Working Groups

Edgar Alejandro Hernández presents, “The Autochromes of the Mexican Alfredo Saldívar.”

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. 
. 

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

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

Louisa-Dorothea Gehrke (Dresden University)

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

Meenakshi Srihari, "Talking Microbes: Why Comics?"

From twentieth-century cartoons in Punch that cast microbes as social and political actors, to manga adaptations imagining the body as an autocratic regime of cellular labour, the microbe has a surprisingly long and charged history of visual representation. This talk traces that history to ask: what does the comics form uniquely offer to stories of contagion and infection that other narrative modes cannot?