H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Hagley Library/Fall Conference/The Power of Energy/October 30 & 31 via Zoom
The Hagley Library fall conference, The Power of Energy, is now on Hagley Museum and Library’s website! Here is the link to register and the full program:https://www.hagley.org/research/conference-thepowerofenergy.
Over the past decade, energy history has emerged as a vibrant subfield: the subject of growing numbers of books, dissertations, course offerings, and public history projects. This international conference brings together fourteen scholars from four continents to share papers that offer insights into how energy history can rewrite the narratives of our disciplines. Papers are organized into five panels over two days. “Energy Sovereignties” opens the conference on Oct. 30 with papers exploring how political entities in India and Brazil sought to shape energy development. It is followed by the “Energy Flows, Information Flows” session with papers that locate energy practices in the geographic settings of China, Niagara Falls, and the Soviet bloc. A panel on “Coerced Labor” closes the Thursday sessions with papers on Japanese forced labor during World War II and Brazil unfree labor in its colonial era. Friday’s Oct. 31 sessions open with the panel “Energy in the Home Beyond the Domestic” with papers on South Korea, Britain, and the US with a particular focus on women. The final session, “Histories of Contemporary Technologies,” brings us up to the late 20th century with studies that explore nuclear power and solar energy.
As the Hagley library holds substantial research materials on energy, including coal, oil, and nuclear power, as well as on its distribution and consumption, we hope energy scholars interested in this conference will also look to see if our collections could support your project and an application for one of our research grants. More information is available here.
Carol Ressler Lockman
Manager, Hagley Center
cfp hss-eshs Edinburgh 2026 [Announcement]
United Kingdom
Dear colleagues,
This is a call for papers for a panel session to be entitled “trust, distrust, faith and disbelief” at the upcoming Joint Meeting of the History of Science Society (HSS) and the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), to be held in Edinburgh, UK, 13–16 July 2026.
At a time when trust in science has become widely contested, this panel will aim to encourage an historical perspective to contests over lay trust and belief in science.
Building on the scholarship over science as public knowledge, such works as those by Naomi Oreskes and her colleagues, and studies of museology, the panel would welcome papers exploring such issues as propaganda for and against scientific interpretations of contested issues, the role and effect of promoting the “public understanding of science” and the role of the media. Imaginative contributions going beyond such categories and building a research agenda would be much appreciated.
Scholars interested in contributing to this panel are invited to submit an abstract (max. 250 words), together with their affiliation and a short bio.
Please send your proposal to rober...@sciencemuseum.ac.uk by 26 October 2025
Further details about the conference can be found on the meeting website: 2026 ESHS/HSS Joint Meeting.
I look forward to your contributions and to an exciting session
Best wishes
Robert Bud MBE FRHistS PhD
Emeritus Keeper, The Science Museum, London
Author: Applied Science: Knowledge, Modernity, and Britain’s Public Realm (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Robert Bud
New book (open access) Negotiating in/visibility: Women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century [Announcement]
Dear colleagues,
Could I draw your attention to our recently published, open-access volume:
Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasă-Matei, eds, NEGOTIATING IN/VISIBILITY: WOMEN, SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND MEDICINE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Manchester University Press, 2025.
The hardcover version is available here: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526178381/
The open-access version can be viewed/ downloaded here:
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526178398/9781526178398.xml
I have also included the TOC below--we hope you will find it of interest.
Best wishes,
Amelia
Foreword by Mariko Ogawa
Introduction: In/visible women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century – Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasă-Matei
I Laboratory cultures: Visible scientific rebels, invisible innovators
1 Breaking down the barriers at Cambridge in the 1930s: Reinet Maasdorp’s experience at Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory – Kathryn Keeble
2 ‘Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again’: Female evolutionary biology theorists as scientific rebels and oppositional scientists – Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach
II In/visibilities across borders: Scientific collaborations and contestations
3 Inventing a career across borders in the early 1930s: The case of cytogeneticists Eileen W. Erlanson and E. K. Janaki Ammal – Savithri Preetha Nair
4 Vlasta Kálalová Di-Lotti in Iraq: Medical practice and scientific research – Adéla Jůnová Macková
5 Early years of the International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists: Shaping transnational collaboration in the Cold War era, 1964–1975 – Emily Rees Koerner and Graeme Gooday
III In/visibilities in medicine and care: Treating, teaching, reforming
6 ‘A model of devotion to the school’: Female doctors in secondary schools in interwar Romania – Camelia Zavarache
7 Women and the practice of Western medicine in late Republican China: Evidence from Sichuan – Jean Corbi
8 Agency and coercion: Fighting ‘women’s illnesses’ with grassroots science and medicine during the Great Famine in China, 1958–1962 – Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
IV Intimate knowledge and in/visible domesticities: Science, medicine and the home
9 The curious case of Yashoda Devi, a woman Ayurvedic practitioner in colonial India – Saurav Kumar Rai
10 Lady Irwin College: Domestic science post-secondary education for three women graduates in India – Anne Hardgrove
11 Clara Park: A mother’s intimate knowledge and child science – Marga Vicedo
V Towards visible change? Publics, pedagogies and politics of science
12 The valuable ‘s’: Publics and counterpublics of abortion and contraception in late-twentieth-century Greece – Evangelia Chordaki
13 The power of autobiography: Documenting women scientists through a lecture series at the University of Illinois – Bethany G. Anderson and Kristen Allen Wilson
14 How to do science as a woman and laugh? Insights and lessons from Hungary – Andrea Pető
Hagley Library/Research Seminar/October 29th/Noon EST/via Zoom
Please join us for the first research seminar in the fall series! Hagley’s research seminar series shares work in progress essays that are distributed in advance. All seminars take place on Wednesdays via Zoom from noon to 1:30 pm. Registration is necessary to obtain the paper and the Zoom link. Paper will be sent after registration on Eventbrite…link below. Thanks! Best, C.
Carol Ressler Lockman
Manager, Hagley Center
Research Seminar: Cody Patton
“Nature’s Brew: Water and Brewing in American Beer”
Virtual Event
October 29 2025
Registration via Eventbrite
This chapter is the fifth in Patton's book manuscript, a more-than-human-history of beer production in the United States and explores the post-World War II consolidation of the American brewing industry by looking at the role of water in the brewing process and the construction of chain breweries throughout the United States. Water quality and its chemical composition are critical to overall beer flavor and product consistency. Even tiny amounts of mineral differences, such as 0.3 parts per million of iron, among water sources can have a noticeable impact on a beer’s flavor. Therefore, the production of many iconic brands were place-bound due to water variability across locations. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, the nation’s largest brewers harnessed advances in water chemistry to manipulate one locale’s water profile to mirror another, allowing big brewers to produce their signature brews anywhere. This technology allowed large breweries to construct a series of “chain breweries” across the United States, allowing them to save on shipping costs. By eroding the price advantage of small local breweries, this contributing to the emergence of the American brewing oligopoly of the late twentieth century.
Cody Patton is affiliated with the history department at Montana State University-Billings.
Christy Spackman of Arizona State University will provide an introductory comment.
CFP: ESHS/HSS Panel: Contested Conceptions of Atlantic Animals [Announcement]
United Kingdom
For the 2026 ESHS/HSS Joint Meeting in Edinburgh. This panel invites proposals for papers that explore cultural conceptions of both land and sea animals in the Atlantic Ocean and on Atlantic islands in medicinal practice, naming, religious, and social attributes. Proposals which demonstrate connections between indigenous or local knowledge and collected colonial knowledge in the late medieval and early modern period (1400-1800) are sought. Graduate students and early career scholars are particularly encouraged to submit proposals.
Please send your paper proposals to Seán Thomas Kane, Binghamton University (ska...@binghamton.edu) by 19 November 2025. Decisions will be notified by 26 November 2025.
Your submission must contain the following:
- Paper title
- Paper abstract (250 word maximum)
- Primary discipline
- Brief CV (max 5 pp)
- PhD or other terminal degree completion year (past or expected)
Seán Thomas Kane, FLS
Binghamton University
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