Working Groups

Luisa Reis Castro (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, USC Dornsife) will present "The World Will Become Brazil: Modified Mosquitoes and the Limits of Situated Knowledges in Times of Planetary Transformations," followed by a discussion.

Alexei Kojevnikov - Quantum physics in the Soviet Union

Kojevnikov will present the history of quantum mechanics in the Soviet Union, building on previous research on Theoretical Physics in the Context of the Cultural Revolution.

Enrico Beltramini, Notre Dame de Namur University, California

Akosua Paries-Osei (Royal Holloway, University of London), "Seditious Seed of Forbidden Flowers: The legacy of Okra in the Reproductive Resistance of Enslaved women"

Roundtable Discussion on Journals as a Means of Shaping the Production & Dissemination of Knowledge

Topics: How to find suitable journals; how to respond to reviews; the role of journals in acdemic discourse; the policies and politics of journals.

Lightning Round

Andrea Álvarez Laorden (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona): “Mapping other’s green: forging environments, territories and communites in Latin America through SPOT satellite data 1980-2000“.

Rafael Dalyson dos Santos Souza (Casa de Oswaldo Cruz da Fiocruz):  "A French technical diplomat in Brazil: inventions, trade and asymmetries in the first half of the 19th century".

Iván Jaramillo (Universitat Pompeu Fabra): "Rutas del Caucho: Infraestructura y Logística en el Amazonas Peruano".

Our readings for April 2 are:

We will be taking a well-deserved Spring Break in April and will resume our meeting schedule in May. Take care, all!

Philippa Barr, "The Divided Sky: Producing Atmosphere through Spatial Segregation in Milan"
 

Pedro Raposo (The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University) and Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University)
 
Teaching with Collections

Arianna Borelli - "Between symmetry and asymmetry: spontaneous symmetry breaking as narrative knowing"
Primary Source: Mahiko Suzuki - "Foundation of Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetries"

Guest Expert: Arianna Borelli

Ian Dooley (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on 'A Pigment Paradigm Shift: How British Printing Ink Industrialization Revolutionized Color Printing in the Late Nineteenth Century'
 
Organizer: Elizabeth Savage

Sahar Bazzaz (College of the Holy Cross): Plants of the Red Sea Littoral: PE Botta's Expedition to Yemen, 1836
 
[this is a joint event with the online lecture series "Ecologies, Collections, and Contested Heritage: (Un-)Natural History and Italian Colonialism in Africa", co-convened by Jermay Michael Gabriel and Vera-Simone Schulz]

Career Diversity

Topics: Academic vs non-academic jobs; Work-life balance; gender; transition out of academia.

Speaker: Arwen Mohun is Professor in history at the University of Delaware, United States. Mohun has coordinated a working group on career diversity at the Consortium for History of Science Technology and Medicine.

April 10, 2025
Dr Nathan Bossoh, Research Fellow in History at Southampton University (UK)
 
Title: Access, Imperial Exploitation, and the Curation of New Botanical Futures
 

 
"Quarantine in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Space, Objects, and Bodies"
Marina Inì (University of Cambridge)
Commentator: Jane Stevens Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes University)

Sylvia Houghteling, "Dying the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia," Religion 11 (2020): 1-20.

Bu Yun Chen "The Craft of Color and the Chemistry of Dyes: Textile Technology in the Ryukyu Kingdom, 1700-1900," Technology & Culture 63, no. 1 (2022): 87-117.

• Nicholas Ostrum, Extracting Concessions and Losing Ground: The Twin Failures of Souédie and the Euphrates Dam, 1963-1969
• Aditi Basu, Hinduism and Sun Deification in India: Relevance as Solar Energy in the 21st Century 

Spectral Colors: Peeping and Projecting Spectacular Reality, 1890–1920s

Zi Yun Huang, University of Chicago, "Cold War interference: bioluminescence, underwater UFOs, the Deep Scattering Layer and other 'unfortunate behaviors' of plankton"