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Tamar Novick

Research Scholar (Sep 2015-Feb 2024)

PhD

Tamar Novick’s research lies at the intersection of history of technology, environmental history, animal studies, and Middle East studies. Her book, Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (MIT Press, 2023), examines the ways in which technology became means for erecting a mystical past in modern Palestine/Israel. It focuses on the bodies that were involved, literally, in producing honey and milk, and in the reproduction of settler populations: honeybees, cows, sheep, goats, horses, and people.  

Her current fluid of fascination is urine. She explores the process by which bodily waste became central to scientific research and practice after World War I. Fountain of Knowledge focuses specifically on the centrality of human and animal urine to the reproduction sciences. More broadly, she is interested in the ways in which materials gain and lose value across different worlds of practice. Other projects deal with animal theft, and with zoological collections in the Middle East. 

Novick holds a PhD from the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to the MPIWG, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. She recently held a teaching fellowship at the Cohn Institute at TAU, and a guest professorship at the Chair for Science Studies, ETH Zürich. At the MPIWG, she has been leading the Out of Place, Out of Time working group.

Projects

Fountain of Knowledge: How Science Turned Urine into Gold

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The Waste of the Body

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Animal Mobilities

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Bovine Regimes: When Animals Become Technology

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Out of Place, Out of Time

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The Body of Animals

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Selected Publications

Novick, Tamar, ed. (2023). Bovine Regimes: When Animals Became Technologies. Special issue, Technology and Culture 64 (4). Johns Hopkins University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51785.

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Beech, Lucy and Tamar Novick (2023). “Sex Panic and the Productive Infertility of the Freemartin.” Technology and Culture 64 (4): 1071–1092. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.a910995.

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Novick, Tamar (2023). “On the Cover: Speculations with Vaginal Specula.” Technology and Culture 64 (4): 1019–1026. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.a910992.

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Novick, Tamar (2023). “Introducing Bovine Regimes: When Animals Became Technologies.” Technology and Culture 64 (4): 1027–1043. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.a910993.

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