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Greetings Israel Society for History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, New items have been posted matching your subscriptions. Table of Contents H-HistGeog: New posted content CfP: Mapping a Nation of Refuge across Time, Space, Institutions and Disciplines [Announcement] Bloomsbury Publishing is looking for authors for our Understanding Modern Nations book series [Announcement] Call for Papers for Catalyst journal special section "Reconfiguring Islands: Environmental Futures Beyond Containment" (abstracts deadline: May 15th 2026) [Announcement] 4s Annual Meeting (October 7-10, Toronto, Canada) open panel CFA: Infrastructure-building as world-building: assembling electrical modernity [Announcement] H-Digital-History: New posted content Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Historical Documents: Applying HTRflow, Exploring New Possibilities, and Addressing Remaining Challenges H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content Mercelis on Lovejoy, 'Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War' [Review] Call for Proposals: The Extractive Midwest Registration now open: Histories of Global Mental Health Conference H-HistGeog: New posted content CfP: Mapping a Nation of Refuge across Time, Space, Institutions and Disciplines [Announcement] Monja Stahlberger Location United Kingdom Call for Papers: Mapping a Nation of Refuge across Time, Space, Institutions and Disciplines  Symposium  10 September 2026  Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), Reading   Research on displacement, asylum, and refuge in Britain has become increasingly interdisciplinary looking at aspects related to history, politics, sociology, media studies, geography, literary and cultural studies. Scholars have discussed how classifications such as “refugee” and “migrant” shape public debate and how public sentiment can shift rapidly in response to political rhetoric or misinformation. Yet despite rich academic work, public discourse often remains polarised oscillating between depictions of “illegal migration” and nostalgic celebration of past humanitarianism. This symposium aims to initiate a conversation to examine how Britain imagines “refuge,” how these narratives matter, and how they might be reframed.  Hosted by the four‑year UKRI‑funded project Nation of Refuge (launched November 2025), this event explores how Britain has thought, talked, legislated, remembered, and felt about “offering refuge” across the last century.   We are delighted to announce that Professor Tony Kushner (University of Southampton) will be joining us for a keynote and that Professor Andrea Hammel (University of Aberystwyth), Dr Sarah Linn (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Agnes Woolley (University of Southampton) and Paul Dudman (University of East London) will be opening the conference with a roundtable discussion on current developments in the field.   We invite contributions that look at the historical, spatial, institutional, cultural, emotional, or experiential dimensions of refuge. We welcome proposals engaging with (including but not limited to):  Historical case studies of refugee reception in Britain  Memory, heritage, and the shaping of contemporary debates  Borders, infrastructures, and everyday geographies of welcome or hostility  Local and regional experiences of hosting refugees  Museum, archival, and material cultures of refuge   Media and political discourse  Law, policy, and governance  Creative practice, education, and community engagement  Refugee narratives and lived experience  Literary perspectives on refuge and refugee representations  Submission Details  Please send your title, an abstract of 300 words, and a short biographical note of 100 words to nationo...@reading.ac.uk by Sunday, 31 May 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent in mid-June.   Contact Information Dr Monja Stahlberger Postdoctoral Research Associate "Nation of Refuge", University of Reading nationo...@reading.ac.uk | m.stah...@reading.ac.uk  Contact Email nationo...@reading.ac.uk Read more or reply Repost Back to top Bloomsbury Publishing is looking for authors for our Understanding Modern Nations book series [Announcement] Maxine Taylor Announcement Type Call for Publications My name is Maxine Taylor and I’m a senior acquisitions editor at ABC-CLIO, now part of Bloomsbury Publishing. We are a premier reference publisher in the areas of history and the social sciences, and I acquire specifically in the areas of food, anthropology/world cultures, and health. I’m currently seeking authors for our ongoing Understanding Modern Nations series. Each book focuses on a specific country and explores both the structure and functioning of the country as a whole and the daily lived experiences of the individuals who reside there. Coverage includes everything from a country’s politics, economy, and recent history to food, sport and leisure, and pop culture. These books are meant to be broad introductions to a country, offering readers a general and accessible overview. Each book is approximately 140,000–160,000 words in length and follows a standardized chapter structure. We’re looking for authors who are natives of the particular country they’d like to write about and/or consider that country to be one of their academic areas of expertise. Authors can choose to write the entire manuscript themselves or co-author with up to two other individuals. Please note that because of the length of these books and the time commitment required (approximately 18 months for development), this opportunity is not suitable for individuals in the process of earning their doctoral degree. We are particularly eager to find authors for books on countries in Africa and Latin America. If interested, please contact me at maxine...@bloomsbury.com for additional information, including more about the type of publishing we do, series guidelines and examples, and compensation information. Please be sure to include your CV and specify which country you’re interested in writing about. I look forward to hearing from you and hope we get the chance to work together! Best, Maxine Contact Email maxine...@bloomsbury.com URL https://bloomsbury.com Read more or reply Repost Back to top Call for Papers for Catalyst journal special section "Reconfiguring Islands: Environmental Futures Beyond Containment" (abstracts deadline: May 15th 2026) [Announcement] May Ee Wong (she/her) Location Netherlands Call for submissions for "Reconfiguring Islands: Environmental Futures Beyond Containment" special section in Catalyst journal (Apologies for cross-posting.) We are co-editing a special section in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience journal called "Reconfiguring Islands: Environmental Futures Beyond Containment." The special section is centered on islands as figure, allegory, epistemic construct, geographic type and (neo)colonial technique associated with the Anthropocene.  We are looking for submissions that bring feminist Science Technology Studies (STS) in engagement with critical ocean and island studies, feminist, critical and/or colonial geography, Arctic studies, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, critical data studies and other fields that critical engage in the island and its historical and developmental legacies. We are also looking for art, poetry, and other creative works that reconfigure (neo)colonial visions. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 15th May 2026. If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to us as co-editors at reconfigur...@gmail.com. The full description of the CFP is here on the journal website: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/announcement/view/1047.   Best, May Ee Wong and Kim de Wolff   Contact Information May Ee Wong, Assistant Professor,  Media and Cultural Studies Department Utrecht University (m.e....@uu.nl)   Contact Email reconfigur...@gmail.com URL https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/announcement/view/1047 Read more or reply Repost Back to top 4s Annual Meeting (October 7-10, Toronto, Canada) open panel CFA: Infrastructure-building as world-building: assembling electrical modernity [Announcement] Hongyun Lyu Location ON Canada Electricity is a secondary energy that draws on primary forms of energy ranging from fossil fuels to hydraulic, solar and wind power, but fundamentally depends on electrical infrastructure. Expanding the concept of infrastructure beyond physical objects like railways and grids, classic Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship has redefined it as a relational concept that enables the circulation of information and entrenches particular social relations (Star 1999; Bowker and Star 2000; Edwards 2010; Larkin 2013). Recent scholars of energy and critical infrastructure studies have applied this approach to a variety of topics: the environmental, social, and political consequences of extraction and consumption (Mitchell 2011; Jones 2014; Kahle 2024), questions of material politics and citizenship (von Schnitzler 2013; Nucho 2016), and how political economic regimes are assembled and re-assembled through infrastructure (Collier 2011; Seow 2022). Building upon these insights, we are interested in exploring how infrastructures produce specific world orders by materializing and making durable social, environmental, and spatial relations—and when those efforts fall short.  For this open panel, we invite diverse perspectives that take up electricity infrastructures as object of analysis, including but not limited to the logistics of their construction, their uneven distribution of climate consequences, the governance of calculative agency and public interest, the techno-economics of constructing electricity markets, and the mediation of knowledge, information, and ideas.   Please submit the abstract through the online portal by April 30, 2026. Any questions, feel free to contact Hongyun Lyu (hongy...@mail.utoronto.ca) and Xixi Jiang (xixi...@berkeley.edu).  Contact Information Hongyun Lyu, History, University of Toronto Xixi Jiang, City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley. Read more or reply Repost Back to top H-Digital-History: New posted content Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Historical Documents: Applying HTRflow, Exploring New Possibilities, and Addressing Remaining Challenges Gillian Macdonald (she/her/hers) Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Historical Documents: Applying HTRflow, Exploring New Possibilities, and Addressing Remaining Challenges Linnaeus University campus (Växjö) and online | April 21-22, 2026 "Join us for a two-day event dedicated to exploring the possibilities and challenges of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in the analysis of complex historical documents. This event, led by Riksarkivet data scientists, focuses on addressing these complexities and expanding the practical applications of HTR. During the workshops, participants will work with Google Colab notebooks built around Riksarkivet’s Python package, HTRflow, allowing them to follow along during demonstrations and experiment independently." For more information: https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/events/2026-04-21-open-lecture-workshop/ Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Historical Documents: Applying HTRflow, Exploring New Possibilities, and Addressing Remaining Challenges Read more or reply Repost Back to top H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content Mercelis on Lovejoy, 'Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War' [Review] H-Net Reviews Lovejoy, Alice. Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War. : University of California Press, 2025. Illustrations. 256 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780520402935. Reviewed by Joris Mercelis (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (April, 2026) Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62254 In this essayistic study, media historian Alice Lovejoy examines motion picture film as a “terribly ordinary” chemical-industrial product, rather than as a cultural medium emerging from a “dream factory” like Hollywood (p. 10). She argues that film’s very ordinariness—its production in chemical factories—is key to grasping its ties to the development and testing of weapons. The book focuses especially on film manufacturers’ participation in the Manhattan Project and in studies of nuclear fallout, but it also considers explosives, chemical poison gas, and war reparations. Even in peacetime, film posed serious risks due to its chemical composition (for example, the flammability of cellulose nitrate film base). Considering raw materials, intermediates, by-products, and final products, Lovejoy demonstrates that this composition was essential to the technology’s “dual-use” status and highlights the local and global dependencies and inequalities it created. Lovejoy’s analysis centers on two factories that had much in common despite being located several thousand miles apart. Both sites were shaped by war. The first, Tennessee Eastman’s factory in Kingsport, originated in a government-owned methanol plant established during World War I. In 1920, the Eastman Kodak Company acquired it to secure a domestic supply of wood-derived chemicals for film production. By the 1930s, Tennessee Eastman had become a sizable organic chemicals manufacturer in its own right, with particular expertise in by-product recovery and scaling up production processes. When the company accepted a US government contract to manage an electromagnetic uranium-isotope separation plant in nearby Oak Ridge, it became one of several large chemical contractors participating in the Manhattan Project. The second film factory central to Lovejoy’s narrative, Agfa’s plant in Wolfen, Germany, was similarly shaped by twentieth-century global conflicts. An outgrowth of Agfa’s diversification from synthetic dyes into photography, the facility developed into Europe’s largest film plant during the interwar period. Having contributed to Germany’s poison gas program during World War I, it later became involved in war crimes during the Nazi era. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, the Soviets confiscated the factory, though not before US and British investigative teams had inspected it to obtain any relevant technology that remained after several weeks of looting in Wolfen (chap. 3). While the history of Tennessee Eastman has remained underexplored in scholarship on Kodak and the US photographic and cinematographic industries, several European historians have previously examined the dramatic history of Agfa-Wolfen.[1] Lovejoy’s account features a few of its better-known figures—notably Fritz Gajewski, manager of the factory and head of the I.G. Farben division into which it was integrated in 1929. Drawing on a wide range of archives, however, Lovejoy also foregrounds the perspectives of actors who may be unfamiliar even to specialists in this literature, such as Ukrainian concentration camp prisoners who produced “Vistra” synthetic fiber during World War II. Across five chapters, Lovejoy interweaves the histories of Agfa-Wolfen and Tennessee Eastman, moving seamlessly between Europe and the United States. The themes she explores range from racial dynamics in the early twentieth-century US South to Cold War-era investigations into the scope and consequences of radioactive fallout. This latter topic, analyzed in the book’s final two chapters, demonstrates that nuclear testing was a “double-edged sword” for the photographic industry (p. 132). While the sector benefited from military contracts and collaborations, its core products were highly vulnerable to radioactive pollution. Lovejoy partly models her book after Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975). Like Levi, the chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor, she presents a series of “tales” that can be read individually yet are also interconnected in important ways. Both authors organize these stories around chemical substances, though not typically elements in Lovejoy’s case. Lovejoy also builds on Levi’s insights. For example, in concluding the first part of her book, she suggests that the expansion of Tennessee Eastman and Agfa encapsulates a “grand chemistry”—Levi’s phrase—that subordinated human suffering to profits and wartime goals (p. 88). In the book’s epilogue, she highlights Levi’s interest in the reuse and transformation of materials, a theme crucial for understanding film factories’ connections to war and its legacies. While Lovejoy’s “tales of militant chemistry” analyze these connections with much narrative and interpretive skill, not all points are equally convincing. For example, the book repeatedly implies that Kodak and Agfa depended on such products as cellulose acetate rayon, explosives, and cigarette filters to keep the film industry running profitably. However, the exact opposite was true at Agfa in the early 1930s, and the company’s civilian photographic business became even more profitable under the Nazi regime’s four-year plan and during the first years of World War II. Kodak similarly used the high profit margins from its film sales to strengthen its position in other markets.[2] Lovejoy does not present comprehensive data that could have shed valuable light on this and other dimensions of Levi’s “grand chemistry ... of colossal plants and dizzying output.”[3] Like Levi, she is more interested in exploring chemical and societal transformations through human-scale stories. Together, her humane, well-researched essays present a captivating material history of film. I strongly recommend them to readers interested in the history of cinema and photography, the photographic and chemical industries, and the connections between film and war. Notes [1]. A useful entry point into this literature is Rainer Karlsch and Helmut Maier, eds., Studien zur Geschichte der Filmfabrik Wolfen und der IG Farbenindustrie AG in Mitteldeutschland (Klartext, 2014). [2]. See Gottfried Plumpe, Die I.G. Farbenindustrie AG: Wirtschaft, Technik und Politik 1904-1945 (Duncker & Humblot, 1990), 438; Hartmut Berghoff and Berti Kolbow, “Konsumgütermarketing im Rüstungsboom: Wachstumsstrategien der IG-Farben-Sparte Agfa, 1933 bis 1945,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 55, no. 2 (2010): 129-60; and Vrinda Kadiyali, “Eastman Kodak in the Photographic Film Industry: Picture Imperfect,” in Market Dominance: How Firms Gain, Hold, or Lose It and the Impact on Economic Performance, ed. David Rosenbaum (Greenwood Press, 1998), 89-108. [3]. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (Schocken Books, 1984), 203. Citation: Joris Mercelis. Review of Lovejoy, Alice. Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War. H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews. April, 2026. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62254 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Read more or reply Repost Back to top Call for Proposals: The Extractive Midwest Victoria Meyer (she/her) Call for Proposals: The Extractive Midwest Read more or reply Repost Back to top Registration now open: Histories of Global Mental Health Conference Victoria Meyer (she/her) Registration now open: Histories of Global Mental Health Conference Read more or reply Repost Back to top Message from a proud sponsor of H-Net: The New Books Network is proud to be a sponsor of H-Net. If you are interested in becoming an NBN host, please go here. Si te interesa hacer entrevistas en español, contáctanos. Please help us keep H-Net free and accessible. $25 from each of our subscribers would fund H-Net for two years. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation online. Contact the Help Desk: he...@mail.h-net.org. Manage notification settings by visiting My Profile > Notifications on the Commons.