Working Groups

This meeting will be held at Johns Hopkins University.

Remi Gandoin, “Windpower Siting in Denmark”

New Methods in Mining Studies II

Environmental Lifeworlds of Extraction in Africa: Methodological Insights by Iva Peša (University of Groningen)

Speaker: JJ R. Strange, PhD Candidate at University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title: Crisis in the Garden: How War and Environmental Loss Transformed Chinese Pharmaceutical Research (1935-1955)

Format: Presentation followed by Q&A

*Note Special Date*

"How to Draw the Buddha and Dissect a Corpse: Iconometry and Anatomy in Early-Modern Tibet"

Briana Brightly (Harvard University)

Commentator: TBC

Jan Gerris (University of Ghent)

Tandulaveyāliya - An ancient Jain philosophical reflection on life

Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) and Sam Robinson (University of York), TBA chapter from their in-progress book on the Discovery Investigations. 

Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College)

A discussion with Edward Beatty and Israel G. Solares, the co-editors of the open-access An Engineered World: The Role of Engineers in Global Modernity (MIT Press, 2025).

Rohan Deb Roy, (Associate Professor in South Asian History, University of Reading) ‘Nobody here… will look at a mosquito’: Entomo-political surveillance in late colonial India

Chloé Laplatine (CNRS, Histoire des théories linguistiques)

History of language documentation in the Pacific Northwest

Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech): Technology in Motion: Relaunching a book series with The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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

Seminar on The Authorities of Cosmetic Knowledge with Montserrat Cabré (University of Cantabria) and Mónica Durán (University of Granada)

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: TBC

Amanda Harris (Sydney)

Archived Sound and Creative Engagements with Papua New Guinean Cultural Heritage in Australia

Oral history interviews. 

Guest experts: Luisa Bonolis and William Thomas

. 

Suzanne Karr Schmidt on 'Color, Cloth, Collation: Previewing  "Premodern Printing on Fabric"'