Working Groups

'They will all go to hell anyway' - Killing the dead in early modern Rumelia

Minji Lee (Montclair State University), 'The Porous Womb: Hildegard’s Understanding of the Female Body Giving New Life and Salvation'

Biography:
Dr. Minji Lee is an Assistant Professor in Religion and the Medical Humanities Program at Montclair State University. Dr. Lee specializes in the study of medicine in relation to cultural practices and belief systems – including women’s health, reproductive issues, and comparative analysis of alternative medicine in Korea and the West.

We will be reading and discussing selections from Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories (2021). We will ask you to read the introduction of the book, and then choose one of the three other chapters in the reading packet. If you have time to read all chapters, please feel free!

Taina Syrjämaa

Tracing ticks and a multispecies network in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland

Ticks have probably lived for centuries in the Finnish territory. However, their exact distribution was not mapped before the 1950s and only few overt traces of them exist in historical sources. For example, oral history collections contain hardly any reference directly to them. My search for ticks in rural nineteenth and early twentieth century Finland started with the dilemma of ticks’ invisibility in the then society.

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Geoff Bil (University of Victoria)

A Tale of Two Naturalists: Hidden and not-so-hidden histories of Indigenous botanical translation in nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand

Reading seminar with Erin Griffey (University of Auckland) on her book Facing Decay: Beauty, Aging and Cosmetics in Early Modern Europe (Penn State University Press, 2025)

From the Margins to the Center: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding (Soviet/ Radio) Astronomy and the State

led by Gabriela Rădulescu, Postdoctoral Guggenheim Fellow, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
 

We are excited to announce that Caleb Shelburne (Harvard University) will join us in December to discuss "Teaching Resources at the History of Anthropology Review." Teaching Resources at the History of Anthropology Review." 

Speaker: Thomas Biskup 

Researcher, leader of the project "A testimony to ecclesiastical natural history and an archive of historical biodiversity. 
The Herbarium Ruperti (1700) of the Herzog August Bibliothek" (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany)

Amy Malventano, "Urban Environmentalism and Waste Management Reform in Early Twentieth-Century Louisville"

Hello all, for this meeting, we will read the following two articles on the theme of embodied and tacit knowledge. Hope to see many of you at the discussion. 

Bertucci P. Spinners' Hands, Imperial Minds: Migrant Labor, Embodied Expertise, and the Failed Transfer of Silk Technology across the Atlantic. Technol Cult. 2021;62(4):1003-1031. 

Eyferth, Jacob. “Craft Knowledge at the Interface of Written and Oral Cultures.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 4, no. 2 (2010): 185–205.

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A Roundtable Discussion to Launch: 

Tillmann Taape, Crafting Medicine: Artisans, Knowledge, and the Common Man in Hieronymus Brunschwig's Books on Surgery and Distillation (Chicago: 2025)

and

Jack Hartnell, Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton: 2025)

moderated by

Pamela H. Smith (Columbia) 

New Approaches in Mining Studies

Timothy LeCain (Montana): Do Coal and Oil Drive History? The New Materialism and the Question of Mineral Agency

Bernhard Hurch (Graz)

The Hugo Schuchardt Archive:  overview of an emblematic figure of the 19th century.

Join us to discuss Working Group member Minji Lee's recent book, The Medieval Womb Hildegard of Bingen’s Views on the Female Rep

Paper: Christoph Lehner, Jos Uffink, "Schrödinger, Szilard, and the emergence of the EPR argument" (forthcoming)

Primary Source: Schrödinger, "The Present Status of Quantum Mechanics" (1935)

Guests: Christoph Lehner, Jos Uffink

Presenter: Guillermo Pupo, "Annatto as Indigenous Matter: A Rhizomatic Reading of Its Use and Meaning in Colonial Context" 

Mistura Allison (Villa Romana) and Helena Uambembe (Berlin): tbc

Michael Adamson, “Lewis Stone and the “Destruction of Venice Beach”: Contesting Petroleum Extraction as a Beneficial Use of the Southern California Shoreline

Sonia Wigh (University of Cambridge)

The Lone Pregnant Body: Illustrating Feminine Forms in Manṣūr’s Anatomy