Anna Schewelew (University of California, Santa Barbara) will be joining us to discuss research from her dissertation project. Anna's research draws on translation theory, media theory and the history of science in order to examine assumptions about language, meaning, multilingualism and the act of reading that are implicit in machine translation systems. Her presentation will be informed by other interests that include mathematical and non-mathematical notions of probability in literature and art, fictions of translation, performance studies and the Soviet Cosmopolis.
The history of the language sciences has expanded considerably in recent years, moving to consider broader disciplinary constellations, global developments, extra-intellectual dynamics, and non-elite actors. This group builds upon that energy, seeking to underscore the centrality of linguistic knowledge to the history and historiography of science. It provides a forum where those with interests in all varieties of linguistic research can come together to share work in progress, engage in “slow reading,” and build community through discussion.
Building on last year’s theme of epistemic transfer, our meetings in 2024-2025 will focus on overlaps and exchanges between linguistics and information science (conceptualized roughly in terms of applied mathematics). What concepts, practices, stakes and personalities do these domains have in common, and what renders them distinct? How have the sciences of language and information brought people together or driven them apart? What bearing might these observations have on contemporary debates about the utility and ethics of AI?
Consortium Respectful Behavior Policy
Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.
Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.
Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.
Upcoming Meetings
Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 9:00 - 10:30 am EDT
Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 9:00 - 10:30 am EDT
Bethany Anderson (University of Illinois) "Towards a (Cybernetic) Human Science’: Margaret Mead, Communication, and the Study of Culture at a Distance”
Group Conveners
Raul Aranovich
Raúl Aranovich is a theoretical linguist working on the interfaces between syntax, morphology, and semantics. His research focuses on grammatical mismatches between these levels. Professor Aranovich specializes in the grammars of Spanish and other Romance languages, but also Austronesian and Bantu languages. He employs empirical methods using natural language processing and corpus linguistics tools, which recently have lead him to work on ontologies and language graph representations for linguistics. More recently, he has turned his attention to the history of linguistics, trying to develop a contextualized epistemology of the discipline. He earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from UC San Diego in 1996, under the direction of Profs. S.-Y. Kuroda and John Moore. He has been at UC Davis since 2001, and is currently full professor. He held faculty positions at the Ohio State University and the University of Texas in San Antonio before joining UC Davis.
Kevin Chang
Kevin Chang works at Taiwan’s national academy, Academia Sinica in Taipei. He received his PhD at the University of Chicago and started as a historian of science and medicine in early modern Europe. He has since expanded his research areas to the global history of higher education, media studies, the comparative history of philology and language sciences. He co-edited World Philology (Havard UP, 2015) with Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman, Impagination: Materiality and Layout of Writing and Publication (De Gruyter, 2021) with Anthony Grafton and Glenn Most, and A Global History of Research Education (Oxford UP, 2021) with Alan Rocke. He has completed a manuscript on the global history of the dissertation as a genre of academic writing.
Judy Kaplan
Judy Kaplan is a cultural and intellectual historian of the human sciences with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistic research. She has published widely on subjects from orientalism to sound studies and is currently working on a project that unravels histories of research on language universals. She was a NSF Fellow in Residence at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and is currently a curatorial fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, PA.
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