Working Groups
Active 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"
Upcoming Meetings
Please set your timezone.
This month's session will not have any readings. Instead, we will be hearing and discussing the work of some of the editors of the History of Anthropology Review who presented papers at the 2021 American Anthropological Association (AAA) and History of Science Society (HSS) conferences taking place this month.
They'll have the chance to share their work, discuss the conference reactions, and reflect on the state of History of Anthropology as shown in these two (zoom-heavy) conferences.
Anna Guerrero, Marine Biological Laboratory and American Philosophical Society
Dear all,
Please join us next week, Thursday, December 2nd for the discussion "Latin America in the global histories of science & the environment" led by Prof. Eve Buckley (University of Delaware) with two leading scholars in the field: Prof. Lise Sedrez (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) and Prof. Stuart McCook (University of Guelph). We plan to discuss readings 1 & 2 and the presenters provided two additional readings that might be of interest to group members.
Maura C. Flannery, Professor Emerita, St. John's University, NY/Research Associate, A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia: "Can Digital Collections Bridge the Gap between the Humanities and Science?"
Covell Meyskens, “Building a Hydraulic Engine for Mao’s China in the Three Gorges
Region.”
Daniella Russ, “Energy Balances and the Politics of Oil Substitution.”
Richard Tait, “Doctors in Society: 15th Century Italy" Thesis Chapter.
We will discuss a new article that was awarded the Rainger prize (for early career scholarship in the earth and environmental sciences) at the recent History of Science Society virtual meeting:
Whitney Barlow Robles, "The Rattlesnake and the Hibernaculum: Animals, Ignorance, and Extinction in the Early American Underworld," William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 1 (January 2021): 3-44.
Melissa B. Reynolds, "The Past and Future in Print"
You can find the pre-circulated paper below. The session will take place over Zoom, which you can access on the date through the link on this page.
If you have any questions leading up to the event, please do not hesitate to reach out to the coordinators.
Rouse, Articulating the World, Ch. 9-10 (Ch. 11, epilogue optional)
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
West Africa Session:
Amanda Logan (Northwestern University): Archaeobotanical Evidence of Food and Crafting from Oduduwa College, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
Chioma Ngonadi (University of Nigeria, Nsukka/University of Cambridge): Ancient Food Practices and Pottery Production in Southeastern Nigeria
Orijemie Emuobosa Akpo (University of Ibadan): From the Hills to the Valley: Changing Food Production Practices among the Tiv in Central Nigeria
*Note Special Time*
Guest Visit: Dr. Viktoria Tkaczyk (Humboldt University)
Readings:
"How to turn interior monologues inside out: epistemologies, methods, and research tools in the long twentieth century" (sound studies, 2020)
&
"Disciplining Auditory Cognition" - Introduction to Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 (Dr. Tkaczyk's current book project)
Guest sessions are moderated.
Elise A. Mitchell (Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow, History Department, Princeton University), "Medicine and Slavery in Early Caribbean Gazettes"
Comment by Rana A. Hogarth, Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Chapter Title: Developmental Disorder, Racial Dissolution: Racial Typologies of Developmental Normalcy in Early Child Medicine, 1830 - 1870.
Please join us on the 16th December for the next session of the Medieval European Medical Manuscripts working group, with Elma Brenner (Wellcome Collection) and Peter Murray Jones (Cambridge) on the theme of 'People and the medical manuscript: endorsement, authorities, owners, patients'.
The session will feature two papers (details below).
Details:
'People and the medical manuscript: endorsement, authorities, owners, patients'
16th December 2021, 4pm-5.30pm (GMT)
Marco Tamborini, Institute of Philosophy, Technical University of Darmstadt, "Data and Visualizations of Deep Time," ch. for edited volume, Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences. Edited by Elena Aronova, David Sepkoski, Marco Tamborini, Springer 2022.
Merging Environmental Conservation and Historic Preservation by Barry Stiefel, Associate Professor at the College of Charleston Historic Preservation & Community Planning Program.
Holiday! No session today.
Don James McLaughlin (Assistant Professor of English, University of Tulsa) “The Muzzle: An Object Biography”
Comment by Cindy Patton (Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University)
Joint meeting with the Engineering Studies Working Group
Ryan Hearty, Johns Hopkins University
"Monitoring Water Quality in US Rivers in the 1950 and 1960s: information, communication, and applied sciences"
*Note Special Time*
Joint meeting with the History of Technology Working Group
Ryan Hearty, Johns Hopkins University
"Monitoring Water Quality in US Rivers in the 1950 and 1960s: information, communication, and applied sciences"
History of Substance Use Disorder Treatment
Victor McFarland, “Breaking the Earth: The Story of Nuclear Fracking.”
Brian Leech, “The Fastest Limit in the West: Energy, Safety, and the American West’s Fight against the National Maximum Speed Limit in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Jennifer Leetsch (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn): Mary Seacole's Plant Matter(s): Vegetal Entanglements of the Black Atlantic in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857)
Lidia Ponce de la Vega (McGill University): The Travel Stories of Plants in the "Biodiversity Heritage Library": Colonization and (In)Visibility of the Global South in Human-Plants Relationships
Launch of working group and informal networking session
Speaker: Prof. Dominik Wujastyk, University of Alberta
Title: New findings from the Suśruta Project.
Magdalena Grüner, Universität Hamburg, "Else Bostelmann’s Abyssal Visions and the Ocean-Surreal"
Luis Felipe Eguiarte Souza, University of Minnesota
"Julian Huxley: 'If I were a dictator', Technocracy in his popular writing and science fiction"
Erika Milam, Princeton University
#1-David Dalton, UNC Charlotte, “Eduardo Urzaiz's novel, Eugenia and the Interface of aesthetics and science in constructing eugenics in postrevolutionary Mexico”
#2-Lucas Izquierdo, Independent Scholar, “Novel as technology: 19th and 20th century Peru”
Nicole Barnes (Duke University), "On Soil and Sustainability, Or, Who Cares about Shit?"
Comments by Gonçalo Santos (University of Coimbra)
Katherine McLeod, New York University: "How to Display a Hoatzin: Ecology, Eugenics, and Zoology in the Early 20th Century United States"
Ryan Jobson, “As a fire runs up a forest”: Counter-plantation futures and the Trinidad oil
strike of 1937.”
Kirsten Moore, “Building Markets, Saving Lives: Insecticide-Treated Nets and a New Approach to Global Malarial Control.”
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Sarah Longair (University of Lincoln): The Coco-de-Mer in the 19th-Century Indian Ocean World: Connections, Conservation and Colonialism
Margaret Carlyle (University of British Columbia)
"Household, Reproductive, and Personal Technologies"
Guest: Dr. Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University, Department of History)
Reading TBA
Guest sessions are moderated.
We'll briefly introduce the visitor, begin with opening remarks on the reading, then discuss participants' questions as well as topics of interest to the visitor as appropriate.
All are welcome!
Beatriz Martínez-Rius, Sorbonne Université.
Claire Mayo, University of Tennessee
"Nineteenth Century Envirotechnical Regimes and the Great Flood of 1910: How Competing Ideas of Water Management Structured the Disaster"
Speaker: Dr Philipp A. Maas, Associate Professor, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (URL)
Title: TBA
Taylor Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara
#1-Fabián Prieto-Nanez, Virginia Tech, “Taste, class, and popular design of technical devices in Bogota, Colombia”
#2-Sonia Robles, University of Delaware, “Blueprints for Modernity: Public radio programming in Mexico”
#3-Third presenter TBA
Hasan Umut (PhD, McGill University), "The Confessional Turn in Early Modern Ottoman Cosmology"
Comments by Travis Zadeh (Yale University, Religious Studies)
Andrea Marshall, Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies: "Zines as Nonbinary Objects and Questions of Privilege"
Baasit Abubakr, “Currents of the Empire in South Asia: A History of Colonial Electrification in Jammu and Kashmir 1900-1947.”
Gina Surita, “The Mysterious Muscle Machine, 1900–1930.”
Patricio Simonetto, “The Body Where I was Born in: Embodiment Repertoires During the Sex Change Transition.”
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Aqsa Mengal (Lahore University), Dania Nasir (Lahore University), Kulsoom Din Malik (Lahore University) and Moiz Abdul Majid (Tufts University UEP): Nature in the City: Memory, Scandal and Leisure in Lahore's Urban Parks
Daniel Trambaiolo (Hong Kong University)
“Manufacturing and Marketing Medicines in Tokugawa Japan”,
Alison Glassie, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.
Liat Spiro, College of the Holy Cross
"Patentability and Experience: Work, Class, and Risk in the Political Economy of Intellectual Property in Imperial Germany"
Speaker: Dr Cristina Pecchia, Austrian Academy of Sciences (URL)
Title: TBA
Cyrus Mody, Maastricht University
#1-Lisa Munro, Independent Scholar. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2021.1977677
#2-Yohad Zacaria, University of Chile.
#3-Peter Soland, Southeast Missouri State University, "Aerial Shots and Bomber Jackets: The Role of Aviation, Celebrity, and Cinema in Re-Imagining Latin America"
Katherine Arnold, London School of Economics: "Interpreting the Collector's Logic: The Pursuit of Desiderata in Early Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa"
Jarrod Hore, “Reinventing a Supercontinent: Towards an Energy History of Gondwanaland.”
Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, “Data Driven: Clerical Work, Geophysics, and the Rise of Computing in the American Oil Industry.”
Molly Nebiolo, Northeastern University
Guest: Dr. Peter Sachs Collopy (personal website)
Reading TBA
Guest sessions are moderated.
We'll briefly introduce the visitor, begin with introductory remarks on the reading, then discuss participants' questions as well as topics of interest to the visitor as appropriate.
All are welcome!
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Cecylia Mgombele (University of Dar es Salaam), Sinyati Robinson Mark (University of Dar es Salaam) and Sarah Walshaw (Simon Fraser University): Human-Plant Relationships in Tanzania's Past: Changes, Choices, Challenges - and Specifically the Changes Brought with the Caravan Trade
Speaker: Eric Gurevitch, PhD candidate
South Asian Languages and Civilizations and
Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science
University of Chicago
Title: Diseases of the eye: Debating the physiology of vision across medicine and philosophy in medieval India
David McCaskey, University of California, Riverside, "Holy Mackerel: Fish, Science, and the Politics of Food Aid in Cold War Southeast Asia"
Evan Hepler-Smith, Duke University
"Chemical ciphers: war and peace"
Patricia Marcos, Doctoral Candidate, University of California, San Diego
#1-Lucas Erichsen, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), "Under the Sun, between tropics: meat preservation technology in late 19th century Brazil"
#2-Marisa Lerer, Manhattan College, “Technology and Memorial Design in the Southern Cone”
#3-Third presenter TBA
Energy History in Asia: Book Discussion
Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020)
Michaela Rife, “Capturing Petroleum Publics: The Visual Culture of Oil on the Dust Bowl Plains.”
Jordan Howell, Capital Be Dammed: Alcoa and the History of Hydroelectric Power in North America, 1890-1950.”
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton University) in conversation with Annalee Davis: Sites of Healing: Plantation Histories and Histories of Care in the Work of Annalee Davis
Taylor McCall (Medieval Academy of America)
“Picturing the Dissected Female Body in Manuscripts c.1200-1500"
Guest visit: Dr. Mara Mills (Media, Culture and Communication, NYU / personal website)
Reading TBA
Guest sessions are moderated.
We'll briefly introduce the visitor, begin with introductory remarks on the reading, then discuss participants' questions as well as topics of interest to the visitor as appropriate.
All are welcome.
Speaker: Madhu K. Parameswaran, Assistant Professor, Department of Dravyagunavijnanam, Vaidyaratnam P.S. Varier Ayurveda College (URL)
Title: TBA
Katherine Sinclair, Rutgers University.
Thomas Zeller, University of Maryland, College Park
"Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters"
#1-David Pretel, Pompeu Fabra University, “Green Gold Modernity: Machines, Peonage and Henequen in Yucatan’s Gilded Age”
#2-Leida Fernandez-Prieto, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, “Mute Witnesses: Mapping the Meanings of the Images on the History of Cuban Agriculture”
#3-Third presenter TBA
Sayori Ghoshal (Columbia University), "Race in Nationalist Science: Making Anthropology an Indian Discipline through the Question of Origin, 1920-1950"
Plants in Africa and the Global South: Multi-Species Materialities, Ecologies, and Aesthetics (MMEA)
Melanie Boehi (University of the Witwatersrand), Phakamani m’Africa Xaba (Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden), and Luciano Concheiro San Vicente (The National Autonomous University of Mexico): Reimagining Botanical Gardens and Urban Parks in a Time of Crisis
Yan Liu (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
“Scent from Afar: A Transcultural History of Aromatics in Medieval China”
Agenda (Updated 9/5/21)
Final Session: Thursday, 6/23/22, 1:00pm-2:30pm EDT
- Meeting with volume editor.
- Discussion of Next Steps
Elise Burton (University of Toronto), "A Lexicon of Science"
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
Lavinia Maddaluno (Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice)
“Water Management and Public Health in Spanish Milan”
Ben Breen (University of California, Santa Cruz)
"Colonial Magic and Spaces of Healing in the Seventeenth Century"
Meredith Gamer (Columbia University)
“William Hunter's Bedside Manner”