Erika Lorraine Milam is the Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, where she is a member of the History Department and the Program in the History of Science.
Currently obsessed with the history of fieldwork & long-term research in behavioral ecology
About
Professor Milam has published widely on the history of evolutionary theory and animal behavior. Her work explores how scientists and public audiences have used animal exemplars to naturalize particular behaviors in humans, from aggression to sex. Her current research charts the post-WWII efflorescence of long-term field sites to study animal behavior, the consolidation of behavioral ecology as a discipline, and the networks of collaboration that sustain field research in far flung locales. It is tentatively titled The Hyena & the Jay: Long-Term Research and the Birth of Behavioral Ecology.
Milam graduated with a biology major from Carleton College and earned an M.S. in Biology (Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology) from the University of Michigan, where she also discovered history of science as an academic field. She then completed a Ph.D. in History of Science at the University of Wisconsin. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, Germany, she taught at the University of Maryland for several years before joining the faculty at Princeton.
Erika Milam © Maurice Weiss
Milam's first book, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), examined connections between biological investigations of courtship behavior in animals and humans through the lens of sexual selection, from Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century to sociobiology in the 1970s. Looking for a Few Good Males has been translated into Slovak as Zopár Správnych Chlapov, trans. Daniel Levický Archleb (Bratislava: Hadart Publishing, 2019) and into Simplified Chinese as 众里寻他 - 挑剔的雌性生物, trans. LI Liang and HOU Dongxia (Liaoning Science and Technology Press, 2024).
Milam’s second monograph, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019) charted the public debates over cultures of masculinity, instinctual aggression, and definitions of human nature in the 1960s and '70s. Creatures of Cain was awarded the 2020 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize by the History of Science Society (you can read the citation here: .pdf) and was shortlisted for the 2020 Pickstone Prize of the British Society for the History of Science.
With Robert A. Nye, Milam has co-edited Scientific Masculinities (Osiris, Vol. 30, 2015). With Joanna Radin and Fred Gibbs, she co-created the public-facing open-access website Histories of the Future. With Suman Seth, she co-edited Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex, and Human Nature, for BJHS Themes (Vol. 6, 2021: open access), and is collaborating with Banu Subramaniam and Etienne Benson on a project exploring Abundance and Loss: Narratives of Diversity in Nature.
Milam is grateful that her current research project on long-term studies in behavioral ecology has been supported by the Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Biodiversity Research Challenge, under the auspices of the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.
Writing
A full list of publications (included as .pdfs when legally allowed) and a current cv are available here.
Mentoring
I have the pleasure of working with a wonderful community of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. You can read more about their research here.
Teaching
Syllabi and descriptions of recent courses for undergraduate and graduate students.
Speaking
A list of recent academic talks, podcast appearances, and distinguished lectures.