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:

  1. Log in, or create an account
  2. Click on a group below
  3. Click on the "Request Membership" link
Submit a discussion paper for one of the working groups.

Upcoming Meetings

Please set your timezone.

Monday, March 17, 2025, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm EDT

 
Some reflections on the practices of proofs in Sanskrit mathematical texts, with a special emphasis on Śaṅkara Vāriyar’s work on Mādhava’s procedure to approximate the circumference of a circle.
 
Agathe Keller (Sphere, CNRS / Université Paris Cité)
 

Monday, March 17, 2025, 8:00 - 9:30 pm EDT

Longkai Zang on 'Genjin and Enjin in Japan: Culture-laden Terms in Hominin Evolution, 1890-1947'

Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

Painterly Still Lifes and Belle Époque Aesthetics in Finland – Wladimir Schohin’s Autochromes

Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 2:00 - 3:30 pm EDT

Derek Nelson, Skagit Valley College, "An Atlantic Framework for the History of Marine Borers ”

Wednesday, March 19, 2025, 10:00 - 11:00 am EDT

In this session with simultaneous interpretation (Spanish/English), we will read and discuss Florencia Soria's working paper,, “El comunicador cristiano. La trayectoria intelectual de Mario Kaplún entre los años cincuenta y setenta” | “The Christian communicator. The intellectual trajectory of Mario Kaplún between the fifties and the seventies.” The PDF download includes both Spanish and English versions of the working paper. 

Wednesday, March 19, 2025, 2:00 - 3:30 pm EDT

Kristine Palmieri, PhD
Gastwissenschaftlerin / Visiting Researcher 
Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklarung 
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

Thursday, March 20, 2025, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

Join us this week to discuss two fantastic papers:

Ranjana Saha's paper: "Mothercraft, “Clean” Midwifery and Child Healthcare: “Scientific” Motherhood Advice in British India and Beyond"

Ranjana Saha is currently a MSCA COFUND TIAS TIES Fellow (September 2023-August 2026) at the Department of European and World History, University of Turku, Finland.

AND 

Whitney Wood's piece: “The Woman-As-Patient Perspective”: Embodied Knowledge and Gynecological Teaching in Canadian Medical Schools, 1970-1990

Friday, March 21, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

UCLA Heat Lab
 
Panelists:
Bharat Venkat (UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics)

Monday, March 24, 2025, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

Luisa Reis Castro (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, USC Dornsife) will present "The World Will Become Brazil: Modified Mosquitoes and the Limits of Situated Knowledges in Times of Planetary Transformations," followed by a discussion.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 10:00 - 11:30 am EDT

Alexei Kojevnikov - Quantum physics in the Soviet Union

Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

Enrico Beltramini, Notre Dame de Namur University, California

Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 10:00 - 11:30 am EDT

Akosua Paries-Osei (Royal Holloway, University of London), "Seditious Seed of Forbidden Flowers: The legacy of Okra in the Reproductive Resistance of Enslaved women"

Thursday, March 27, 2025, 9:00 - 10:30 am EDT

Roundtable Discussion on Journals as a Means of Shaping the Production & Dissemination of Knowledge

Topics: How to find suitable journals; how to respond to reviews; the role of journals in acdemic discourse; the policies and politics of journals.

Thursday, April 3, 2025, 2:00 - 3:30 pm EDT

Philippa Barr, "The Divided Sky: Producing Atmosphere through Spatial Segregation in Milan"
 

Friday, April 4, 2025, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

Sylvia Houghteling, "Dying the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia," Religion 11 (2020): 1-20.

Bu Yun Chen "The Craft of Color and the Chemistry of Dyes: Textile Technology in the Ryukyu Kingdom, 1700-1900," Technology & Culture 63, no. 1 (2022): 87-117.

Friday, April 4, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

Pedro Raposo (The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University) and Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University)
 
Teaching with Collections

Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 9:30 - 11:00 am EDT

Arianna Borelli - "Between symmetry and asymmetry: spontaneous symmetry breaking as narrative knowing"
Primary Source: Mahiko Suzuki - "Foundation of Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetries"

Guest Expert: Arianna Borelli

Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

Ian Dooley (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on 'A Pigment Paradigm Shift: How British Printing Ink Industrialization Revolutionized Color Printing in the Late Nineteenth Century'
 
Organizer: Elizabeth Savage

Thursday, April 10, 2025, 10:00 - 11:30 am EDT

Sahar Bazzaz (College of the Holy Cross): Plants of the Red Sea Littoral: PE Botta's Expedition to Yemen, 1836
 
[this is a joint event with the online lecture series "Ecologies, Collections, and Contested Heritage: (Un-)Natural History and Italian Colonialism in Africa", co-convened by Jermay Michael Gabriel and Vera-Simone Schulz]

Thursday, April 10, 2025, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm EDT

Career Diversity

Topics: Academic vs non-academic jobs; Work-life balance; gender; transition out of academia.

Speaker: Arwen Mohun is Professor in history at the University of Delaware, United States. Mohun has coordinated a working group on career diversity at the Consortium for History of Science Technology and Medicine.