Working Groups

For the first meeting, we will be reading some excerpts from Do Less Harm, produced by the previous iteration of this Working Group, so that both new and old members can become familiar with the previous work of this group. We will brainstorm what topics and readings we want to discuss over the coming year, and we will share other updates. 

John Goldsmith (University of Chicago) "A case study of mentor and student: Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky, and the analysis of the English verbal auxiliary"

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in understanding the significance of the mentor/student relationship, which can be studied in terms of personality, of social identity and context, and intellectual orientation. 

Suzanne Moon, University of Oklahoma, "History of Technology: the rebirth of a journal and publishing in our rapidly changing field."

Victoria Dickenson (McGill)

The Saint-Domingue Albums: Hidden Hands, Lost Names and Local Knowledge

On 19 February 1766, a French engineer who had lived almost half his life in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) sat down to paint a moth. This would not have been a remarkable event, if it had not heralded the beginning of an enterprise of natural history that was to occupy René Gabriel de Rabié (1717-1785) for the rest of his life. 

 Tunahan Durmaz: "Slavery, disease, and medical authority: Syphilis in the early modern Ottoman world"

Reading Club!

This year we inaugurate a new session format: the Reading Club; in which we comment and discuss on a selected article or chapter. Everyone is welcome to read and comment on the piece.

For this session, please join us in reading Appadurai, Arjun. ‘The Museum, the Colony, and the Planet: Territories of the Imperial Imagination’. Public Culture 33, no. 1 (1 January 2021): 115–28. doi:10.1215/08992363-8742232.

Claire Turner, "Out of Sight, Out of Mind?: 'Seeing' Plague Outbreaks in Early Modern London"

In this meeting, we will read about sensory history. We will read chapter 5 and chapter 6 from Michael Hatch's Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790-1840 (Penn State University Press, 2023). Please join us if you can. 

Charlotte Williams (University of California, Berkeley)

"Balancing the Scale: a museum exchange and the archaeological currencies of cultural relativism" 

Narratives on the Marginalization of Astrology

Steven French "From a Lost History to a New Future: Is a Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Physics Viable?"

With a primary source: London and Bauer "The Theory of Observation in Quantum Mechanics"

At our October meeting, we will workshop an essay by Shane Smith Morrissy,  

"Art, Authority, and the Phantasmagorias of Color at the Panama Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, CA), 1915"

Pre-Modern Pharmacy between Theory and Practice 

Format and Theme: Roundtable on the History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (HoPP), forthcoming special issue.

Host: Lucas Richert (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Speakers: Claire Burridge (University of Oslo), Petros Bouras-Vallianatos (University of Athens), Amanda Repress (Ohio State University)

Edwin Coomasaru (London): Plantation Desires and Abundant Aesthetics: Queer Ecologies in Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon (1950)

"The Comfort of Physicians and the Early History of Palliative Care"

Cynthia Klestinec (Miami University)

Commentator: Maria Pia Donato (l’IHMC, Paris)

Reading seminar with Evelyn Welch (University of Bristol): ‘Whose Hair is it Anyway?: Beauty, Health and Shaven Heads in Early Modern Europe’. 

We will discuss Chapter 5 of her book Renaissance Skin (Manchester University Press, 2025).

Gonçalo Fernandes (UTAD) 

Between History and the Language Sciences: The Portugaliæ Monumenta Linguistica and the Re-conceptualization of Archives

Mannat Johal (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG))

Attributes of continuity: Maintaining a house at Maski (12th-15th centuries CE) 

There will be a precirculated paper for this event.

Scott Erich, Washington College, "The Subterranean Sea"

Henry Noltie (RBGE), ‘Flora Indica: Recovering lost stories from Kew’s Indian drawings’

In the talk I’ll discuss the retrieval of 5, 500 drawings from Kew’s worldwide illustrations collection, their rearrangement into their original collections and subsequent cataloguing. This work lies behind the exhibition of the same title, co-curated with Dr Sita Reddy, on show at Kew from October 2025 to April 2026, which will also be discussed.