News of the Consortium

October 2019
In this issue:
  • The University of Oklahoma Joins the Consortium
  • 2020-21 Fellowships Now Available
  • Announcing 2nd Round of 2019-20 Research Fellows
  • New Working Groups
  • Fellows Updates
  • Newly Acquired or Processed Collections
  • Events Calendar
 University of Oklahoma Joins Consortium
The Consortium is delighted to welcome the University of Oklahoma as its newest member. Scholars will be able to apply for Consortium fellowships to use OU collections starting in spring 2020. OU is home to one of the oldest programs in the U.S. in history of science, technology and medicine, as well as the History of Science Collections.

The Collections hold nearly 100,000 print volumes, with strengths in traditional fields including astronomy, physics, natural history, geology, technology, and science and religion. Areas of recent concentration include women in science, Islamicate science, star maps, and science and technology in Asia. History of environmental science, geology, meteorology, technology, physics, science and Native American culture, and natural history in the American West are featured in the Western History Collections and University Archives.
 2020-21 Fellowships Now Available

The Consortium invites applications for fellowships in the history of science, technology and medicine, broadly construed. Opportunities include: 

  • Short-term Research Fellowships
  • Dissertation Fellowships
  • NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship
  • Fellows in Residence
  • Research Fellowships for Brazilian, Indian and South African scholars working in the medical humanities

To apply, please visit the online application form. The website also features: information about the fellowship programs of member institutions; descriptions of the exceptional collections in the museums, archives, and libraries of the Consortium; and a Consortium-wide search hub for rare books and manuscripts.

Applications for 2020-2021 must be submitted online no later than December 16, 2019.
 Announcing 2nd Round 2019-20 Research Fellowships
The Consortium has awarded a second round of research fellowships for 2019-20 to the following scholars:

Howard Chiang, UC Davis
Translators of the Soul: From the First Chinese Psychoanalyst to the Rise of Transcultural Psychiatry

Marcos Cueto, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil
A History of Global AIDS and Health Activism in Brazil

Menglu Gao, Northwestern University
The Lacquered Chinese Box: Opium, Addiction, and the Fantasy of Empire in Nineteenth-century British Literature

Kit Heintzman, Harvard University
Medicine Unbridled: Veterinarians and Multispecies Statecraft, 1750-1815

Alani Hicks-Bartlett, Brown University
The Cure Gone Awry: Gender, Dis/ability, and the Ailing Empire in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Christa Kuljian, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Persistent Biological Myths: Fifty Years of Pushing Back Against Gender Bias in Science, 1969-2019

Xiao Li, Southern Illinois University
"A New Woman": Yamei Kin’s Contributions to Medicine and Women’s Rights in the U.S. and China, 1864-1934

Diana Louis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums, and Mental Illness in the 19th Century

Marcos Martins, UC San Diego
Political Medicine: Science Sovereignty and the Government of Imperial Bodies in the Portuguese Atlantic (1715-1818)

Dorin Smith, Brown University
Fictional Brains: Reflecting on the Neural Subject in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Justin Tackett, Stanford University
Poetry and Sound Technology, 1816-1914; Hardy and Radio; Poetics and the Prehistory of Silent Film, c.1880-c.1930

See the list of fellows from the first round of awards for 2019-20.
 Working Groups
Below is the list of working groups for 2019-20. Scholars from around the world participate online in small groups to discuss specialized topics. The schedule for all upcoming meetings is available. The Consortium is pleased to announce a slate of new working groups which will be starting soon. Follow the links below to register for any of the groups. New Groups Evolution and Heredity in Brazil
This group will examine the history of the evolutionary synthesis of genetics and natural selection, its impact upon agriculture, theories of race and eugenics, as well as other theories of heredity and evolution which influenced these processes.
Conveners: William deJong-Lambert, Bronx Community College; Robert Wegner, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation; Marcelo Lima Loreta, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

History of Science in Asia: Decolonizing the History of Science
This group will engage questions regarding the deconstruction of imperial visions and definitions of the sciences in Asia, and will seek to explore how new work can contribute to the diversification of perspectives in the history of science.
Conveners: Mary Brazelton, University of Cambridge; Elise Burton, University of Cambridge; Shireen Hamza, Harvard University; Charu Singh, University of Cambridge

Malingering and Social Welfare Policy
This group will both advance the historiography on the role of malingering and feigned illness in building and conceptualizing modern welfare states, and will highlight the persistence and relevance of that history in current debates over health and health policy in the West.
Convener: Daniel Goldberg
 
Measuring Aurality; Interdisciplinary Histories of Disability, Technology, and Military Acoustics
This group forges interdisciplinary and intersectional connections in the history of science, technology, and medicine, sound studies, military studies, and disability history to probe questions about measuring and manipulating modern aurality. It will examine how and why sound became measured and standardized, as well as how aurality intersected with social differences.
Conveners: Jessica Martucci, Science History Institute; David Suisman, University of Delaware; Jaipreet Vidri, University of Delaware
 
Sciences of the Senses
This group will focus on the overlapping histories of the sciences of nature and culture at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when the human senses became central objects of investigation for anthropologists, linguists, physiologists, psychologists, technicians, and instrument makers. It will explore scientific attempts to produce knowledge through and about the senses as a way of restoring authentic continuities among disciplinary entities in flux, and producing scientific knowledge about human nature and culture.
Conveners: Cameron Brinitzer, University of Pennsylvania; Judy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania
 
Under Tropical Skies: Science, Technology, and Society
This group seeks to address a gap in scholarship that has largely omitted tropical regions from the history of atmospheric sciences and technologies. Topics that it will consider include agricultural meteorology for tropical regions, climate technologies, and the involvement of women in tropical meteorology.
Conveners: Fiona Williamson, Singapore Management University; Ruth Morgan, Monash University; Jim Fleming, Colby College
 Fellows Updates


Leah Aronowsky, 2016-17 Research Fellow
Leah received the History of Science Society's 2019 Ronald Rainger Award for best early career work in the history of earth and environmental sciences.


Kevin Baker, 2017-18 Dissertation Fellow
Kevin completed his dissertation and accepted a two-year postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department.


Geoff Bil, 2018-19 Research Fellow
Geoff began a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware.



Roberta Chauca Tapia, 2014-15 Dissertation Fellow
Roberto published "El 'imperio fluvial' franciscano en la Amazonia occidental entre los siglos XVII y XVIII" ["The Franciscan 'River Empire' in Western Amazonia between the 17th and 18th Centuries"], in Historia Critica 73 (2019): 95-116.

Ryan Dahn, 2019-20 Fellow in Residence
Ryan published "Big Science, Nazified? Pascual Jordan, Adolf Meyer-Abich, and the Abortive Scientific Journal Physis" in Isis 110, no. 1 (March 2019).


Theodora Dryer, 2017-18 Dissertation Fellow; 2018-2019 Fellow in Residence
Theodora defended her dissertation and received the Dean's Fellowship Award for Humanistic Studies from University of San Diego. She has been named Postdoctoral Associate at the AI Now Institute at New York University.

Alexandra Fair, 2018-19 Research Fellow
Alexandra received the 2019-20 Fulbright-University of Reading Postgraduate Award to study history in the United Kingdom. She recently published an article titled “Situating Standpoint Magazine: Conservative Journalism and Eugenic Ideology” on eugenic discourse in the British publication Standpoint. When she returns from the UK, Alexandra will begin a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Abraham Gibson, 2014-15 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow
Abe recently co-edited a Focus Section on "Computational History and Philosophy of Science" and co-authored an article, "The History of Science and the Science of History: Computational Methods, Algorithms, and the Future of the Field," both in the same issue of Isis (September 2019). Abe also published an article, "Moonshine Capital of the World: A Visual History of Untaxed Whiskey in Franklin County, Virginia," in Environmental History (July 2019). 

Jonathan Jones, 2017-18 Research Fellow
Jonathan has two forthcoming publications: "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction" in The Journal of the Civil War Era and "Buying and Selling Masculinity: Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction Patent Cures" in Caroline E. Janney and James Marten, eds., Buying and Selling the Civil War.

Jessica Linker, 2013-14 Research Fellow
Jessica is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford and Bryn Mawr, and a short-term fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Jessica's dissertation won the 2019 Zuckerman Dissertation Prize at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her postdoc project, a digital history of Bryn Mawr women in science can be seen at: https://digitalscholarship.brynmawr.edu/howis/

Shana Lopes, 2015-16 Research Fellow
Shana joined the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as Assistant Curator of Photography.


Joseph Malherek, 2015-16 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow
Joseph will be a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Central European University in Budapest for the 2019-202 academic year. He also recently published "Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen's Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia," in Consumer Engineering, 1920s-1970s: Marketing between Expert Planning and Consumer Responsiveness, eds. Jan Logemann, Gary Cross and Ingo Köhler.

Jonson Miller, 2014-15 Research Fellow
Jonson will be publishing his book, The White Manhood of Engineering: Creating Engineers at the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute with Lever Press.


Vivek Neelakantan, 2018-19 Research Fellow
Vivek published a Bahasa Indonesia translation of his book, Science, Public Health and Nation-Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia.


James Poskett, 2013-14 Research Fellow
James published Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 with University of Chicago Press.


Lisa Ruth Rand, 2015-16 Dissertation Fellow; 2018-2019 Postdoctoral Fellow in Residence
Ruth has begun a two-year Haas Fellowship at the Science History Institute.


James Risk, 2015-16 Research Fellow
James published "The Fresnel Affair: Manufacturing, Technology Transfer, Republicanism, and the United States' Adoption of the Fresnel Lighthouse Lens, 1819-1852" in The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 28, issue 4 (Autumn 2018).

Neeraja Sankaran, 2018-19 Research Fellow
Neeraja  is now editor of the HSS Newsletter, and has two publications: "Macfarlane Burnet: The Concept of Self" in Interference: International Review of Science 4, no. 4 (July 2019), and Anderson W., Sankaran N. (2019) "Historiography and Immunology" in Dietrich M., Borello M., Harman O. (eds), Handbook of the Historiography of Biology: Historiographies of Science, volume 1 (Springer, 2022). Neeraja will be an International Visiting Fellow at the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Leeds for one semester, beginning January 2020.

Óscar Moisés Torres Montúfar, 2016-17 Research Fellow
Óscar begins a position as Professor at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico.


Dora Vargha, 2015-16 Research Fellow; 2010-2011 Research Fellow
Dora received the 2019 Book Award from the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) for Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic.
 Newly Acquired or Processed Collections
Adler Planetarium has published a catalogue of its sundial collection.
The Adler Planetarium of Chicago has the best and most comprehensive collection of sundials and time-finding instruments in North America. Now many of these objects can be yours to explore.  This volume encompasses a dazzling array of sundials, 268 in all, that date from the 15th to 20th centuries.
 
The American Philosophical Society is pleased to announce that the papers of H. Eldon Sutton (25 linear feet) and Val Fitch (60 linear feet) have been processed and are available to researchers. In addition, the APS has acquired the papers of Freeman Dyson.
 
The College of Physicians has digitized its Silas Weir Mitchell Materials.
 
The New York Academy of Medicine has digitized two projects:
Public Health in Modern America, 1890-1970; and 
Archives of Sexuality & Gender, Part III: Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries.
 
The Wellcome Collection makes the papers of Dr. Joshua Bierer available for research.
 
 Events Calendar
The Consortium maintains a calendar of events in the history of science, technology and medicine at member institutions. Find an event near you.
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