Working Groups

*Note Special Date*

"How to Draw the Buddha and Dissect a Corpse: Iconometry and Anatomy in Early-Modern Tibet"

Briana Brightly (Harvard University)

Commentator: Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

At this meeting, we will be discussing the ethical challenges of Generative AI for historians. We will discuss selections from the 2023 AHR forum on AI, as well as these articles: 

https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/practice-history/artificial-intelligence-a-warning-for-history/

Jan Gerris (University of Ghent)

Tandulaveyāliya - An ancient Jain philosophical reflection on life

Please read the three texts below:

Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) and Sam Robinson (University of York), "Research and Development in the Dependencies of the Falkland 
Islands’: The Discovery Committee and the Early Politics of the Discovery Investigations"

Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College) 

Sourcing Dragon’s Blood: Forging an Early Modern Global Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

Melissa Reynolds (Texas Christian University), 'The Material Culture of Later Medieval English Medicine'

Abstract:

A discussion with Edward Beatty and Israel G. Solares, the co-editors of the open-access An Engineered World: The Role of Engineers in Global Modernity (MIT Press, 2025).

Rohan Deb Roy, (Associate Professor in South Asian History, University of Reading) ‘Nobody here… will look at a mosquito’: Entomo-political surveillance in late colonial India

Chloé Laplatine (Histoire des théories linguistiques, CNRS et Université Paris Cité)

Linguistic archives for research on North American languages and their revitalization

Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech): Technology in Motion: Relaunching a book series with The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Edgar Alejandro Hernández presents, “The Autochromes of the Mexican Alfredo Saldívar.”

Dear all,

For the May meeting, we will discuss issues including color, dyeing, surface, and materiality. Please read the following two recent articles. Note that the author of the first article, Rachel Silberstein, who is also one of the convenors of this group, will certainly be at at the discussion.

Rachel Silberstein, “The 72 Kinds”: The Cloth Classic, the Jiangnan Cotton Finishing Sector, and the Expansion of Cotton Dyeing in the Qing Dynasty, in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69 (2026): 1–53.

Henry Schmidt (University of California, Berkeley), "Invention and Federal Ethnology in the US"

In the final third of the nineteenth century, ethnologists engaged in new ways with the matter of how and why human culture develops. In the United States, a community of ethnologists based in Washington, DC articulated their answers to those questions by drawing on the concept of ‘invention.’

Guy Erez, "Catching and Curing the Plague in the Multispecies City"

"Medicine at the Mines in Seventeenth-Century Sumatra"

Brief abstract: 

In the late seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company launched intensive mining operations on the west coast of Sumatra. Medical practitioners played crucial roles at the mining sites. This paper examines how these European practitioners understood diseases, managed the health of the labor force, and experimented with mineral medicine at the mines. 

Wenrui Zhao (University of Utah)

Commentator: Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University Bochum)

Community Care and Environmental Health in the Early Extractocene by Guy Geltner (Monash University)

Amanda Harris (Sydney)

Triangulating the relationships between diaspora speaker communities, dispersed cultural heritage, and modern digital archives of Oceania

Oral history interviews. 

Guest experts: Luisa Bonolis and William Thomas

. 

Suzanne Karr Schmidt on 'Color, Cloth, Collation: Previewing  "Premodern Printing on Fabric"'