Iris Clever
Iris Clever Office: Foster Hall 102 Email Interests:

History of science and the body, data and AI, race and racism, gender and sexuality, history of colonialism and empire, modern European history, critical theory
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor

RESEARCH INTERESTS

History of science and the body, data and AI, race and racism, gender and sexuality, history of colonialism and empire, modern European history, critical theory 

BIOGRAPHY

Iris Clever is a postdoctoral fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and an iSchool Research Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her BA and MA in History from Utrecht University and her PhD in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from UCLA. Her research explores the quantification of human bodies in the modern world. She is particularly interested in how the sciences of human measurement have racialized and sexualized human bodies in the past and how these historical practices live on in present-day science, medicine, and society. Her first book project, The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science, is under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press. The book makes visible how measuring skulls for the purpose of studying race, often assumed to be an outdated medical-scientific practice, in fact remained at the forefront of science and technology in the twentieth century. It reveals how the continued use of skull collections, cranial datasets, and statistical tools ensured the survival of race and racism in present-day science and society. 

PUBLICATIONS

“Old Bones in New Databases: Historical Insights into Race, Statistics, and Ancestry Estimation in Anthropology” (with Lisette Jong, forthcoming with American Anthropologist in September 2025)
 
“The Origins of Forensic Anthropology in the United States,” Forensic Anthropology 6: 192-205 (with Nicholas Passalacqua, 2024). https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2023.0011
 
 “Biometry Against Fascism: Geoffrey Morant, Race, and Antiracism in Twentieth-Century Physical Anthropology,” Isis 114: 25-49 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1086/723686
 
“Miriam Tildesley and the Anthropological Politics of Standardizing Racial Measurements,” in: I. Clever, J. Hyun, and E. Burton (eds.), Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in Human Populations Studies, special issue in Perspectives on Science 30: 13-47. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00401
 
“Introduction: People in Motion,” Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in Human Populations Studies, special issue in Perspectives on Science 30: 1-12 (with Jaehwan Hyun and Elise Burton, 2022) https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_e_00400
 
“Beyond Cultural History? The Material Turn and Body History,” Humanities 3: 546-566 (with Willemijn Ruberg, 2014) https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040546