Working Groups

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).

Welcome to the Minescapes Working Group!  

Welcome and Introduction by Conveners

Presentations: 

• Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum) and Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University): Minescapes: Socio-natural Landscapes of Extraction and Knowledge

Gonçalo Fernandes (UTAD) 

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

Join us this week for a conversation with Nursing Clio. Creator and co-founder Jacki D. Antonovich and former managing editor Laura Ansley will be with us to discuss the development and publication of The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice, working together as a feminist collective, and a chapter from the book. 

Elif Bengüsu Arık: “Vision and Exclusion: Sensory Narratives, Disability, and the Medical Instrumentalization of Trachoma (1914–1924)”

For this meeting, we will discuss selections from Alexis Shotwell's Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. 

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

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

For the October meeting of our group, we will be reading the following for essays and discussing them. The PDF containing all four files is posted below.

Collecting Colour – Autochromes with Hugh Tifft

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.

Expecting: Birth, Belief and Protection at Wellcome Collection

Elma Brenner (Wellcome Collection) and Kierri Price (Independent Researcher) will discuss their experiences of co-creating a public display centred on Wellcome MS.632, a medieval English birth scroll to be displayed in the UK for the first time from 24 October 2025. 

SHOT Prometheans Panels in Luxembourg: A Debrief

All are invited to join us as we recap, discuss, and synthesize lessons learned from our four Prometheans-sponsored panels at the SHOT annual conference in Luxembourg earlier in October.

Chef Christian Irabién

SHOT Debrief! Tuesday, October 28, 1-2:30 EST

Join us for a debrief of the recent SHOT meeting, just held in Luxembourg (Oct. 8-12). Learn what went on if you were not there, and fill us in on what you found interesting if you were (or if you joined virtually). What are people talking about these days in HOT?

There are no documents to read before this meeting.

[session postponed from Oct.2]

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.

Philippa Barr, "The Divided Sky: Regulating Atmospheric Crisis in Early Modern Milan"

Bian He and Mårten Söderblom Saarela, The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2025), Introduction, Chs 3 and 5.

Michelle DiMeo (Science History Institute)

Seminar with Katharina Seidl (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna / Ambras Castle, Innsbruck) on the "The Art of Beauty exhibition" at Ambras Castle, Innsbruck (June-October 2025)