Working Groups
Active 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.
Upcoming Meetings
Please set your timezone.
Introduction: Scientific Knowledge and German Colonialism
Readings
We will discuss selections from two related and recently or soon-to-be published books:
Jacob Darwin Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology (New York: Oxford Universty Press, 2021), introduction and chapter 5. (PDF is available in the restricted login area for group members)
(Un)Happy Times
28th January: Setting the scene: the Osler’s François II de Rohan manuscript and Wellcome Western MS. 626 (Mary Yearl, Anna Dysert, Faith Wallis, Elma Brenner, Julia Nurse). To view the digitized manuscripts, see:
Osler: https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-osl_medical-recipes-health-regimens_WZ240F825m1515-18875
Join us on Jan. 28th @ 2PM EST for a conversation with professors Bernardita Escobar Andrae, Pablo Galaso, Aurora Gomez-Galvarriato & Martin Monsalve Zanatti about the intersection of technology and business development during the first half of the twentieth-century in Latin America.
Reading List
Session 5: "Racism in science"
Main readings:
- Time-Buddy
- Presenter: Dominik Wujastyk, University of Alberta
- Topic: Early Modern Eristic: Readings from the medical polemic Rogārogavāda by Vīreśvara
- Bibliography
Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber, Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (University of Illinois Press, 2020).
Hyeok Hweon Kang, Visiting Scholar and D. Kim Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University
“Saltpeter on the Move: From China to Korea, Between Global Intelligence and Local Experiment, 1592–1635”
Leonelli, Data-Centric Biology
TBA, selections
Workshop: Noa Nahmias (York University)
Farren E. Yero (Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Duke University), “Caribbean Crucible: Smallpox, Safety, and the Ethics of Risk”
Comment by Kristen Block, Associate Professor of History, and Program Director, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Tennessee
Larrie Ferreiro, George Mason University, "The Technology of Armed Oceangoing Ships and the Rise of Overseas Empires"
Johan Gärdebo, Thematic Studies in Environmental Change, Linköping University. "Following the verbs: How 'Observing the Earth' eventually became the Earth observation satellite SPOT, 1975-1995."
Anna Clemencia Guerrero, Center for Biology and Society, Arizona State University, “Generating a Discovery Narrative of Biofilms Through Images,” from dissertation in progress.
What is “Behavioral” in Behavioral Economics?
Session 6: "Policing in applied/public anthropology"
Main Readings
Anita Guerrini, Horning Professor in the Humanities emerita at Oregon State University and Research Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara
“Giants, Fossils and National Identity in Early Modern France"
Leonelli, Data-Centric Biology
TBA, selections
- Time-Buddy.
- Presenter: Dagmar Wujastyk, University of Alberta
- Topic: Readings from the Kalyāṇakāraka of Ugrāditya (fl. ca. 800 CE), a Jain work on medicine and alchemy.
- Bibliography
Samm Newton, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "Pteropods Realized: From Bio-indication to Bio-inspiration"
Mario Bianchini, Georgia Institute of Technology; Linda Hall Library. "The Perfect(able) German Body: Sport as Technological Utopianism in East Germany."
Discussion
Elise Burton, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford University Press, 2021)
Elena Aronova, Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Laura Aguilera, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, University of British Columbia, diss. ch. “Transcultural Trajectories of Two Feathered Objects” from Transcultural Mobilities: The Translation of Mesoamerican Knowledge and Early Modern Natural History.
Session 7: "Visualization"
Main Readings
Jaipreet Virdi, "Weaving History & Memoir: Writing Hearing Happiness."
Virdi is the author of, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Leonelli, Data-Centric Biology
TBA, selections
Pamela Mackenzie, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, either diss. ch.: Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants / OR article: images of bladder stones in the Royal Society collections.
- Time-buddy
- Presenter: Andrey Klebanov
- Topic: Readings from the anonymous *Suśrutavyākhyā
- Link to the Suśrutavyākhyā at PanditProject.
ASEH Environmental History Week
Transformative Histories: Connecting Science, Weather and Environmental Change
Chair: Dr Ruth Morgan (ANU)
Ruth Morgan is Director of the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University in Canberra, where she is researching the environmental exchanges between British India and the Australian colonies during the long nineteenth century.
Overview:
Katharina Steiner, University of Wisconsin-Madison, chapter from her book manuscript Visualizing Marine Biology: Fishermen, Copepods, and the Naples Zoological Station 1880-1914
Justin Castro, Arkansas State University; Linda Hall Library. Title TBA.
Workshop: Minakshi Menon (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
Burch is a professor of American Studies at Middlebury College. Her research and teaching interests focus on deaf, disability, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. Material culture, oral history, and inclusive design play an important role in her courses.
Luke Freeman, Doctoral Candidate at University of Minnesota
“Bernard and Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des tous les peuple du monde (1723-1743)"
Nick Hopwood, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, chapters from ms. Human Embryos: A Visual History.
Judy Johns Schloegel, Independent Scholar, "Instituting Biology in the Great Lakes: Scientific Survey Work and Inland Seas Maritime Culture, 1893-1903"
Ashley Gonik, Doctoral Candidate at Harvard University
"Printed Calendars, Inside and Out"
Hanna Lucia Worliczek, The Sciences in Historical, Philosophical and Cultural Contexts, University of Vienna, ch. ms. Visual Evidence and Image Circulation – A History of the Argumentative Use of Fluorescence Microscopy Images in Cell Biology Research, 1970-1995.
Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University, chapters from ms. Dangerous Exposures, on the use of visual evidence in environmental science and pollution reform.
Elisabeth Hsu, University of Oxford, work in progress, “The Yijin jing (Canon for supple sinews) of 1882, 1956 and 2003: the texts of tu- illustrations.”
Marco Tamborini, Institute of Philosophy, Technical University of Darmstadt, ch. from ms. The Architecture of Evolution: The Science of Form in Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Biology.
Alexis L. Boylan, Department of Art History, University of Connecticut, ch. from ms. on the art of the American Natural History Museum in New York.