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.
Cholera, the Hijaz Railroad: A Reversed Reasoning? - Benan Grams (Georgetown University, Washington DC.)
In our next meeting we will focus on the influence of Weyl (1918) on the development of later gravitational theories, and discuss Erhard Scholz's paper "Gauging the spacetime metric – looking back and forth a century later". (Attached below)
John Stewart, University of Oklahoma
John Stewart is Assistant Director of the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma. An expert in all things digital (and a founding co-organizer of the Digital History Working Group!), John will lead a discussion on the sudden rise of ChatGPT and its implications for historians of science.
During this meeting, we will discuss the "Writing" section of the planned volume, featuring the following essays:
- Michaela Clark, "Images"
- Jessica Martucci and Britt Dahlberg, "Digital Humanities"
- Ayah Nuriddin, "Silences and Violences"
- Claire Clark & Amy Sullivan, "Language"
- Courtney Thompson, "Citation"
Pete Soland, “A Bird’s Eye View of Latin America: Aviation Technology and High Modernism in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru”
Epistemic Images: A Discussion
With Sietske Fransen (Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History)
Response: Alicia Petersen (Yale)... and all OISH Members
Katja Bruisch, “More-than-human histories of extraction: Labour at the margins of Russia’s fossil economy.”
Title: “Carthorses, Jades, and Equine Disability”
In this session, we will read Kit Coppard, Paddy Whannel, Raymond Williams, and Tony Higgins's “Television Supplement” (New Left Review, 1961) and Susan Douglas's draft chapters “Introduction” and “What Is Culture?”
We'll discuss the introduction and first chapter of Fanny Gribensky's new book, Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics, 1859–1955 (Chicago, 2023).
"Competent From Personal Experience": Networks of Engineers and Decision Making behind South Korea's Mungyong Cement Plant
A work-in-progress by Juyoung Lee, PhD candidate in history of science and technology at Johns Hopkins University (USA). This is a chapter draft from Juyoung's forthcoming dissertation.
Chapter draft will be available for download by 10 February 2023.
Guest: Jorge Quetzal Argueta Prado, México.
Title of the presentation: El cultivo del maíz en México en la primera mitad del siglo XX: modernizaciones contenciosas y reflexividades ambientales.
Reading: Text will be attached soon.
Previous Works:
Speaker: Anthony Cerulli, Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Topic: We will discuss Prof. Cerulli's new monograph, The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India (University of California Press, 2022). The book is available as Open Access in several formats.
Kunyan Zheng, Trinity College Dublin, "Medical knowledge of marine fish in early modern England"
Andrew Meade McGee, National Air and Space Museum, “The Electronic Origins of the Neoliberal Order: Computers, Digital Technologies, and the Re-Shaping of State-Market Relations, 1968-1988."
Histories of Science in Latin America and Asia: A Conversation Across Regions
Cameron Brinitzer, a Berggruen Fellow at the UCS Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, joins us to discuss his article-in-progress: “The Evolution of Culture: Materializing an Elusive Concept.”
Food, Science, and State in Latin America
Session Coordinator: Stefan Pohl (Universidad de Rosario, Colombia)
Presenters:
Sören Brinckman (University of Wrocław), author of Milk for the Tropics! Food Regulation and Nutrition Policy using the Example of Urban Milk Supply in Brazil (1889-1964) [written in German].
Joshua F. Frens-String (The University of Texas at Austin), author of Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile.
Ally Fulton (University of California-Davis), “Stenographic Specimens in the Preservation of American Science”
"Elizabeth Agassiz's Stenography and the Preservation of Professional Science"
Allison Fulton
Special session for the discussion of future directions for the history of science in early SA, and especially funding.
We will discuss a recent article that was awarded the Rainger prize (for early career scholarship in the history of the earth and environmental sciences) at last November's History of Science Society meeting:
Claire Isabel Webb, "Gaze-Scaling: Planets as Islands in Exobiologists' Imaginaries," Science as Culture 30, no. 3 (2021): 391-415.
Merits of the Plague by Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani: Reflections on a New Translation - Joel Blecher (George Washington University) and Mairaj Syed (University of California, Davis)
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, University of Texas at San Antonio
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
During this meeting, we will discuss the "Teaching" section of the planned volume, featuring the following essays:
- Antoine Johnson & Gloria Lockett, "Decolonizing the Syllabus"
- Beatriz Pichel, "Images and Primary Sources"
- Sharrona Pearl, "Grading and Assignments"
- Cornelia Lambert, "Constructive Discomfort"
- Shannon Withycombe, "Teaching Graduate Students about Ethics"
- Lan Li, "Ethics of Teaching Future Health Professionals"
The essay drafts will be uploaded on March 2.
Presenter 1: Mónica Salas Landa, Lafayette College, “A Postcard View of Progress:” Pemex’s Visual Propaganda and the Aesthetics of Mexico’s Technological Nationalism, 1950”
“Cutting the Body: Jacopo Berengario da Carpi and the Anatomical Woodcut”
Ariella Minden (Toronto / Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History)
Response: Taylor McCall (Medieval Academy)
Nathan N. Kapoor, "The Coal Answer: The Huntly Power Station and New Zealand's Energy Regime."
Symptoms of Insurrection: Contagion, Disease, and Social Disorder in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui
Kelli Smith-Biwer
Dissertation chapter - TBA
¡Alerta! Engineering on Shaky Ground
A discussion with Elizabeth Reddy, PhD, of her recently published book with MIT's Engineering Studies Series, ¡Alerta! Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Press, 2023).
CHANGE IN PROGRAM
Speaker: Dr Lisa Brooks
Topic: tba
Nancy Ko, Columbia University
Alexander Statman (UCLA), “Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Control of Water"
Duygu Yildirim (University of Tennessee), "Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences"
Discussant: Ahmed Ragab (Johns Hopkins University)
"Engineering on Trial: The 1920 Nile Projects Controversy and Epistemologies of Measurement”
Anthony Greco, University of California, Santa Barbara
This work-in-progress explores how medieval Arabic literary traditions, Egyptian nationalist engineers, and British physical scientists shaped the methods of hydraulic science in the Nile Valley of 1920. The physical and social networks which produced and circulated hydraulic data on the Nile reflected the complex relationship between science, colonialism, and national liberation.
Discussions on smallpox and smallpox vaccination according to Şanizade - Yasemin Akçagüner (Columbia University, New York)
Natalia Gándara (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso). Title TBA
Marta Lourenco (Universidade de Lisboa, Museu Nacional de Historia e da Cienca), Talk Title TBA
"Mother Hens: Women and the social reproduction of medical illustration"
Drew Danielle Belsky
Title: Alluring Stimulant: Poison, the Body, and a Reinterpretation of Side Effects
Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.
During this meeting, we will discuss the "Historian" section of the planned volume, featuring the following essays:
- Barron Lerner, "Positionality"
- Richard McKay, "Becoming an Ethical Historian"
- Kylie Smith, "Reparatory History"
- Adam Biggs, "Historical Therapeutics"
- Nicole Schroeder, "Accessibility"
- Jess Dillard-Wright, "Advocacy and Activism"
The essay drafts will be uploaded on April 6.
Presenter 1: Vanessa Freije, University of Washington, "Imaginaries of Satellite Technology in Hidalgo, Mexico”
"Can Mixtures Be Identified by Touch? The Reception of Galen’s De complexionibus in Italian Renaissance Medicine"
Viktoria von Hoffmann (FNRS / Liège)
Response: Anita Guerrini (Oregon State)
- Michiel Bron, “Uranium’s geographies: How the geographical properties of uranium determined the formation of an infamous cartel and the involvement of oil companies in the uranium market.”
- Hilary Blum, “The Public Need to Know: Public Relations, Public History, and Secrecy at the Hanford Nuclear Site.”
Speaker: Dr Cristina Pecchia, University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences
Topic: TBA
Dominik Hünniger, Universität Hamburg, "The museum at sea - collecting ecologies of marine micro-fauna at the Museum Godeffroy (ca. 1861-1885)"
Julia Sanchez-Dorado, Technische Universität Berlin and Susan Sterrett, Wichita State University
Noah Kahrs
dissertation chapter - details and draft TBA
Paper Discussion: 'Revolutionary Vision: Myopia, Socialist Youth and Public Health Campaigns in China (1960-1976)’
Yixue Yang (University of California, San Diego)
Discussant: Dora Vargha (Humboldt University Berlin)
"Imagining A ‘Peatlandian Humanities’ for the ‘Lungs of Humanity’: An African Carbon Sink in the Congo Basin and the Climate Emergency"
Frank Blibo, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cold War Cartographic Technologies
Presenters:
Julie Gibbings, The University of Edinburgh
Sebastian Diaz Angel, Cornell University
During this meeting, we will discuss the "Museums & Archives" section of the planned volume, featuring the following essays:
- Melissa Grafe, "Specimens"
- Aisling Shalvey, "Human Remains"
- Katrina Jirik, "Disability"
- Amanda Mahoney, "Stewardship"
- Shelley Saggar, "Decolonizing Archives and Museums"
- Aparna Nair, "Commercialization of Remains and Records"
The essay drafts will be uploaded on April 27.
Pedro Raposo (Martha Hamilton and I. Wistar Morris III Executive Director, Library and Archives, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University) and Paul Callomon (Collections Manager, Malacology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University), "People, Nature, and the Social Extension of Specimens"
“Being Natural”: Science, Environment, Sexuality and the Life of Marston Bates"
Megan Raby
Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity
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Presenter 1: Dafne Cruz Porchini, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), “The artist Fermín Revueltas and the Visual Imaginaries of Technology in Mexico: the mural Allegory of Productivity (1934)”
Title tbc
Wee-Siang Margaret Ng (College of Wooster)
Response: tbc
Dr. Helge Wendt, “Building materials from coal-waste. An extension of the history of energy in the interwar period in France and Germany.”
Speaker: Dr Vijaya Deshpande
Title: TBA (on a Sanskrit work on alchemy. See the BORI publication launch: https://youtu.be/jKJJaIJPOEA )
Abstract: TBA
Natalia Gándara Chacana, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaiso, Chile
Patrick McCray, University of California, Santa Barbara
Shireen Hamza (Harvard) and Eric Moses Gurevitch (Vanderbilt), "The Promise of Medieval Sciences, the Perils of Global History."
"Who Is a Maker? Artisan Knowledge in Medieval India."
Eric Gurevitch (Vanderbilt)
Response: (tbc)
· Tobah Aukland-Peck, “Mineral landscapes: The Mine and British Modernism.”
· V. M. Roberts, “Grandpa Tallman’s Engine.”
Paper discussion
Siddhartha Mukherjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University), "Controlling the Currents: Electricity Crisis and State Response in Delhi during the Second World War"
Discussant: Victor Seow (Harvard University)
James Allison, “Seeing Coal: The Geologists, Local Actors, and Distant Capitalists that Industrialized Appalachia.”
Title tbc
Stephanie O'Rourke (St Andrews)
Response: tbc
"Marginal Recipes, Major Insights: Exploring the Manuscript Contexts of Early Medieval Medical Knowledge"
Claire Burridge (Sheffield)
Response: tbc
"Anatomy and the Early Académie Royale des Sciences"
Katherine Reinhart (Binghamton)
Response: tbc