Unfortunately, we have to cancel this event due to the speaker’s unavailability for a family matter. We are planning to reschedule it for spring 2027.

Title: Sex Contextualism in Practice

A contextualist approach to sex-related biology offers an alternative to binary sex essentialist approaches to research design and interpretation.  The talk introduces sex contextualism as a framework to support accountable, rigorous, precise research on sex-related variables that works to enhance health equity.

Sarah S. Richardson is the Aramont Professor of the History of Science and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University, as well as the founder and director of the Harvard GenderSci Lab. In her research, Richardson combines historical and philosophy-of-science analyses with empirical studies of sex- and gender-related phenomena in order to develop methodological approaches for gender-sensitive, context-specific, and socially responsible biomedical research in the life sciences.

Her publications include Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (2013), The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021), as well as the edited volumes Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome (with Hallam Stevens, 2015) and Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (with Sandra Soo-Jin Lee and Barbara Koenig, 2008).

With the concept of Sex Contextualism (2022), Richardson argues that sex should be treated as a context-dependent category that can be flexibly operationalized, and that must be grounded in careful methodological reflection and statistically robust justification.

Information for public DLS Lecture
Thursday, 25 June 2026
16:00–18:00
Location: Campus Lübeck 

Online-attendance via Webex

Information for DLS Seminar
Friday, 26 June 2026
09:00–14:00 (presence)
Location: IMGWF Lecture Hall (Hörsaal) Königstr. 42, 23552 Lübeck

DLS Seminar Programme 

9:45 – 10:00 Coffee & Check-In

10:00 – 10:15 Welcome, introduction 

10:15 – 11:30 Group work

11:30 – 11:55 Break

11:55 – 12:00 Group picture

12:00 – 12:45 Open discussion

12:45 – 13:00 iRTG information

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch