Working Groups

Dear all,

For the May meeting, we will discuss issues including color, dyeing, surface, and materiality. Please read the following two recent articles. Note that the author of the first article, Rachel Silberstein, who is also one of the convenors of this group, will certainly be at at the discussion.

Rachel Silberstein, “The 72 Kinds”: The Cloth Classic, the Jiangnan Cotton Finishing Sector, and the Expansion of Cotton Dyeing in the Qing Dynasty, in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 69 (2026): 1–53.

Henry Schmidt (University of California, Berkeley), "Invention and Federal Ethnology in the US"

In the final third of the nineteenth century, ethnologists engaged in new ways with the matter of how and why human culture develops. In the United States, a community of ethnologists based in Washington, DC articulated their answers to those questions by drawing on the concept of ‘invention.’

Guy Erez, "Catching and Curing the Plague in the Multispecies City"

"Medicine at the Mines in Seventeenth-Century Sumatra"

Brief abstract: 

In the late seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company launched intensive mining operations on the west coast of Sumatra. Medical practitioners played crucial roles at the mining sites. This paper examines how these European practitioners understood diseases, managed the health of the labor force, and experimented with mineral medicine at the mines. 

Wenrui Zhao (University of Utah)

Commentator: Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University Bochum)

Community Care and Environmental Health in the Early Extractocene by Guy Geltner (Monash University)

Amanda Harris (Sydney)

Triangulating the relationships between diaspora speaker communities, dispersed cultural heritage, and modern digital archives of Oceania

On oral history interviews. 

Guest experts: Luisa Bonolis (MPWIG) and William Thomas (AIP). 

The session will be dedicated to the concept of oral history interviews, as a resource in the history and philosophy of physics. The attached file includes two selected interviews conducted by each of our guest experts. 
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Suzanne Karr Schmidt on 'Color, Cloth, Collation: Previewing  "Premodern Printing on Fabric"'

Kevin Murungi (32 Degrees East) and Luca Tenreira (European University Institute): 'Bomba La Mafuta' : Textile Memory and Multi-Species Entanglements Along the East African Oil Corridor

Speaker
Marcelo Monetti Pavani
M.A. in Science Education, University of São Paulo (PIEC-USP)
Affiliated with LaHBE-USP

Presentation
“Spencer, Lamarck e a angústia da influência”
[“Spencer, Lamarck, and the Anxiety of Influence”]

At this meeting, we will be discussing the ethical challenges of Generative AI for historians. We will discuss selections from the 2023 AHR forum on AI, as well as these articles: 

https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/practice-history/artificial-intelligence-a-warning-for-history/ 

Snapshot Presentations!

“Stopping Menstruation in Jainism"
Ruth Westoby (Oxford Center for Hindu Studies) 

"Are plants conscious? Vegetal 'being' in the Caraka Saṃhitā”
Pushya A. Gautam (National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India) 

TBD
Gayathri Iyer 

“Ancient Indian Healing Systems: Insights from Jivaka’s Practice"
Siddharth R. Dawane (Amity University, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India) 

Rescheduled Seminar with Victoria Munn (University of Auckland) on Early Modern Hair Dye Recipes

Gaana Jayagopalan, "Viral Vernaculars: Mediating Contagion, Care, and Communication in the Global South."

Seth Stein LeJacq, Hunter College, The City University of New York, "Hidden Crimes: Sexual Violence and Historical Memory of Britain’s Navy in the Age of Sail"

Title: Meet the Editors

Speakers: Kelly O’Donnell, Towson University & Lucas Richert, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mary Mendoza (Assistant Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University) Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People defied the U.S.-Mexico Border

When most people picture the US-Mexico border, they think of walls, fences, concrete, and wire. But in this first history of how the environment influenced physical boundary-making between the two nations, Mary E. Mendoza focuses on how the natural world shaped ideas about race, gender, and security. In so doing, she unearths surprising origins of the modern-day immigration debate.
 

Louisa-Dorothea Gehrke (Dresden University)

Designing Photographic Films with Robert L. Shanebrook

Designing photographic films requires identifying the subjective tastes of photographers then making compromises while applying the limited technical tools available to the film designer. Using Kodak PORTRA Film as an example, subjective image evaluation will be described and then the technology that is applied to design and then manufacture the film. 

Seminar on Beautifying Practices in Arabic Medieval Medical Compendia with Anna Gili (University of Padua): Medical Beauty Prescriptions. A reading of al-Rāzī's Kitāb al-Manṣūrī and al-Maǧūsī's Kitāb al-Malakī