Models and Mechanisms

Gabe Siegel is currently finishing a PhD at WUSTL. He and I wrote a paper together, “Phenomenal laws and mechanistic explanations,” that shows how Woodward and Rescorla’s complaints about mechanistic explanation reflect fundamental misunderstandings of the difference between etiological and constitutive laws and the uses of the term “phenomenal” in the literature of the philosophy of science. Gabe also wrote an independent paper, “Scientific Understanding as Narrative Intelligibility” on the value of mechanistic details in rendering explanations intelligible. More of Gabe’s great work can be found here.

Judith Carlisle now a faculty member at the University of Tennessee, has worked on a few papers with me: one on the idea of “levels” as applied to the implicit/explicit distinction, and one (under review) on the character of collective trauma. A fuller survey of her exciting work, with downloads, can be found here.

 

Slavery, St. Louis, and WUSTL

During COVID lockdowns, I began working with others to recover and study the history of enslavement in St. Louis. With the help of over 40 undergraduates (and counting), Kelly Schmidt and I have assembled a database of official records of enslavement in St. Louis from the earliest census records until emancipations. We call it the St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement, and we encourage you to use it for your own research.

In the process of building this database, a number of students have taken on independent projects about individual enslavers, about individual enslaved persons, and about the founders of Washington University, many of whom participated directly or indirectly in the industry of enslavement. Here are some of the important projects that came out of it:

A group of students working with me and Iver Bernstein (History at WUSTL) wrote an essay about the WUSTL’s founder: “WashU’s founder was not an abolitionist: Who was William Greenleaf Eliot?” Authors on this paper included Adam Teich, Aidan Smyth, Cecilia Wright, Detric Hernderson, and Nkemjika Emenike.

Nkemjika Emenike and Iver Bernstein sat for an NPR interview about this work that you can access here.  

Adam Teich and I also did an interview with Joe Madison on The Black Eagle radio show you can listen to here. 

Charlie Fallon worked with Iver Bernstein and me on a project about John Berry Meachum, educator and founding pastor of the First African Baptist Church of St. Louis. Charlie uses resources from SLIDE, from freedom suits, and from regional and religious history to raise shocking questions about why Mecahum enslaved people, why they sued him, and how this fits with his reputation as a great opponent of slavery in the St. Louis region. His research has since inspired work by Betty Lee, also working with Bernstein and me, whose work I hope to post here soon. Check out Charlie’s pioneering effort here. Charlie is about to graduate and is going off to work in a graduate program in nuclear physics.

Cecilia Wright went on to write an honors thesis about Frances McIntosh (“He wore ‘a flaming red silk waistcoat’: Remembering Francis McIntosh”), the first victim of lynching in St. Louis. The main challenge she faced, in my opinion, was to recognize and honor the diversity of conflicting evidential claims we have about the events of the lynching and the context in which they occurred while, at the same time, constructing a relatively linear narrative. Douglas Flowe (History, WUSTL) and I were advisers on this project, which the History department honored with the J. Walter Goldstein Prize for Best Senior Thesis in History. Cecilia, now working at the Center for Brooklyn History, has revised the essay for publication in the Missouri Historical Society Magazine.

Adam Teich wrote an impressive story-map of the life of Lucinda Patterson, a formerly enslaved person who played a key role in the founding and administration of Black schools in St. Louis. This story map was recognized by WUSTL’s Center for Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) as the best undergraduate paper on the topic of race in St. Louis.

Julia Feller produced a story-map of the failed escape attempt of Esther, a woman enslaved by Henry Shaw, founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden

Medical Inequality

Olivia Drees started out writing a thesis on the transgenerational effects of poverty on the brain and ended up writing an extremely important {thesis} on health disparities in St. Louis County. Working in collaboration with local health departments and consulting public records, Olivia built a set of maps of St. Louis County that represent socioeconomic and health disparities across zip-codes. She argues forcefully that no approach to health care in the city of St. Louis can succeed without addressing the kinds of disparities her research displays. And nobody can practice medicine well in this city if they are ignorant of these geographic, economic, and racial constraints on the lives available to us. Olivia is now working in a lab as a gap year before applying to medical schools.

Other

Garrett Yalch worked with me on several independent studies, often to my benefit, but the most impactful work happened when I served as his local advisor in a collaborative project with Sebastian Rotella (at ProPublica) and Clifton Adock (at the Frontier) exposing the illegal marijuana trade in Oklahoma. This work has been discussed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on NPR. You can listen to an overview here. And you can read the articles: 1, 2, 3, and 4.