Iris Clever

Iris studies contemporary and historical knowledge production practices including scientific data practices. She is a qualitative, interdisciplinary researcher who brings together the history of science, medicine, and technology, science and technology studies, and critical data studies.

• 2025 Article Prize from the Forum for History of Human Science   
• 2021 DHST Dissertation Award (honorable mention) International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Clever is an interdisciplinary historian of science and medicine. Her work asks how humans become embedded in technologies through scientific data practices and how we use those technologies to make sense of human identity. She is especially interested in the quantification of human bodies in the modern world, and in how historical legacies of human measurement live on in present-day science, medicine, and society. 

Her book project, The Afterlives of Skulls (under contract, University of Chicago Press), traces a forgotten history of biometrics. Measuring skulls to study race is often assumed to be an outdated scientific practice; the book project makes visible how it remained at the forefront of twentieth-century science and technology. Clever reveals how historical skull collections, biometric datasets, and statistical tools still shape how we understand human identity. 

Her recent publications have traced how old practices of race-making persist in modern forensic software and how antiracist commitments and race science coexisted in twentieth-century human biology.  

The Afterlives of Skulls. How Race Science Became a Data Science (under advanced contract with University of Chicago Press) 

Clever, I., Jong, L. (2025). “Old Bones in New Databases: Historical Insights into Race, Statistics, and
Ancestry Estimation in Anthropology, American Anthropologist 127: 566-580.

Passalacqua, N., Clever, I. (2024). "The Origins of Forensic Anthropology in the United States," Forensic Anthropology 6: 192-205.

Clever, I (2023). "Biometry Against Fascism: Geoffrey Morant, Race, and Antiracism in Twentieth-Century Physical Anthropology," Isis 114: 25-49.

Clever, I. (2022). "Miriam Tildesley and the Anthropological Politics of Standardizing Racial Measurements," in: I. Clever, J. Hyun, and E. Burton (eds.), Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in Human Populations Studies, special issue in Perspectives on Science 30: 13-47.

Clever, I., J. Hyun, J., Burton, E. (2022). "Introduction: People in Motion," Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in Human Populations Studies, special issue in Perspectives on Science 30: 1-12. 

Clever, I., Ruberg, W.G. (2014). "Beyond Cultural History? The Material Turn and Body History," Humanities 3: 546-566.

"Racial Typologies and Twentieth-Century Statistics" History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Edinburgh, Scotland, 12-16 July, 2026.

“Encoding Race: A History of Statistics, Biometric Data, and Algorithms, Big Data before “Data Science”: legacies of large-scale human data, Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences, 9-12 December, 2025.

“What Remains? Legacies of the Anthropological Skeleton” American Association of Anthropology Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 19-23 November, 2025.  

"From Skull Science to Biometrics: The Making of the Modern Statistical Identity," Centre for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Oxford, 16 June, 2025.

"Thinking Beyond Accuracy," AI & the Human Condition Speaker Series, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 12 February, 2025.

"From Biometry to Biometrics. Hidden Histories of Race Science." Presentation and panelist at “Surveillance and Countersurveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency,” public event for the HSS Centennial celebration, Wende Museum Los Angeles, 23 November, 2024.

"The Making of the Modern Statistical Identity: From Skull Science to Biometrics." Racial Justice Speaker Series, Claremont Colleges, 15 November, 2024.

"History in the Age of Tech Evangelism" History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Mérida, Mexico, 7-10 November, 2024. 

"Beyond ‘Neutral’ Data: Historical Insights on Algorithms, Racism, and Bodies," Medical and Health Humanities Speaker Series, Sam Houston University, 6 November, 2024. 

2023    “Determining Races with Computers: William Howells and Multivariate Analysis in Postwar Physical Anthropology,” History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Portland, 9-12 November.