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 9, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

Deren Ertas (Harvard University) 

"From the Mine to the Market: A History of Silver in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire"

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 9:00 - 10:30 am EDT

Robert Edwards (UC San Diego / Irvine) 

"Anticolonial Methods in the History of Linguistic Anthropology "

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

Anna Derksen

Welfare Under Scrutiny: Body Politics, Memory, and Racialisation in the 1990s Swedish Sterilisation Debate 

Catherine Medici-Thiemann

Women’s Chronic Illness Stories: Creating a New Understanding of Illness

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 9:30 - 11:00 am EDT

A. Blum, D. Brill - "Tokyo Wheeler or the Epistemic Preconditions of the Renaissance of Relativity" (2020)

Primary Source: (Re)Translation of John Wheeler’s Tokyo Lecture "Discussion on the Problems of Elementary Particle Theory" (1954), which is part of the attachment of the above paper.

Guest: Alexander Blum

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

Leib Celnik,  "Revisiting Goethe's Farbenlehre: English Translations, History, and Polemics"

Friday, March 13, 2026, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

"Palatino 586: A medieval Occitan health manual"

Benedetta Mariani (UEA)

Commentator: TBC

Friday, March 13, 2026, 12:30 - 2:00 pm EDT

Brian Leech, American Popular Coal-ture: Mining Movies and Sad Songs in the American Imagination

Monday, March 16, 2026, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm EDT

 

Divya Kumar-Dumas (University of Maryland)

Metal, Matter, and Meaning: Toward a Textual and Scientific History of the Sumhuram Yakṣī

Monday, March 16, 2026, 8:00 - 9:30 pm EDT

This month's readings will be on Imanishi Kinji as follows (see the zip file below to access them):

Halstead, Beverly. “Anti-Darwinian Theory in Japan.” Nature 317, no. 6038 (1985): 587–89. https://doi.org/10.1038/317587a0.

Hokkyo, Noboru. “Comments on Anti-Darwinian Theory in Japan: Human Concerns beyond Natural Science.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 10, no. 4 (1987): 377–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-1750(87)90054-6.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 2:00 - 3:30 pm EDT

Aijie Shi, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Life History of Laminaria japonica in the Northwest Pacific”

Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 10:00 - 11:00 am EDT

In this session, we will read and discuss Otávio Daros's working paper, “Trends in the Historiography of the Press and Journalism in Brazil.“

Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

Speaker: Ryan A. Kashanipour, University of Arizona

Title: Epidemics and Epistemologies: Experiencing Illness in Colonial Yucatán

Monday, March 23, 2026, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT
Alexander Silaen (University of Vienna)
Colonial Entomology and Labor Relations in Sumatra, 1880–1930 of the Gregorian Calendar

Tuesday, March 24, 2026, 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT

Kelcey Gibbons (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society, MIT)

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 10:00 - 11:30 am EDT

Rajarshi Sengupta (IIT Kanpur)

Hyperrealism in James Forbes’ Studies and Chintz Textiles: Through Research and Practice 

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

From the eerie vision of the owl to the radiant vision of man: Study and conservation-restoration proposal of three tri-color carbon prints by Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, c.1907-1912, by Isaak Cecchetto González

Abstract:

Friday, March 27, 2026, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT
Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT

Amy Woodson-Boulton (Loyola Marymount University), "The Question of Kinship: Totemism, Animal Ancestors, and the Evolution of Culture"

Thursday, April 2, 2026, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EDT

Speaker: Camille-Mary Sharp

Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Visual Arts /Center for Sustainable Curating, Western University -- https://cmsharp.ca/ 

Session title: Petro-museologies