Working Groups

The Consortium invites scholars to join our topical working groups for challenging and collegial discussion of interesting publications in their fields and of each others’ works-in-progress.

Each group meets monthly. All interested scholars are welcome to participate via online video conferencing.

To join a group:

  1. Log in, or create an account
  2. Click on a group below
  3. Click on the "Membership" tab and select "Request Group Membership"

Submit a discussion paper for one of the working groups.


Upcoming Meetings

Please set your timezone.

Monday, April 1, 2024 11:30 am EDT

In anticipation of the total solar eclipse across North America on April 8, we will discuss the history of solar eclipse expeditions and experiences. Readings will include: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, "The Social Event of the Season: Solar Eclipse Expeditions and Victorian Culture," Isis 84, no. 2 (1993): 252-77; Steve Ruskin, "'Among the Favored Mortals of the Earth': The Press, State Pride, and the Eclipse of 1878," Colorado Heritage (Spring 2008): 22-35; review of and excerpts from David Baron, American Eclipse (New York: Liveright, 2017).

Tuesday, April 2, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

Special Collections and Archives with Krystal Tribbett (University of California, Irvine) and Peter Collopy (Caltech)

Wednesday, April 3, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

April's session will feature an informal talk by Joanna Radin (Yale) titled "Michael Crichton's Racial Calculations for 1960s Anthropology." There will not be a pre-circulated reading for this session. 
 

Thursday, April 4, 2024 11:00 am EDT

Reading Group: 
Alaniz, Rodolfo John. "Havelock Ellis, Sexology, and Sexual Selection in Post-Darwinian Evolutionary Biology." Journal of the History of Biology (2024): 1-24.
We will be reading and discussing Dr. Alaniz's recent article in JHB. 
 

Thursday, April 4, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

 
Black and Indigenous Mining Technologies and Knowledges in the Americas
Presenters:
Jenny Bulstrode (UCL)
Allison Bigelow (University of Virginia)
 

Thursday, April 4, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

Kara Murphy Schlichting, "Summer Complaint: Heat as a Public Health Crisis in 19th-Century New York City"
 

Friday, April 5, 2024 11:00 am EDT

Morgan Pitelka, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Introduction & chapter 2.

Friday, April 5, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute), "The Berlin Turfan Collection, Disciplinarity, and Scholarly Biography"
 

Tuesday, April 9, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Cripping Ecorelationality and Ecorelational Pleasure 
 

Wednesday, April 10, 2024 9:30 am EDT

Ben-Menahem (2001): Poincaré and some of his critics, and Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothsis (1905, chp.  3 + a bit from chp. 4).
Guest: Yemima Ben-Menahem

Wednesday, April 10, 2024 6:30 pm EDT

David Beer, "The Problem of Researching a Recursive Society: Algorithms, Data Coils, and the Looping of the Social" (2022, Big Data & Society)
Beatrice Fazi, "Beyond Human: Deep Learning, Explainability, and Representation" (2021, Theory, Culture, & Society)

Thursday, April 11, 2024 8:00 am EDT

Please note the time change for this session!
 
Reevaluating Insects as Archives – Collection Ecologies as Multidisciplinary and Multipractice Conversation
Dominik Huenniger, German Port Museum, Hamburg
Karina Lucas Silva-Brandão, Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change
Christian Reiß, Regensburg University
Xiaoya Zhan, Nanyang Technological University

Thursday, April 11, 2024 10:00 am EDT

Chanelle Adams (University of Lausanne): Volatile Oils: 'Wellness', Political Power, and the Market for Ravintsara Essential Oil in Madagascar

Thursday, April 11, 2024 1:00 pm EDT

David Pretel, UAM
 
Marco Cabrera Geserick, Northern Arizona University
"Superior Technology, Superior Souls: Science-Fiction and Anti-Imperialism in La Caída del Águila (1920)"

Friday, April 12, 2024 11:00 am EDT

"Discussion: Objects, Images, and Spaces of Health...  for Broad Publics"
Jill Burke (Edinburgh)
Kathleen Crowther (Oklahoma)
Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins)
Jack Hartnell (UEA)
 

Friday, April 12, 2024 1:30 pm EDT
  • Andrew Kettler, “Disenchanting the Senses: Sulfuric Discourse and the World System”

 

Monday, April 15, 2024 10:30 am EDT

 
Calling All Members: "Show and Tell"
 
Join us for a special meeting on April 15! You are invited to introduce yourself and your research in a short 3 minute (or less) presentation using an object or image to facilitate you mini-talk. 
 

What is your topic? What is the question that you most want to answer? What questions do you think you will not be able to answer, and why? How does this object or image help us to understand or think about your research question or findings?

Tuesday, April 16, 2024 11:00 am EDT

"Unidentified color positives in Slovak collections - Research and challenges" by Kitti Baráthová   

Tuesday, April 16, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

Alessandra Passariello, Naples Zoological Station, "The micro I.G.Y. project and global plankton ecology: unexpected histories from the archives of the Stazione Zoologica Anton"

Thursday, April 18, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Gender, Masculinity and Reproduction
 
Here, we will explore how gender and masculinity shapes how we think about human reproductive experiences and the histories we write about them.
 

Friday, April 19, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Speaker:
Dr. Mércio Pereira Gomes (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Anthropologist, Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Brazil.

Former President of Funai (National Indigenous People Foundation) from 2003 to 2007.

Friday, April 19, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

How to Make a Humanities Lab
 

Monday, April 22, 2024 11:00 am EDT

Dominik Hünniger and Lisa Onaga

Tuesday, April 23, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

 
Michael Gordin, Princeton University
 
"Genghis Khan with a Nuclear Reactor: Three Centuries of 'Western Science' in Russia"

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

We are very pleased to have Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) join us in May.
Title: Eugène Pittard, Bayan Afet, and Others: Actors and Milieus of Anthropological Knowledge and the Formation of the Turkish History Thesis in the 1930s

Thursday, May 2, 2024 11:00 am EDT

Leah Malamut, "Sisters of the Beekeeping Fraternity: American Women in Apiculture, 1870-1920"

Thursday, May 2, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

 
Machines and Urbanisation in the Amazon
Lorena Córdoba (CONICET/UCA and Ca' Foscari University Venice).
Adrián Lerner (Cambridge University and Freie Universität Berlin).
 

Thursday, May 2, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

Slava Savova, "Re-Ottomanizing modernity: domesticating balneology in early to mid-20th century Bulgaria"

This dissertation chapter examines the local intermingling of a specific type of sociomedical architectures – Ottoman and European thermal baths - and the persistent vernacular uses that bind them together.

Friday, May 3, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Hannah Swan, Lucas Richert (UW-Madison, School of Pharmacy), "Pharmacy History in the
Twenty-First Century: Modernizing the Edward Kremers Research Library and Archive”
 
This presentation will summarize the activities and findings of a 3-year National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded project, “Accessing the History of Health,
Pharmacy, and Medicines,” which focuses on the archival collections of the Edward Kremers
Research Library and Archive, held jointly by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy

Monday, May 6, 2024 11:30 am EDT

We will discuss a work in progress by Max Bautista Perpinyà, UC Louvain (Belgium), "Pines, orchards, and forest genetics in the Spanish political transiton: from ‘improvement’ to ‘conservation’ (1966-1999)"

Tuesday, May 7, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

K-12 Teaching with Spring Greeney (Friends Select School, Philadelphia) and Andrew Bozanic (Padua Academy, Wilmington, Delaware).

Thursday, May 9, 2024 10:00 am EDT

Neda Saeedi (Tehran / Berlin): "Swear by the Fig, Swear by the Olive"
 
"Swear by the Fig, Swear by the Olive" explores urban and territorial landscapes and their flora, used to justify land ownership and deprivation in conflict zones.

Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

 
Mollusks. Between Resource, Specimen and Race, 1860-1920

Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, Marie Jahoda Fellow, Inst. for Economic & Social History, University of Vienna
&
Tamara Fernando, Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University

Thursday, May 9, 2024 1:00 pm EDT

Yohad Zacarías, University of Texas at Austin, TBA
 
Diana Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis

Friday, May 10, 2024 11:00 am EDT

Note, we are meeting on May 3rd this month, so as to avoid a clash with the AAHM Meeting
 
"Rethinking “Infirmity” in Crusader Jerusalem: A New History of the Hospital of St. John"
Katharine Park (Harvard)
Reponse: tbc

Friday, May 10, 2024 1:30 pm EDT
  • Odinn Melsted and Candida Sánchez-Burmester, “Geoscience Spillover: The Oil Industry and Geothermal Development in Greater California, 1960s-1970s”
  • Dante LaRiccia, “Kurt Waldheim, the United Nations, and the Campaign for a ‘World Energy Order’

 

Tuesday, May 14, 2024 9:00 am EDT

Chen-Pang Yeang, "Information, Cryptography, and Noise" 

Tuesday, May 14, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

“The Mad Butler of Gray’s Inn: Service, Disability, and the Limits of Early Modern Institutional Care”
 

Thursday, May 16, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Reproducing History: Writing Histories of the Personal
This session will focus on how historians have used their own healthcare experiences to complement and inform their research and advocacy work.
 

Friday, May 17, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Eugenics and Its Afterlives: The Afterlives of Eugenics Collective at Yale University
 
Confirmed Presenters:
Dan HoSang
 

Monday, May 20, 2024 10:30 am EDT

 
Are the Elements and the Pañcabhūta the Same (Thing)? Epistemic Objects between
Science, Religion, and Philosophy in Colonial North India, c.1920

Dr. Charu Singh (University of Cambridge)

Tuesday, May 21, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

Jonathan Galka, Harvard University, “'The offer which the ocean has given us': The Law of the Sea, the New International Economic Order, and the Promises of Manganese Nodules in the Global 1970s"

Friday, May 24, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

 
Paul Keyser, Independent Scholar
 
"Neither Triumph Nor Telos"

Wednesday, May 29, 2024 12:30 pm EDT

Nithyanand Rao, Doctoral Student, University of California, San Diego.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024 9:30 am EDT

Fraser and Koberinski (2016), "The Higgs mechanism and superconductivity: A case study of formal analogies" and Anderson (1963) "Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass"
Guests: Doreen Fraser and Adam Koberinski 

Thursday, June 13, 2024 10:00 am EDT

Sahar Bazzaz (College of the Holy Cross): Plants of the Red Sea Littoral: PE Botta's Expedition to Yemen, 1836

Thursday, June 13, 2024 12:00 pm EDT

Katherine Arnold, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU München 

Friday, June 14, 2024 11:00 am EDT

"Windows to the Surgeon: Eye Diseases, Remedies, and Images in Early Modern German Print and Manuscript"
Alisha Rankin (Tufts)
Response: Felix Jäger (Courtauld)

Friday, June 14, 2024 1:30 pm EDT
  • Joya John, Energy Histories, Museums, and Postcolonial Development in India

 

Tuesday, June 18, 2024 2:00 pm EDT

Pamela Overmann, head curator for the Naval Art Collection, United States Navy History and Heritage Command

Monday, June 24, 2024 8:00 pm EDT

 
Chuyoung Won, Catholic University College of Medicine, Seoul
Jaehwan Hyun, Pusan National University, Busan
 
"Teaching History of (Western) Science? History of Science in General Education in South Korea "

Thursday, July 11, 2024 10:00 am EDT

Maxmillian J Chuhila (University of Dar es Salaam): Green Imperialism and Biomedical Campaigns in Colonial Tanganyika

Thursday, September 12, 2024 10:00 am EDT

Guillermo Pupo Pernet (University of Arkansas): Achiote: Painting the Town Red