Working Groups

'Whither the Sub-Tropics? Medical Geography and Geographic Imaginaries of a Shifting Climate"
Elaine Lafay, Rutgers University

Taylor Dysart joins us from the University of Pennsylvania to workshop a chapter from her dissertation, “The Psychedelic Century: The Amazonian Origins of Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century" 
 

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, "Hydrological Dissonances: Climate, Geography, and Port City Waters"

James McElvenny and Floris Solleveld, "Australian Languages and Cultures: Histories of Documentation" 

Ryan Neftd, "Motivating a Scientific Modelling Continuum: The case of natural models in the Covid-19 pandemic" (2023, Philosophy of Science)

"'The Männel is a root, it should be called an Allraune': A Mandrake, Magic, and Money in Seventeenth-Century Saxony"
Tara Nummedal (Brown)
Response: Alisha Rankin (Tufts)
 

 
Ancient manuscript fragments of the Carakasaṃhitā and their text genealogical relevance
 
Dr. Gudrun Melzer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Dr. Philipp Maas (University of Leipzig)
 

Aaron Mendon-Plasek, Yale Law School, "Creativity in an irrational world of inexhaustible meaning: early 1950s origins of machine learning as subjective decision-making, disunified science, and a remedy for what cannot be predicted."
 
Abstract

Reproducing History: Writing Histories of the Present 
This session will foreground contemporary discussions about the role of presentism in history and examine how present-day ideas and perspectives have and continue to inform how we think and write about reproductive health.
 
As prompts, we invite participants to read and reflect on the following essays:
 

Claire Votava - Doctoral Candidate, UCLA - in conversation on radicalism in 20th century science.

Taylor Desloge, "Sanitized Violence: The Strange Liberal Rebirth of Jim Crow and the Origins of an Urban Renewal Coalition, 1917-1929" 

Fraser Livingston, Introduction to "Losing Longleaf: Forestry and Conservation in the Southern Coastal Plain" and Chapter VII, "Frankenstein Forests: Federal Forestry and Longleaf Conservation in the Twentieth Century"

Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics (Appendix XX); Karim Thébault, On Mach on Time (2021)
Guest: Karim Thébault
 

James Wachira (University of Nairobi): NarRating Plants in Kenyan Verbal Arts

"Marginal Recipes, Major Insights: Exploring the Manuscript Contexts of Early Medieval Medical Knowledge"
Claire Burridge (Sheffield)
Response: Debby Banham (Cambridge)

Michael E. Lynch

 
A Contagion Theory in the Hārītasaṃhitā? The Chapter on upasarga
 
Dr. Vitus Angermeier (University of Vienna)
 

Nancy Ko, Columbia University

Diana Marsh and Katrina Fenlon (University of Maryland), "Linking Analog Archival Data Across Scientific Disciplines: What’s Next?"
 

Aisling Shalvey, "'I didn't think I could survive it... The bleeding was stopped completely': The role of women, gender and sexuality in biomedical experiments during National Socialism"

"Anatomy and the Early Académie Royale des Sciences"
Katherine Reinhart (Binghamton)
Response: tbc

*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Gregory Radick, "Language, Darwinism and the Human/Non-Human Boundary"
 

James Lowe and David Ingram, "DNA Barcoding and the Changing Ontological Commitments of Taxonomy" (2023, Biology and Philosophy)

Francisco Tijerina, Washington University in St. Louis, TBA

*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
We're partnering with the International Commission of the History of Oceanography to host a fun and informal reading group of portions of Jamie Jones's new book, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling, with the intention of bringing together scholars of ocean history across Asia and beyond (thus the special time slot!) Readings from the book's introduction and first chapter will be posted in advance of the meeting.

*NOTE SPECIAL TIME*
Paul Michael Kurtz, "Knowledge Infrastructure ca. 1900: The Case of Assyriology at the British Museum" 

David Pretel, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, TBA

• Julia Mead, “Frozen Assets: Czechoslovakia’s 1979 Blizzard and the Energetic Social Contract of Late Socialism”

Taking ‘Patient’ Histories
This session will focus on how scholars can engage with ‘patient’ narratives  in both oral testimonies and archival records responsibly, in ways that avoid replicating medicalization and pathologization.

Short Writings Roundtable
 
If you have a shorter piece--an abstract, a research description, an op-ed, etc.--that you would like feedback on, this session is for you! Please send you short piece to Melanie or Jason by January 19 for posting.

"Translating New World Drugs in Late Renaissance Italy: The Case of Indies Balsam"
Sharon Strocchia (Emory)
Response: Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College)

Kristine Palmieri, "Grand Visions of Alterthumswissenschaft: Classical Philology as Language Science in early Nineteenth-Century Germany"

Kimia Shahi, University of Southern California

Evan Roberts, "Young but daily growing? The decline of stunting and growth faltering in the United States, 1857-2014" 

• Minseok Jang, Testing a New Energy Resource: Fire Tests and the Risk of Kerosene in the Anglo-American World, 1859-1911

Dr. Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom (McGill University)

Reproductive Technologies
This session will examine the history and future trends of researching and writing about reproductive technologies.

Chanelle Adams (University of Lausanne): Volatile Oils: 'Wellness', Political Power, and the Market for Ravintsara Essential Oil in Madagascar

"Discussion: Objects, Images, and Spaces of Health...  for Broad Publics"
Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins)
Jack Hartnell (UEA)
 

 
TBA
 
 

Gender, Masculinity and Reproduction
 
Here, we will explore how gender and masculinity shapes how we think about human reproductive experiences and the histories we write about them.
 

Neda Saeedi (Tehran / Berlin): "Swear by the Fig, Swear by the Olive"
 
"Swear by the Fig, Swear by the Olive" explores urban and territorial landscapes and their flora, used to justify land ownership and deprivation in conflict zones.

• Odinn Melsted and Candida Sánchez-Burmester, “Geoscience Spillover: The Oil Industry and Geothermal Development in Greater California, 1960s-1970s”
• Dante LaRiccia, “Kurt Waldheim, the United Nations, and the Campaign for a ‘World Energy Order’

Reproducing History: Writing Histories of the Personal
This session will focus on how historians have used their own healthcare experiences to complement and inform their research and advocacy work.
 

Jonathan Galka, Harvard University, “'The offer which the ocean has given us': The Law of the Sea, the New International Economic Order, and the Promises of Manganese Nodules in the Global 1970s"

• Joya John, Energy Histories, Museums, and Postcolonial Development in India