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.
Jeremy Vetter (University of Arizona), one of the working group's co-conveners, will discuss one of his ongoing projects, Agate: The Biography of a Scientific Field Site, building on previous journal articles to explain how he is working to turn it into a book, and to reconceptualize it in the process. This will serve as an opening example of our intended theme for this academic year in this working group -- "Small Stories with Big Significance" -- and we will also discuss this theme in more general terms.
Staffan Müller-Wille joins us from the University of Cambridge’s Department for History and Philosophy of Science to workshop his forthcoming paper, “Race and Kinship: Anthropology and the ‘Genealogical Method.’”
“Race and Kinship: Anthropology and the ‘Genealogical Method’”
Presenter: Jaime Larry Benchimol, Researcher, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz – Fundação Oswaldo Cruz
"The history of the New World leishmaniases from a Brazilian perspective"
Francesca Bray, "Translating the Art of Tea: Naturalizing Chinese Savoir Faire in British Assam," in Pamela Smith ed., Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 99-137.
Kyoungjin Bae, "Export Furniture and Artisanal Translation in Eighteenth-Century Canton," Isis 113.2 (June 2022): 310-330.
“Women work particularly well in community organizations”: Cultivating Community and Consumerism in the Comanche County REA Women’s Club, 1939-1940
Victoria Plutshack, Ashton Merck, & Jonathon Free
Weyl's (1918) Gravitation and Electricity (German origin; searchable English version).
Ted Underwood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Prof. Underwood has graciously agreed to pre-circulate his recent co-authored paper, "Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture." which was published in Sociological Science earlier this year.
Thursday, 10/13/22, 1:00pm-2:30pm EDT
- Presenter--Lucas Erichsen, Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica - Brasil. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil.
- Moderator: Yovanna Pineda
Lavinia Maddaluno (Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice)
“Water Management and Public Health in Spanish Milan”
Comment by Valentina Pugliano (MIT)
Veronica Jacome, '"Killing Complaints with Courtesy”: the history of relationship building in the success of central power stations'
Speaker: Dr Charu Singh, Dept. of History, Stanford University (from January 2023: Assistant Professor, Dept. History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)
Title: When science became vijñāna: Redescriptions of knowledge in colonial north India, 1915–1935.
See attached paper.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm BST
Researching Color Photography in the 19th & early 20th Century Today: Reflections on History, Science, and Materiality
Presenters: Catlin Langford
Please refer to the resource section for reading material.
Autochromes and Representation
Urna Mukherjee, Johns Hopkins University, "Malabar Teak" and "Bengal-made Canvass": Indigenous Expertise in Eighteenth Century Shipbuilding in British Colonial Bombay and Calcutta
James Esposito, Ohio State University
"Canaries, Camouflets, and Carbon Monoxide: 'Proto Man' and Oxygen Breathing Apparatus in Britain’s Tunneling War 1915-1918"
we'll be discussing Cecchetto, David. Listening in the Afterlife of Data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication.
‘Applied Medical History:’ Taking Stock
Guests:
Pamela Block (Stony Brook University, New York, US)
Richard Scotch (University of Texas at Dallas, US)
Allison C. Carey (Shippensburg University, PA, US)
Title of the presentation: "Allies and Obstacles: Disability Activism and Parents of Children with Disabilities"
Book Discussion: Buddhism and Medicine Across Asia
Pierce Salguero, A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine (Columbia University Press, 2021).
Discussant: Anthony Cerulli (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Tad Brown (University of Cambridge), “Peanut Traces: Collecting Arachis from the Telegraph Line in Brazil”
"Mutual Influence: Anna Weber-van Bosse, the “Self-Organized” Network and Conceptions of Species Associations 1868-1899”
Emily Hutcheson
"'A Great Responsibility': Biodiversity Crisis in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew"
Isobel Akerman, Cambridge University
This paper examines the integration of biodiversity crisis into the research, governance, and outreach of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It explores the environmental, political, and institutional context of Kew in the late 1980s and 1990s, and uses Kew’s 1998 public exhibition ‘Plants + People’ as a case study to question how and why environmental knowledge was made to move between a relatively small group of botanists and a wider cohort of publics.
Kaluza-Klein Theory
Jennifer Guiliano, IUPUI
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
Thursday, 11/10/22
- Presenter: Yovanna Pineda, University of Central Florida, "Bodies of Machines: The Aesthetics of Humans and Farm Machinery in Twentieth Century Argentina"
- Discussant & Moderator: Diana J. Montano
Ben Breen (University of California, Santa Cruz)
"Colonial Magic and Spaces of Healing in the Seventeenth Century"
Comment by Philippa Carter (University of Cambridge)
Elizabeth Chatterjee and Sachaet Pandey, “Dams and the Deep Earth: Human Geological Agency and the Koyna Earthquake of 1967.”
Prokudin-Gorskii’s technique of colour photography: colour separation, additive projection and pigment printing
Presenter: Nadezhda Stanulevich
Samantha Muka, Stevens Institute of Technology
SHOT: directions and themes in an ever-growing field: discussion led by Ben Gross, Linda Hall Library.
We'll be discussing
McKittrick, Katherine. 2014. “Mathematics Black Life.” The Black Scholar 44 (2): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413684.
Emerging Priorities in Applied Medical History
Guest: Thomas F. Glick, Professor of History, Emeritus, at Boston University, US.
Personal website: http://www.thomasfglick.com/index.html
Title of the presentation: "Darwin and Darwinism in Uruguay”
Reading: Text will be attached soon.
Speaker: Lucy May Constantini
Title: Understanding Text in Relation to the Embodied Practice of Kaḷarippayaṟṟ˘: investigating alternative methodologies
Abstract:
Garrett Dash Nelson (President and Head Curator, Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library) “More or Less in Common: Environmental Justice in the Urban Landscape”
"The Sexual Politics of Pesticides"
Melinda Packer
- Presenter: Diana Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis, "Set-in-Stone Technologies: Metate & Gender in Twentieth Century Mexico"
- Moderator: Yovanna Pineda
Meredith Gamer (Columbia University)
“William Hunter's Bedside Manner”
Comment by Mary Fissell (John Hopkins University)
Jennifer Eaglin, “Brazilian Nuclear Ambitions, Hydroelectricity, and Water Resources.”
We'll be discussing
McCray, Patrick. 2020. Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Teaching History of Medicine to Future and Current Medical Professionals
Guest: Henrique Caldeira, PhD candidate, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Title of the presentation: "The Creation-Evolution Controversy in Brazil (1960-1990)"
Reading: Text will be attached soon.
Speaker: Dr Vitus Angermeier, PI at the FWF Project "Epidemics and Crisis Management in Pre-modern South Asia", University of Vienna
Topic: Epidemiology in the Bhelasaṃhitā – the chapter on distinctions according to land and people
The working group will not meet this month.
Hannah Conway, Harvard University, “Petroleum Sovereignty: Native Land & Life at the End of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin
since 1927”
"Bringing the History of Mathematics Home: Entangled Practices of Domesticity, Gender, and Mathematical Work"
David E. Dunning and Brigitte Stenhouse
Justin Madron, University of Richmond
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
Presenter: Francisco G. Tijerina Martínez, Washington University, St. Louis, From the Cosmopolitan to the Planetary: Ecological Aesthetics in Contemporary Mexican Haikus
- Ritam Sengupta, “The Laws of Electricity and the Laws of Men: Governing technical conduct in colonial India.”
- Matthew Shutzer, “Machines of Development: Ecology and Energy at the End of Empire.”
Speaker: Dr Andrey Klebanov
Title: TBA
Lino Camprubí, Universidad de Sevilla
Marjan Wardaki (Yale), "The Birth of Modern ‘ilm : Between Indo-German Theosophy and Islamicate Philosophy"
History of Informatics in Latin America. Marcelo Vianna, Lucas de Almeida Pereira & Colette Perold
Nuala Caomhanach (New York University), "From Unique to Ubiquitous: The Conflict of Endemism in Conservation Law"
Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold, University of Richmond
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
February 9 - Second Round
- Presenter 1: Dafne Cruz Porchini
- Presenter 2: Pete Soland
Katja Bruisch, “More-than-human histories of extraction: Labour at the margins of Russia’s fossil economy.”
Guest: Jorge Quetzal Argueta Prado, México. [Still to be confirmed]
Title of the presentation: The title will be announced soon.
Reading: Text will be attached soon.
Speaker: Anthony Cerulli, Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Topic: Prof. Cerulli will introduce his new monograph, The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India (University of California Press, 2022). The book is available as Open Access in several formats.
Kunyan Zheng, Trinity College Dublin, "Medical knowledge of marine fish in early modern England"
Histories of Science in Latin America and Asia: A Conversation Across Regions
Ally Fulton (University of California-Davis), “Stenographic Specimens in the Preservation of American Science”
"Elizabeth Agassiz's Stenography and the Preservation of Professional Science"
Allison Fulton
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, University of Texas at San Antonio
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
- Presenter: Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College, "A Postcard View of Progress: Pemex Propaganda Apparatus and the Aesthetics of Mexico’s Technological Nationalism"
Nathan N. Kapoor, "The Coal Answer: The Huntly Power Station and New Zealand's Energy Regime."
Speaker: Dr Vitus Angermeier, PI at the FWF Project "Epidemics and Crisis Management in Pre-modern South Asia", University of Vienna
Topic: A contagion theory in the Hārītasaṃhita? The chapter on upasarga.
Nancy Ko, Columbia University
Alexander Statman (UCLA), “Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Control of Water"
Duygu Yildirim (University of Tennessee), "Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences"
Discussant: Ahmed Ragab (Johns Hopkins University)
Natalia Gándara (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso). Title TBA
Lydia Pyne, "How A Clay Becomes A Pigment: Ochrescapes from Blombos”
Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
- Michiel Bron, “Uranium’s geographies: How the geographical properties of uranium determined the formation of an infamous cartel and the involvement of oil companies in the uranium market.”
- Hilary Blum, “The Public Need to Know: Public Relations, Public History, and Secrecy at the Hanford Nuclear Site.”
Speaker: Dr Cristina Pecchia, University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences
Topic: TBA
Dominik Hünniger, Universität Hamburg "The museum at sea - collecting ecologies of marine micro-fauna at the Museum Godeffroy (ca. 1861-1885)"
Paper Discussion: 'Revolutionary Vision: Myopia, Socialist Youth and Public Health Campaigns in China (1960-1976)’
Yixue Yang (University of California, San Diego)
Discussant: Dora Vargha (Humboldt University Berlin)
Animal history
Pedro Raposo (Martha Hamilton and I. Wistar Morris III Executive Director, Library and Archives, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University) and Paul Callomon (Collections Manager, Malacology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University), "People, Nature, and the Social Extension of Specimens"
“Being Natural”: Science, Environment, Sexuality and the Life of Marston Bates"
Megan Raby
- Presenter: Leida Fernandez
- Presenter: Sonia Robles
- Discussant: Mónica Salas Landa
- Moderator: Diana Montaño
Dr. Helge Wendt, “Building materials from coal-waste. An extension of the history of energy in the interwar period in France and Germany.”
Speaker: Dr Vijaya Deshpande
Title: TBA (on a Sanskrit work on alchemy. See the BORI publication launch: https://youtu.be/jKJJaIJPOEA )
Abstract: TBA
Natalia Gándara Chacana, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile
Paper discussion
Siddhartha Mukherjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University), "Controlling the Currents: Electricity Crisis and State Response in Delhi during the Second World War"
Discussant: TBA