Erika Milam is an historian of science whose research investigates the construction and maintenance of boundaries between human and animal in research on evolutionary biology and animal behavior. She pays particular attention to the rhetoric natural and artificial in this context.

Milam is the author of Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). In her book, she examines the history of female mate choice from late-nineteenth century debates over sexual selection to discussions over female choice as part of sociobiology in the 1970s and 80s (including population genetics, ethology, and comparative psychology). Milam argues that research on female reproductive behavior was not eclipsed during these decades, and that therefore the lack of interest in sexual selection should be attributed to concerns of biologists over the capacity of animals to “choose” rather than inattention to females within evolutionary biology. Additionally, she suggests that histories of sexual selection written in the 1980s served to demarcate disciplinary identities in the 20th-century life sciences and to bolster the scientific and popular prestige of the “field” as an obligatory place for accessing truths about nature.

Her current research project, "Barely Human: the American Search for Human Nature in the Long 1960s," addresses how and why zoological and primatological research on animal behavior came to compete with anthropological studies of human cultures as sources of reliable information about human nature.

Within the Department of History, Milam is a member of the caucus for Technology, Science, and the Environment. During the 2009-10 year, she is coordinating the Maryland Colloquium for the History of Technology, Science, and the Environment (MCHOTSE).

Click HERE for a schedule of this year’s talks.