Working Groups

A discussion with Gregory Dreicer, author of American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History (MIT Press, 2026).

We will start our discussion with a short presentation from the author: 

Wood, Iron, and History: How Stories Have Shaped Materials and Structures—and Stopped Us from Learning About the Reinvention of Construction

Seminar with Victoria Munn (University of Auckland) on Early Modern Hair Dye Recipes

Disability and the History of Astronomy

Astronomy has a long history of operating at, and even beyond, the limits of human ability.  In the introduction to the 2024 Osiris volume on “Disability and the History of Science”, editors Mara Mills, Jaipreet Virdi and Sarah F.

We are excited that the work for our March discussion will be a chapter from a work in progress by Alex Golub (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), "Projects and Problematics: Marshall Sahlins in Paris, 1967-1969."

Commentators: David H. Price and Robert Hancock

Speaker: Tiziana Beltrame

Assistant Professor - History of Science, Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA), University of Padua

Co-Editor with Yaël Kreplak of "Les réserves des musées – Écologies des collections" (2024) https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=11524 

Session Title: Museum cohabitations: how to make room for objects and their digital avatars?

Yovanna Pineda, "Public Health and the Urban Waters of the Riachuelo in Dock Sud, Buenos Aires City"

Hello all, for the March meeting, we will read Moving Crops and the Scales of History written by Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraivathe. Professor Bray will be joining us for the discussion, which will cover the Introduction (Orientations, Cropscales and History), plus Chapters 3 (Sizes) and 4 (Actants). Hope to see many of you there!

Sarah Finn (Talk Title TBA)

Deren Ertas (Harvard University) 

"From the Mine to the Market: A History of Silver in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire"

Robert Edwards (UC San Diego / Irvine) 

"Anticolonial Methods in the History of Linguistic Anthropology "

A. Blum, D. Brill - "Tokyo Wheeler or the Epistemic Preconditions of the Renaissance of Relativity" (2020)

Primary Source: (Re)Translation of John Wheeler’s Tokyo Lecture "Discussion on the Problems of Elementary Particle Theory" (1954), which is part of the attachment of the above paper.

Guest: Alexander Blum

Leib Celnik,  "Revisiting Goethe's Farbenlehre: English Translations, History, and Polemics"

Banji Chona (Lusaka): tbc

"Palatino 586: A medieval Occitan health manual"

Benedetta Mariani (UEA)

Commentator: TBC

Brian Leech, American Popular Coal-ture: Mining Movies and Sad Songs in the American Imagination

Divya Kumar-Dumas (University of Maryland)

Metal, Matter, and Meaning: Toward a Textual and Scientific History of the Sumhuram Yakṣī

Aijie Shi, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Life History of Laminaria japonica in the Northwest Pacific”

Speaker: Ryan A. Kashanipour, University of Arizona

Title: Epidemics and Epistemologies: Experiencing Illness in Colonial Yucatán

Alexander Silaen (University of Vienna)

Colonial Entomology and Labor Relations in Sumatra, 1880–1930 of the Gregorian Calendar

Kelcey Gibbons (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society, MIT)