Working Groups

Mary Mendoza (Assistant Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University) Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People defied the U.S.-Mexico Border

When most people picture the US-Mexico border, they think of walls, fences, concrete, and wire. But in this first history of how the environment influenced physical boundary-making between the two nations, Mary E. Mendoza focuses on how the natural world shaped ideas about race, gender, and security. In so doing, she unearths surprising origins of the modern-day immigration debate.
 

Louisa-Dorothea Gehrke (Dresden University)

Designing Photographic Films with Robert L. Shanebrook

Designing photographic films requires identifying the subjective tastes of photographers then making compromises while applying the limited technical tools available to the film designer. Using Kodak PORTRA Film as an example, subjective image evaluation will be described and then the technology that is applied to design and then manufacture the film. 

Seminar on Beautifying Practices in Arabic Medieval Medical Compendia with Anna Gili (University of Padua): Medical Beauty Prescriptions. A reading of al-Rāzī's Kitāb al-Manṣūrī and al-Maǧūsī's Kitāb al-Malakī

Meenakshi Srihari, "Talking Microbes: Why Comics?"

From twentieth-century cartoons in Punch that cast microbes as social and political actors, to manga adaptations imagining the body as an autocratic regime of cellular labour, the microbe has a surprisingly long and charged history of visual representation. This talk traces that history to ask: what does the comics form uniquely offer to stories of contagion and infection that other narrative modes cannot?

Amalia Dragani (EHESS), "Malinowski’s Hidden Poet: Artistic Practice and the Birth of a New Methodology"

There will be no meetings in June, July, or August. We look forward to seeing you again in the fall.

Deep Space Extractivism: The Negative Portrayal of Mining in Hollywood’s Science Fiction by Brian Leech (Augustana College)

Join us for our very last working group meeting of the year. At this meeting we will explore future plans of the group and discuss a draft dissertation chapter from CHSTM working group member Emma Wathen, titled: 

• “What I Needed Was a Disabled Moms Network”: Disability Feminism, Reproductive Rights, and Medical Self-Advocacy.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Collecting Color/Color Collections*

First: Some statements

Justin Randolph Thompson (The Recovery Plan): Earth | Art | Space | Time: Re-Positioning The First Conference for Minority Participation in Earth Science and Mineral Engineering

Medical History in the World: A Roundtable

Speakers: 

Amanda Herbert (Durham)

Lauren Kassell (EUI/Cambridge)

Hannah Murphy (KCL)

Penelope K. Hardy, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, "Science from the Quarterdeck: Naval-Scientific Networks and the 1870s Challenger Expedition"

Speaker
Sofia Nestrovski
M.A. in Literary Theory, University of São Paulo (USP)
Ph.D. candidate in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo (USP)

Presentation
Title to be announced soon

Joseph Campana

Lidia Ponce de la Vega, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies

Of Archives, Heritage, and Virtual Repatriation: Biologia Centrali-Americana and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Current research: Seminar on Bathing Women in Late Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts with Sabrina Jocher  (University of Salzburg).

Pallavi Das, "Rethinking Cholera in the Indian Ocean World: Transregional Networks and Epidemic Governance in the Nineteenth Century."

We will gather informally to hear about all of our research, plans, and summer travels. Please join us!

Jack Ashby, University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

Australian mammals, museums and colonial histories