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:
- Log in, or create an account
- Click on a group below
- 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.
Museums with Debbie Douglas (MIT Museum) and Tony Perry (National Museum of American History)
Taylor Dysart joins us from the University of Pennsylvania to workshop a chapter from her dissertation, “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century"
Nelson Jiajie Meng, "Beyond Cultural Translation: Syphilis Medical Advertisement in Shun Pao"
Kristin Brig-Ortiz, "Hydrological Dissonances: Climate, Geography, and Port City Waters"
Sarah Teasley, "Sticky Solutions: The Persistence of Animal Glues in Laboratories and Workshops in Twentieth-Century Japan," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53, no. 3 (June 2023): 278-307.
Tom H. Fisher, "What We Touch, Touches Us: Materials, Affects, and Affordances," Design Issues (2004) 20 (4): 20–31.
James McElvenny and Floris Solleveld, "Australian Languages and Cultures: Histories of Documentation"
Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothsis (1905, chp. 3 + a bit from chp. 4); Yemima Ben-Menahem: Poincaré and some of his critics (2001).
Guest: Yemima Ben-Menahem
Ryan Neftd, "Motivating a Scientific Modelling Continuum: The case of natural models in the Covid-19 pandemic" (2023, Philosophy of Science)
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Ali Gholamifard (Lorestan University): Flagship Species of Lizards and Plants of Iran: A Measure for Indicating Biodiversity
"'The Männel is a root, it should be called an Allraune': A Mandrake, Magic, and Money in Seventeenth-Century Saxony"
Tara Nummedal (Brown)
Response: Alisha Rankin (Tufts)
- Chao Ren, “Global Circulation of Low-End Expertise: Knowledge, Hierarchy, and Labor Migration in a Burmese Oilfield”
Ancient manuscript fragments of the Carakasaṃhitā and their text genealogical relevance
Dr. Gudrun Melzer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Dr. Philipp Maas (University of Leipzig)
Filters, Optics, Visions: Color Imaging and Missionary Photography in Modern China
Abstract:
Aaron Mendon-Plasek, Yale Law School, "Creativity in an irrational world of inexhaustible meaning: early 1950s origins of machine learning as subjective decision-making, disunified science, and a remedy for what cannot be predicted."
Abstract
Natalia Gándara Chacana, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile, "On whales and giant kelp: the construction of knowledge about the depths of the Southeastern Pacific during the Age of Revolutions"
In this session, we will read Marcel Broersma's “From Press History to the History of Journalism” (2011) and Otávio Daros's “Prehistory of journalism studies: Discovering the Brazilian tradition.“
Reproducing History: Writing Histories of the Present
This session will foreground contemporary discussions about the role of presentism in history and examine how present-day ideas and perspectives have and continue to inform how we think and write about reproductive health.
As prompts, we invite participants to read and reflect on the following essays:
How to Do History as a Clinician: A Panel Featuring Current Medical Students and Early Career Clinicians
Are you interested in a medical career but also have a love for historical research? There are many possible training and career paths for clinicians who also do historical research and teach medical history. The panel will consist of current students as well as early career clinicians who took different paths to becoming clinician historians. We'll discuss combined training programs, including MD/PhD and MA programs and more.
Panelists TBA
Guest: Alessandra Santana Soares e Barros, Full Professor at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
Presentation: “Deficiência, diagnóstico de anomalias fetais e aborto: o caso da Síndrome de Down no Brasil”.
Previous works/Website: Lattes CV.
Reading: Attached are three texts by Alessandra Barros.
Claire Votava - Doctoral Candidate, UCLA - in conversation on radicalism in 20th century science.
Yingchen Kwok, "Can Protozoa Die? On Heredity and Reproductive Futurity in Late Nineteenth-Century German Biology"
Taylor Desloge, "Sanitized Violence: The Strange Liberal Rebirth of Jim Crow and the Origins of an Urban Renewal Coalition, 1917-1929"
John Sime (University of Pennsylvania), "The Illustration of Nature Recast: Jacob Green's Models of North American Trilobites"
Fraser Livingston, Introduction to "Losing Longleaf: Forestry and Conservation in the Southern Coastal Plain" and Chapter VII, "Frankenstein Forests: Federal Forestry and Longleaf Conservation in the Twentieth Century"
Federal Government Opportunities with Angel Callahan (Naval Research Laboratory) and Adrianne Noe (federal museum director)
Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics (Appendix XX); Karim Thébault, On Mach on Time (2021)
Guest: Karim Thébault
James Woodward, "Modelling Interventions in Multi-Level Causal Systems: Supervenience, Exclusion and Underdetermination" (2022, European Journal for Philosophy of Science)
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
James Wachira (University of Nairobi): NarRating Plants in Kenyan Verbal Arts
Fabian Prieto-Nañez, VirginiaTech, TBA
"Marginal Recipes, Major Insights: Exploring the Manuscript Contexts of Early Medieval Medical Knowledge"
Claire Burridge (Sheffield)
Response: Debby Banham (Cambridge)
- Petra Dolata and Victor McFarland, “Oil Consultant Walter J. Levy”
Reproductive (In)Justice
Here, we will read a selection of works that grapple with reproductive politics and injustices and discuss how academic scholarship has, and can continue to be used to advance reproductive rights and social justice.
Sterilization and Social Justice Lab
In this session we will hear from members of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab about their work to use history of eugenics and sertilization in the U.S. to uncover and help redress past abuses.
Confirmed Panelists: Natalie Lira, PhD
Other panelists and recommended reading TBA
A Contagion Theory in the Hārītasaṃhitā? The Chapter on upasarga
Dr. Vitus Angermeier (University of Vienna)
SHOT MEETING REDUX!
The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), the most prominent society in history of technology, recently held its annual meeting. Join us for a discussion of the meeting, the themes and papers, and behind the scenes insights. This is a great way to share opinions on what is happening in a fast-growing field, and to learn what went on if you were unable to attend. These Redux discussions are among our most popular .
Nancy Ko, Columbia University
We are going to discuss the changing concept of resources in the early modern and modern period.
“Focus: Resources in the Early Modern World,” Isis 114, no. 3 (September 1, 2023): 599–645, https://doi.org/10.1086/726186.
Peter B. Lavelle, The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), Chapter 2.
Diana Marsh and Katrina Fenlon (University of Maryland), "Linking Analog Archival Data Across Scientific Disciplines: What’s Next?"
Oral History with David Caruso (Science History Institute) and Jannekan Smucker (West Chester University)
Aisling Shalvey, "'I didn't think I could survive it... The bleeding was stopped completely': The role of women, gender and sexuality in biomedical experiments during National Socialism"
Sam Hege, “When Noxious Odors Prevail”: Dust, Race, and the Creation of an Agro-Industrial Complex in the Texas Panhandle
"Anatomy and the Early Académie Royale des Sciences"
Katherine Reinhart (Binghamton)
Response: tbc
- Wout Saelens, “Energy politics: urban fuel policy and the transition to coal in Ghent (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries).”
*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Gregory Radick, "Language, Darwinism and the Human/Non-Human Boundary"
Emily Herrington, Touch Hunger: The story of hand transplants (Introduction)
Abstract:
James Lowe and David Ingram, "DNA Barcoding and the Changing Ontological Commitments of Taxonomy" (2023, Biology and Philosophy)
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Elena Agudio (Villa Romana) and Marleen Boschen (Goldsmiths, University of London / Tate): Testing Grounds / Seeding Worlds: Intersections of Art and Ecology in the Garden of Villa Romana, Florence
Francisco Tijerina, Washington University in St. Louis, TBA
Incurability as ‘disability’ in classical Āyurveda: The case of vision disorders
Tulika Singh (University of Alberta)
*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
We're partnering with the International Commission of the History of Oceanography to host a fun and informal reading group of portions of Jamie Jones's new book, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling, with the intention of bringing together scholars of ocean history across Asia and beyond (thus the special time slot!) Readings from the book's introduction and first chapter will be posted in advance of the meeting.
*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Paul Michael Kurtz, "Knowledge Infrastructure ca. 1900: The Case of Assyriology at the British Museum"
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Sumana Roy (Ashoka University): The Quest for the Plant Script
David Pretel, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, TBA
"Roundtable: The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester UP, 2023)"
Heidi Hausse (Auburn)
Pamela O. Long (Independent)
Alisha Rankin (Tufts)
Paolo Savioa (Bologna)
- Julia Mead, “Frozen Assets: Czechoslovakia’s 1979 Blizzard and the Energetic Social Contract of Late Socialism”
Anne Ricculli, Morris Museum
Taking ‘Patient’ Histories
This session will focus on how scholars can engage with ‘patient’ narratives in both oral testimonies and archival records responsibly, in ways that avoid replicating medicalization and pathologization.
*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
TBA
Short Writings Roundtable
If you have a shorter piece--an abstract, a research description, an op-ed, etc.--that you would like feedback on, this session is for you! Please send you short piece to Melanie or Jason by January 19 for posting.
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Semih Celik (University of Exeter): 'A Museum in the Cradle of Civilization': The Imperial Natural History Museum in Istanbul and its Aftermath (1836-1870)
"Translating New World Drugs in Late Renaissance Italy: The Case of Indies Balsam"
Sharon Strocchia (Emory)
Response: Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton)
- Chad Montrie, “‘What is Labour’s Stake?’: Workers and the History of Environmentalism in Alberta.”
Kristine Palmieri, "Grand Visions of Alterthumswissenschaft: Classical Philology as Language Science in early Nineteenth-Century Germany"
Oral Histories
This meeting will reckon with the value and challenges of using oral history as a source in humanities and social science research on reproduction.
Kimia Shahi, University of Southern California
*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
The yogi who became a Muslim: Indian Alchemy and Pseudograph Sufi Writings in South Asia
Dr. Fabrizio Speziale (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris-Marseille)
Evan Roberts, "Young but daily growing? The decline of stunting and growth faltering in the United States, 1857-2014"
"Ghosts in Wellcome's Medieval Galleries"
Lauren Rozenberg (UEA/Leverhulme)
Response: tbc
- Minseok Jang, Testing a New Energy Resource: Fire Tests and the Risk of Kerosene in the Anglo-American World, 1859-1911
Vanessa Freije, University of Washington, TBA
Daniel Reboucas, Federal University of Bahia
Dr. Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom (McGill University)
Elexis Trinity Williams Gray, Cornell University
Reproductive Technologies
This session will examine the history and future trends of researching and writing about reproductive technologies.
Diana Anselmo, "To Love so Much it Hurts: 'Bad Feelings,' Medicine, and Movie-Mad Female Audiences in the 1910s"
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Chanelle Adams (University of Lausanne): Volatile Oils: 'Wellness', Political Power, and the Market for Ravintsara Essential Oil in Madagascar
Julie Gibbings, University of Edinburgh, "Viewing Genocide's Aftermaths from Above: Aerial Photography and the Rio Chixoy Dam in Guatemala"
"Discussion: Objects, Images, and Spaces of Health... for Broad Publics"
Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins)
Jack Hartnell (UEA)
- Andrew Kettler, “Disenchanting the Senses: Sulfuric Discourse and the World System”
Alessandra Passariello, Naples Zoological Station
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.
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.
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
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.
Yohad Zacarías, University of Texas at Austin, TBA
- 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’
Chen-Pang Yeang, "Information, Cryptography, and Noise"
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.
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)
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"
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Sahar Bazzaz (College of the Holy Cross): Plants of the Red Sea Littoral: PE Botta's Expedition to Yemen, 1836
- Joya John, Energy Histories, Museums, and Postcolonial Development in India
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Maxmillian J Chuhila (University of Dar es Salaam): Green Imperialism and Biomedical Campaigns in Colonial Tanganyika
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Guillermo Pupo Pernet (University of Arkansas): Achiote: Painting the Town Red