Working Groups
The Consortium invites area scholars to join one or more topical working groups for challenging and collegial discussion of interesting publications in their fields and of each others’ works-in-progress.
Instructions for participation:
- Click on the name of a group below.
- Select "Request group membership."
- Await updates and instructions for participating online or in person
Each of the groups meets one evening or afternoon each month at the Consortium offices in Philadelphia. Scholars located anywhere can also participate online. The regular meeting days are listed below. Changes to the regular schedule will be announced on each group's mailing list and posted on its webpage.
| Tuesdays | Wednesdays | Thursdays | Fridays | |
| 1st | Science Beyond the West | Earth & Environmental Sciences | Biological Sciences | Early Modern Science |
| 2nd | History & Philosophy of Science | Ancient and Medieval Sciences | History & Theory | |
| 3rd | Technology | Human Sciences | Physical Sciences | Medicine and Health |
Upcoming Meetings
All times Eastern
A. Emilie Gehl Skulberg, University of Cambridge, "Building Around a Black Hole: Materiality and Embodiment in Visual Representations of Black Holes, c. 1965-2017."
Tamara Venit-Shelton, Claremont Mckenna College: Herbs and Roots Only: Toward an Environmental History of Chinese Medicine in the United States.
Note Special Day
We will be discussing articles in the special issue of the journal History of the Human Sciences on "Psychology and its Publics."
We will discuss two recently published papers on the history of climate change, which take very different approaches to the topic:
Supran, Geoffrey, and Naomi Oreskes. "Assessing Exxonmobil's Climate Change Communications (1977-2014)." Environmental Research Letters 12 (2017).
Coen, Deborah R. "Big Is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas." Journal of the History of Ideas 77 (2016): 305-21.
Chapters 13, 14 and 15 of Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms and Molecules (University of Chicago Press, 2016). We will be focusing on the "molecules" part of this ambitious and long book, and especially the work done by people like Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Mark Feldman at Stanford University on human population genetics, genomics and the "genographic project."
Note Special Day
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Chapters 4, 6, 6.5, 7 and Conclusion.
Continuing conversations around anti-stadial theories of history, shatter zones, friction, political agency and the objects of history, capture, enclosure, fugitivity and refuge. And whether eating roots is more fun than growing grain.
Chapters 5-8 of About Method. The discussion will be opened by Tawrin Baker (UPenn)
Note Special Day
Katie Boyce-Jacino (Johns Hopkins) will present on planetariums in Weimar Germany
Matthew Shindell, National Air and Space Museum, Title TBD