Working Groups

Hello all, for the March meeting, we will read Moving Crops and the Scales of History written by Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraivathe. Professor Bray will be joining us for the discussion, which will cover the Introduction (Orientations, Cropscales and History), plus Chapters 3 (Sizes) and 4 (Actants). Hope to see many of you there!

Sarah Finn, Romance of Books: Sharing Library Collections through Social Media

In December 2017, Sarah Finn created the Instagram account @romanceofbooks with the intention of documenting her research into printed natural history illustrations found in rare books located in Special Collections libraries. The account has gained a global audience of over 136,000 followers from a wide variety of backgrounds including current scientific illustrators, tattoo artists, cultural heritage professionals, and people who just enjoy beautiful images of plants and animals.

Deren Ertas (Harvard University) 

"From the Mine to the Market: A History of Silver in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire"

Robert Edwards (UC San Diego / Irvine) 

"Anticolonial Methods in the History of Linguistic Anthropology "

Anna Derksen

Welfare Under Scrutiny: Body Politics, Memory, and Racialisation in the 1990s Swedish Sterilisation Debate 

Catherine Medici-Thiemann

Women’s Chronic Illness Stories: Creating a New Understanding of Illness

A. Blum, D. Brill - "Tokyo Wheeler or the Epistemic Preconditions of the Renaissance of Relativity" (2020)

Primary Source: (Re)Translation of John Wheeler’s Tokyo Lecture "Discussion on the Problems of Elementary Particle Theory" (1954), which is part of the attachment of the above paper.

Guest: Alexander Blum

Leib Celnik,  "Revisiting Goethe's Farbenlehre: English Translations, History, and Polemics"

Banji Chona (Lusaka): tbc

"Palatino 586: A medieval Occitan health manual"

Benedetta Mariani (UEA)

Commentator: TBC

Brian Leech, American Popular Coal-ture: Mining Movies and Sad Songs in the American Imagination

Divya Kumar-Dumas (University of Maryland)

Metal, Matter, and Meaning: Toward a Textual and Scientific History of the Sumhuram Yakṣī

This month's readings will be on Imanishi Kinji as follows (see the zip file below to access them):

Halstead, Beverly. “Anti-Darwinian Theory in Japan.” Nature 317, no. 6038 (1985): 587–89. https://doi.org/10.1038/317587a0.

Hokkyo, Noboru. “Comments on Anti-Darwinian Theory in Japan: Human Concerns beyond Natural Science.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 10, no. 4 (1987): 377–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-1750(87)90054-6.

Aijie Shi, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Life History of Laminaria japonica in the Northwest Pacific”

In this session, we will read and discuss Otávio Daros's working paper, “Trends in the Historiography of the Press and Journalism in Brazil.“

Speaker: Ryan A. Kashanipour, University of Arizona

Title: Epidemics and Epistemologies: Experiencing Illness in Colonial Yucatán

Alexander Silaen (University of Vienna)

Colonial Entomology and Labor Relations in Sumatra, 1880–1930 of the Gregorian Calendar

Kelcey Gibbons (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society, MIT)

Rajarshi Sengupta (IIT Kanpur)

Hyperrealism in James Forbes’ Studies and Chintz Textiles: Through Research and Practice 

From the eerie vision of the owl to the radiant vision of man: Study and conservation-restoration proposal of three tri-color carbon prints by Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, c.1907-1912, by Isaak Cecchetto González

Abstract:

A discussion with José Alberto Nochebuena, author of Obra Oculta: Historia Política y Artífices Del Sistema de Drenaje Profundo de La Ciudad de México (Fundación ICA, 2025).