H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Huntington Library Quarterly Call for Submissions–DEADLINE TO SUBMIT IS APRIL 15, 2025! [Announcement]
HLQ Call for Submissions:
The Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ) invites article submissions for two featured issues that will mark the journal’s expanded scope, including the study of science, medicine, and technology. The submission deadline for the first of these issues, to be published in September 2025, has passed. Submissions received by 15 April 2025 will be evaluated for the second of these issues, to be published in December 2025.
HLQ is published by The Huntington, a world-leading research center with vast early modern holdings in its Library, Art, and Botanical divisions. Although the journal welcomes submissions that draw directly on these resources, the location of research or source material has no influence on publication decisions. For more information, visit https://www.pennpress.org/journals/journal/huntington-library-quarterly/ hosted by Penn Press.
All the best,
Brett Rushforth, Editor in Chief, Huntington Library Quarterly (brush...@huntington.org)
Abby Gibson, Editorial Assistant, Huntington Library Quarterly
Journal Description
The Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ) is a peer-reviewed journal featuring original research and new perspectives on the early modern period, broadly defined (c. 1400–1800). Its content reflects an early modern world that was connected and cosmopolitan, with diverse communities and cultures increasingly linked by the circulation of people, ideas, social practices, and material objects in ways that transcend disciplinary and geographic boundaries. We invite submissions that draw on the sources, methods, and theoretical frameworks of literature, art, history, science, medicine, material culture, music, performance, and critical cultural studies, with a preference for scholarship that is broadly legible across disciplines. HLQ’s historical focus on Britain and its American colonies has been dramatically expanded to embrace broader and more diverse fields of inquiry, including scholarship rooted in continental Europe, the African Diaspora, and the Indigenous Americas, as well as their intersections with Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds.
HLQ publishes four types of essays:
1. Research Articles (standard monographic essays based on original research and interpretation, usually 8,000–12,000 words, including notes)
2. Sources (short critical editions of previously unpublished textual or visual sources, translated into English when applicable, with a full critical apparatus and interpretive intervention)
3. Review Essays (state-of-the-field and methodological essays, usually 3,000–5,000 words, commissioned or submitted)
4. Early/Modern Connections (interventions that explicitly link original early modern research to public humanities and the public interest)
Editor in Chief, Brett Rushforth
Call for Papers: Writing Population History in a Time of Planetary Crisis [Announcement]
United Kingdom
CfP: Writing Population History in a Time of Planetary Crisis, Workshop 2nd-3rd June 2025, University of Exeter (UK)
The present moment is suffused with demographic anxieties. Reaching the milestone of 8 billion people in the global population in 2022 has reinvigorated debate about the impact of a growing global population—particularly, though not exclusively, on planetary ecology; this in turn has renewed calls in some quarters for population control measures. At the same time, policymakers have expressed concern about aging populations and declining national birth rates or, in other locations, about the impact of so-called ‘youth bulges’ on security and labour. Meanwhile, actors on the far right have leant upon racialised narratives of migration and demographic change to mobilize support.
History has a particular place in current demographic debates. For example, Natalia Kanem, the Executive Director of the UN Population Fund, has cautioned against ‘population alarmism,’ warning that historic population control measures have been ‘ineffective and even dangerous.’ This 2-day, hybrid workshop will explore the challenges and possibilities of writing population history at this current historical moment. How might population history-writing engage with contemporary demographic anxieties, and how might the concerns of our present moment shape the development of the scholarly field?
We are thrilled to welcome Professor Alison Bashford, Scientia Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population at the University of New South Wales, as our keynote speaker.
We welcome papers that present traditional historical studies as well as more informal think-pieces on the relationship between the past and present of population, demographic anxiety, and ecological and political crises, including work related to activism in these sectors. We welcome participation from non-historians and non-academics. Student and early-career speakers who are SSHM members may be eligible for SSHM travel bursaries. Further details can be found at https://sshm.org/bursaries/.
Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Population control
- Fertility and population decline
- Ageing, youth and demographic profiles
- Reproductive justice
- Migration
- Eugenics
Extended deadline: Please submit an abstract of c.250 words to R.Wil...@Exeter.ac.uk by 2nd April.
Dr. Rebecca Williams, Senior Lecturer in Medical History, University of Exeter
Barbara Bates Center Seminar: Wendy Kline on the History of the Pelvic Exam [Announcement]
Join the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at Penn Nursing for an upcoming lecture in the Bates Seminar Series!
Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 4:00pm - 5:00pm, ET
Speaker: Wendy Kline, PhD, Purdue University
Why has the pelvic exam become a source of shame and fear? In this hybrid Bates Center seminar, Dr. Wendy Kline argues that the real problem has to do with the unaddressed, indeed silenced, stigma surrounding the practice of the routine gynecological exam.
Click to register for this event: https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/calendar/event/5097-do-i-need-to-take-a-security-guard-to-the-gynecologist-.
Abstract: Beginning in 1960, a trip to the gynecologist was nearly synonymous with getting the birth control pill – or at least the main reason many visited the gynecologist in the U.S. But by the 1990s, it was becoming clearer that more and more sexually active women were putting off a trip to the gynecologist due to the shame and fear of getting a pelvic exam. But why has the pelvic exam become a source of shame and fear? The exposure of sexual misconduct in the examining room has eroded the sense of trust between patients and gynecologists, resulting in a massive decline in preventive reproductive health care. In this talk, Kline argues that the real problem has to do with the unaddressed, indeed silenced, stigma surrounding the practice of the routine gynecological exam. It has to do with the very uncomfortable question of what it means to touch and peer into the vagina of a patient. And it’s a problem that’s been with us since the origins of gynecology.
Bio: Wendy Kline, Ph.D., Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine at Purdue University, is internationally recognized for her scholarship in the history of medicine, history of women’s health and the history of childbirth. She is the author of four major books focusing on sexuality and reproduction: Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam (Polity Press, 2024); Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth (Oxford University Press, 2019); Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (U. of Chicago Press 2010); and Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (U. of California Press, 2001). She has appeared in the Netflix documentry, Sex, Explained, as well as the PBS documentary, The Eugenics Crusade. Her research has been funded by major fellowships, including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar fellowship, a British Academy Fellowship, and a Huntington Fellowship. Kline is also a professional violinist, currently principal second with the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra.
Science and Technology in Asia @ Harvard - Wen-Hua Kuo on "From Needham to STS (and Back Again to Needham): Why East Asian History Matters" - Tuesday, March 25, 10:30–11:45 am ET over Zoom [Announcement]
MA
United States
I am pleased to invite you to the next session of the Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series for spring 2025. This will take place on Tuesday, March 25, 10:30–11:45 am ET over Zoom.
Our speaker is Wen-Hua Kuo of National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and the details of his talk are as follows:
FROM NEEDHAM TO STS (AND BACK TO NEEDHAM): WHY EAST ASIAN HISTORY MATTERS
Witnessing the emergence of East Asian STS and the rise of East Asia in the global STS landscape, this talk touches upon my academic journey from the history and philosophy of science to STS, and an iconic guide of Joseph Needham (1900-1995), a renowned biochemist who devoted his later career to understanding Chinese science and technology. Drawing from close reading of Needham’s work and archival studies concerning medicine, the talk offers an assessment, with critical eyes of STS, on this towering figure and how Chinese medicine was treated in Science and Civilisation in China, the intellectual enterprise he created. I argue that Needham’s STS legacy is multilayered; it should be understood not only in the context of Cold War science and science diplomacy; it has to do with his peculiar approach to Asian medicines, which were shared by his historian colleagues as well as physician contemporaries. Only with this understanding can we approximate Needham’s vision about medicine in the future, where, in a Kuhnian sense, knowing the past is essential and necessary.
About our speaker: Wen-Hua Kuo is a professor at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, where he teaches social studies of medicine. A certified acupuncturist and physician, his STS experience includes serving as the Editor-in-Chief of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2016-2022) and Associate Editor of Social Studies of Science since 2023. He will serve as the President of 4S from 2025 to 2027.
Zoom registration:https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia
We hope you will be able to join us for this and subsequent talks, listed below:
April 1 | Zuoyue Wang | “Chinese American Scientists: A Transnational History from Cold War to China Initiative”
April 15 | Yuriko Furuhata | “Refrigerated Time Capsules: On the Colonial Roots of Japan’s Polar Science”
April 22 | Li Zhang | “Of Visceral/Somatic Practices in Healing”
Victor Seow
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Department of the History of Science
Harvard University
CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union [Announcement]
CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union. Thursday, April 10, 11:00 am ET / 17:00 CET / 18:00 Kyiv, Zoom.
ABOUT THIS EVENT
Virtual platforms CHORUS (Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science) & HPS.CESEE (History of Science in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe) are inviting you to the forthcoming discussion of a new book on the history of Soviet economics. Ewa Dąbrowska and Ilya Matveev will join Olessia Kirtchik to comment on her recent book: Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union [1], in a discussion moderated by Slava Gerovitch.
Thursday, April 10, 11:00 am ET / 17:00 CET / 18:00 Kyiv, Zoom.
The meeting is free and open to the public. To receive the Zoom link, please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/LInm1rrqSzqQFiI0muwJzwor write to hps....@gmail.com
[1] Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2024.
“This book aims to shed new light on the puzzle of the late Soviet conversion to the “market” and capitalism by revisiting the history of Soviet reform economics. Using a variety of sources, including interviews with economists, archival files, and published materials, it examines the social contexts in which economists employed in economic administration and research institutions could have played a crucial public and political role, the forms of their participation, and the social and political logic behind the selection of economic experts and their rise to power during perestroika and the “transition” period. It also compares the professional trajectories of these reformist economists and assesses the scope of this group’s influence in the post-Soviet period in order to conclude on the new state of economic expertise in Russia.”
Participants
Ewa Dąbrowska is a Postdoc in the Cluster “Contestations of the liberal Script” and at the Institute for East European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam with the thesis on ideas and policy change in Putin’s Russia. Her current research focuses on alternatives to the liberal norms and institutions in the governance of the Internet, data and the digital economy in Russia and the Global South. More information https://www.scripts-berlin.eu/people/Dabrowska/index.html
Olessia Kirtchik is a sociologist and CNRS researcher, specializing in the sociology of science and technology. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and has held academic positions in Russia, France, and Austria. Her research focuses on the history of cybernetics, AI, and the circulation of economic ideas. Notable publications include “The Soviet Scientific Programme on AI” (BJHS Themes, 2023) and “Computers for the Planned Economy” (Europe-Asia Studies, 2022). She is currently working on the IAction project, studying AI’s role in public administration in France. More information: https://cis.cnrs.fr/en/olessia_kirtchik/
Ilya Matveev is an independent Marxist researcher in Russian and international political economy. He is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and a member of the research group Public Sociology Laboratory. He is a founding editor of Openleft.ru. His recent publications include “From the Chicago Boys to Hjalmar Schacht: The Trajectory of the (Neo)Liberal Economic Expertise in Russia” (Problems of Post-Communism, 2024) and "When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: Russian Developmentalism since the Mid-2000s." (Russian Politics 2023 with Oleg Zhuravlev). More information: https://berkeley.academia.edu/IlyaMatveev
Slava Gerovitch teaches history of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds two PhDs: one in philosophy of science (from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology in Moscow) and one in history and social study of science and technology (from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program). He has written extensively on the history of Soviet mathematics, cybernetics, cosmonautics, and computing. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002), Voices of the Soviet Space Program (2014), and Soviet Space Mythologies (2015). More information: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage
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