Lectures on Tap - "When Eugenicists Became Obsessed with Surfers"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "When Eugenicists Became Obsessed with Surfers"

🎤 Speaker: Prof. Michael Rossi

In 1920s America, a group of powerful eugenicists became fixated on Hawaiian surfers, convinced they embodied a lost ideal of human perfection. They set their sights on Duke Kahanamoku and his brothers, attempting to “capture” them through photography, bodily measurements, and even full-body plaster casts.

Yet while these pseudo-scientists tried to freeze them as relics of a vanishing past, Duke and his fellow surfers were creating something entirely new: a global surfing culture that would outlast—and ultimately undermine—the eugenic worldview that sought to contain them.

Historian of science and medicine Prof. Michael Rossi will trace this strange, gripping story as both a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science and a warning about the enduring harms of eugenics. He will also explore how surfing, race, and popular culture intersected in ways that reshaped ideas of humanity and personhood.

Michael Rossi is the author of Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture (HarperOne, 2025) and The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America (U Chicago Press, 2019).

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.