Submersion

An illuminating and wide-ranging edited collection on the life and career of John C. Lilly across disciplines, from animal studies to the history of architecture.

John C. Lilly (1915–2001) was a neurophysiologist who had one of the most unusual careers in twentieth-century science: He theorized extraterrestrial language and intelligence, wrote quasi-philosophical treatises about computer science and consciousness, self-experimented with LSD and ketamine, and developed the first sensory deprivation tank (which he later used for scientific tripping). Most famously, he worked with dolphins, trying to understand their forms of communication and to teach them to speak English, later aiming to mediate human and dolphin communication via computers.

Submersion, edited by Hannah Zeavin and Jeffrey Mathias, brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines—from animal studies to the history of the human sciences, from the history of architecture to feminist science and technology studies—to reevaluate Lilly’s life and career within his own moment and from our vantage point in ours. Ever relevant, Lilly’s work illuminates twentieth-century cultural and scientific phenomena ranging from cybernetics to the human potential movement. And his midcentury prominence as a neurophysiologist further makes him crucial to—albeit understudied within—the history of Cold War science and technology.