Working Groups
The Consortium invites scholars to join our topical working groups for challenging and collegial discussion of interesting publications in their fields and of each others’ works-in-progress.
Each group meets monthly. All interested scholars are welcome to participate via online video conferencing.
To join a group:
- Log in, or create an account
- Click on a group below
- Click on the "Membership" tab and select "Request Group Membership"
Submit a discussion paper for one of the working groups.
Upcoming Meetings
Please set your timezone.
"Anatomy and the Early Académie Royale des Sciences"
Katherine Reinhart (Binghamton)
Response: Antoine Gallay (Geneva)
- Wout Saelens, “Energy politics: urban fuel policy and the transition to coal in Ghent (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries).”
*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Gregory Radick (University of Leeds), "Language, Darwinism and the Human/Non-Human Boundary"
Emily Herrington, Touch Hunger: The story of hand transplants (Introduction)
Abstract:
Heisenberg - "Quantum-theoretical re-interpretations of kinematic and mechanical relations" (Z. Phys, 1925);
Blum, Jähnert, Lehner, Renn - "Translation as heuristics: Heisenberg's turn to matrix mechanics" (Studies, 2017);
Guest: Alexander Blum
James Lowe and David Ingram, "DNA Barcoding and the Changing Ontological Commitments of Taxonomy" (2023, Biology and Philosophy)
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Elena Agudio (Villa Romana) and Marleen Boschen (Goldsmiths, University of London / Tate): Testing Grounds / Seeding Worlds: Intersections of Art and Ecology in the Garden of Villa Romana, Florence
"Cameroon in Berlin. A collaborative assessment of collections and archives from the mammal collections in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin"
with Paul Taku Bisong, MSc in Evolution, Ecology and Systematics from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, with a dissertation entitled "The Batanga Expedition in German 'Kamerun' (1887): The Role of the first 'Kolonialzoologe' Bernhard Weissenborn." He is the author of an assessment on the type material from "Kamerun" in the mammal collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
Postponed until January, 2024.
Open discussion: Beginning a shared bibliography project using Zotero
Please join us as we start building our shared library!
Register here:
https://www.zotero.org/groups/5036327/engineering_studies
Guest discussants, two contributors to the Envirotech bibliography:
Incurability as ‘disability’ in classical Āyurveda: The case of vision disorders
Tulika Singh (University of Alberta)
Digitizing Paget, Finlay and Dufaycolor photographs at National Geographic Society
Jan Hubička
Daniella McCahey, Texas Tech University, "A Model for Extraterrestrial Settlement: Antarctica as an Analogue for Space"
In this session, we will read contributions from the just-published The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women’s Contributions to Media Studies (Goldsmiths Press, 2023), including the introduction by the editors, Elena D. Hristova, Aimee-Marie Dorsten, and Carol A. Stabile, and a chapter by Marianne Kinkel on “Gene Weltfish (1902–1980).”
**NOTE SPECIAL DATE AND TIME**
*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Paul Michael Kurtz, "Knowledge Infrastructure ca. 1900: The Case of Assyriology at the British Museum"
Guest: Marco Giovanelli
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Sumana Roy (Ashoka University): The Quest for the Plant Script
David Pretel, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, TBA
Francisco Tijerina, Ph.D. candidate, Washington University in St. Louis, TBA
"Roundtable: The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester UP, 2023)"
Heidi Hausse (Auburn)
Pamela O. Long (Independent)
Alisha Rankin (Tufts)
Paolo Savioa (Bologna)
- Julia Mead, “Frozen Assets: Czechoslovakia’s 1979 Blizzard and the Energetic Social Contract of Late Socialism”
Javier Poveda Figueroa, Independent researcher, "The dispute between Herbert Simon and Hao Wang concerning the future of artificial intelligence during the Cold War"
Anne Ricculli, Morris Museum
Taking ‘Patient’ Histories
This session will focus on how scholars can engage with ‘patient’ narratives in both oral testimonies and archival records responsibly, in ways that avoid replicating medicalization and pathologization.
Speakers:
Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes, Professor of History of Sciences at the Department of History at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
Rosanna Dent, Assistant Professor, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
Hues of faces and phases: insights on crafting high-tin bronzes in southern India
Dr Sharada Srinivasan (National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India)
Sajdeep Soomal, Doctoral Candidate, University of Toronto, “Refining Planetary Consciousness.”
Javiera Letelier (UC Irvine) & Pablo Pryluka (Princeton University), "Household appliances and consumers in Cold War Southern Cone"
Short Writings Roundtable
If you have a shorter piece--an abstract, a research description, an op-ed, etc.--that you would like feedback on, this session is for you! Please send you short piece to Melanie or Jason by January 19 for posting.
Bashira Chowdhury and Jim Giesen (Mississippi State University), Talk Title TBA
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Semih Celik (University of Exeter): 'A Museum in the Cradle of Civilization': The Imperial Natural History Museum in Istanbul and its Aftermath (1836-1870)
Mikael Wolfe, Stanford University
Fabian Prieto-Nañez, VirginiaTech
"Translating New World Drugs in Late Renaissance Italy: The Case of Indies Balsam"
Sharon Strocchia (Emory)
Response: Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton)
- Chad Montrie, “‘What is Labour’s Stake?’: Workers and the History of Environmentalism in Alberta.”
Kristine Palmieri, "Grand Visions of Alterthumswissenschaft: Classical Philology as Language Science in early Nineteenth-Century Germany"
Falconer - „Vortices and atoms in the Maxwellian era“
Guest: Isobel Falconer (tbc)
Oral Histories
This meeting will reckon with the value and challenges of using oral history as a source in humanities and social science research on reproduction.
Kimia Shahi, University of Southern California
*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
The yogi who became a Muslim: Indian Alchemy and Pseudograph Sufi Writings in South Asia
Dr. Fabrizio Speziale (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris-Marseille)
Ann Daly, Mississippi State University.
Joshua Bell (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian), Talk Title TBA
Lucas René Ramos, "From Sodomy to Heterosexual Incapacity: Governing “Sexual Deviancies” in Italian Catholic Sexology (1952-1978)"
Evan Roberts, "Young but daily growing? The decline of stunting and growth faltering in the United States, 1857-2014"
"Ghosts in Wellcome's Medieval Galleries"
Lauren Rozenberg (UEA/Leverhulme)
Response: tbc
- Minseok Jang, Testing a New Energy Resource: Fire Tests and the Risk of Kerosene in the Anglo-American World, 1859-1911
Heilbron, Rovelli - "Matrix Mechanics Mis-Prized: Max Born's Belated Nobelization"
Guest: Carlo Rovelli
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Taiye Fasola (University of Ibadan): The Relevance of Ethnobotany for a Modern Society
Vanessa Freije, University of Washington, TBA
Daniel Reboucas, Federal University of Bahia
Material aspects of some early modern Sri Lankan medical manuscripts
Dr. Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom (McGill University)
Elexis Trinity Williams Gray, Cornell University
Reproductive Technologies
This session will examine the history and future trends of researching and writing about reproductive technologies.
Admire Mseba will present on "The Challenges of Collaborative Locust Control in Late Twentieth Century Southern Africa, 1960s-1980s," followed by a discussion.
Diana Anselmo, "To Love so Much it Hurts: 'Bad Feelings,' Medicine, and Movie-Mad Female Audiences in the 1910s"
Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute), "Taking Stock of Documentary Linguistic Archives After Twenty Five Years":
This presentation will summarize findings of a collaborative writing project recently undertaken for the History of Anthropology Review. The project has asked several stakeholders (e.g. linguists, archivists, and community educators) to reflect on their experiences with digital language archives about a quarter century after the paradigm of documentary linguistics first took shape.
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Chanelle Adams (University of Lausanne): Volatile Oils: 'Wellness', Political Power, and the Market for Ravintsara Essential Oil in Madagascar
Julie Gibbings, University of Edinburgh
"Viewing Genocide's Aftermaths from Above: Aerial Photography and the Rio Chixoy Dam in Guatemala"
"Discussion: Objects, Images, and Spaces of Health... for Broad Publics"
Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins)
Jack Hartnell (UEA)
- Andrew Kettler, “Disenchanting the Senses: Sulfuric Discourse and the World System”
Al-Bīrūnī’s Taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind and the transmission of sciences in the early eleventh-century Gandhara and Panjab
Dr. Noémie Verdon (University of Lausanne)
Alessandra Passariello, Naples Zoological Station
Gender, Masculinity and Reproduction
Here, we will explore how gender and masculinity shapes how we think about human reproductive experiences and the histories we write about them.
Slava Savova, "Re-Ottomanizing modernity: domesticating balneology in early to mid-20th century Bulgaria"
This dissertation chapter examines the local intermingling of a specific type of sociomedical architectures – Ottoman and European thermal baths - and the persistent vernacular uses that bind them together.
Lucas Richert and Hannah Swan (University of Wisconsin), Talk Title TBA
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Neda Saeedi (Tehran / Berlin): "Swear by the Fig, Swear by the Olive"
"Swear by the Fig, Swear by the Olive" explores urban and territorial landscapes and their flora, used to justify land ownership and deprivation in conflict zones.
Yohad Zacarías, University of Texas at Austin, TBA
Diana Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis
- Odinn Melsted and Candida Sánchez-Burmester, “Geoscience Spillover: The Oil Industry and Geothermal Development in Greater California, 1960s-1970s”
- Dante LaRiccia, “Kurt Waldheim, the United Nations, and the Campaign for a ‘World Energy Order’
Chen-Pang Yeang, "Information, Cryptography, and Noise"
Reproducing History: Writing Histories of the Personal
This session will focus on how historians have used their own healthcare experiences to complement and inform their research and advocacy work.
Are the Elements and the Pañcabhūta the Same (Thing)? Epistemic Objects between
Science, Religion, and Philosophy in Colonial North India, c.1920
Dr. Charu Singh (University of Cambridge)
Jonathan Galka, Harvard University, “'The offer which the ocean has given us': The Law of the Sea, the New International Economic Order, and the Promises of Manganese Nodules in the Global 1970s"
Nithyanand Rao, Doctoral Student, University of California, San Diego.
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Sahar Bazzaz (College of the Holy Cross): Plants of the Red Sea Littoral: PE Botta's Expedition to Yemen, 1836
Katherine Arnold, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU München
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
- Joya John, Energy Histories, Museums, and Postcolonial Development in India
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Maxmillian J Chuhila (University of Dar es Salaam): Green Imperialism and Biomedical Campaigns in Colonial Tanganyika
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Guillermo Pupo Pernet (University of Arkansas): Achiote: Painting the Town Red