Working Groups, 2025 / 2026
Early Sciences Working Group
Coordinators: Courtney Greer-Soliday (Gragson) and Briana Brightly
Faculty Sponsors: Hannah Marcus, Eric Gurevitch
The Early Sciences Working Group (ESWG) brings graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty together to discuss current work in the fields of ancient, medieval and early modern science and medicine. Our primary goal is to provide a forum for student and faculty scholars to present and receive comments on their current research. Presenters at the working group share drafts of articles, dissertation chapters, and research from books-in-progress or independent projects. Students and faculty have taken the opportunity to practice conference papers at the working group. Members of the group offer valuable feedback on the presentation and content of these talks.
This year, as part of the existing Early Sciences Working Group format of pre-circulated papers, we are excited to introduce a new workshop focused on the interpretation of primary sources. Primary source engagement is at the heart of our scholarly practice, yet it often happens in isolation. This new group seeks to create a more communal space for encountering and interpreting sources together. We also hope to expand our sense of what kinds of materials can count as sources in the history of science, and how we approach them. Primary sources may include traditional textual materials—recipes, letters, treatises, marginalia, case notes, petitions, legal records, travelogues, or manuals—as well as visual and material sources such as maps, diagrams, anatomical drawings, botanical illustrations, medical images, instruments, artifacts, and so on.
Presenters at this year's working group include graduate students in the History and History of Science departments, the Committee on the Study of Religion, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, as well as postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and Harvard faculty.
The Early Sciences Working Group is particularly focused on promoting graduate student work, encouraging networking and the exchange of ideas among graduate students, and assisting graduate students at all levels of advancement. Graduate students present research papers and portions of prospectuses or dissertations, as well as primary sources. Students nearing the completion of their degrees practice job talks at the working group. More experienced students in the group, as well as faculty, are also a valuable professional resource for first, second, and third year graduate students.
ESWG meets on Thursdays, from 12:00-1:15 ET, both in person and online.
History of Medicine Working Group
Coordinators: Genevieve Dally-Watkins, Kelsey Ichikawa, and Elizabeth Karron
Faculty Sponsors: Allan M. Brandt and David S. Jones
The History of Medicine Working Group is an interdisciplinary group that convenes on a biweekly basis throughout the academic year to discuss emerging scholarship in the history of health and medicine. The group has three main areas of focus:
- Discussing, debating, and helping to shape participants' work-in-progress.
- Engaging in cross-disciplinary conversations regarding methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of the history of medicine
- Introducing the Harvard History of Medicine community to the work of local and visiting scholars via an intimate seminar setting.
For over forty consecutive years, this working group has brought together graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and distinguished faculty from GSAS, HMS, HSPH, and local universities (including MIT, Wellesley, and Boston University) to discuss emerging themes in the history of medicine and members' scholarly projects, and to foster the intellectual growth and professional development of our students. Funding from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has been crucial in enabling the History of Medicine Working Group to develop a sustained conversation about the relevance, character, and future direction of this particular branch of historical analysis, and to broaden our interaction with students and scholars from a wide range of departments, disciplines, and schools. While GSAS funding is on hiatus, we are grateful for support from Harvard’s Ackerman Program on Medicine & Culture which allows HMWG to continue its work.
This interaction and critique has only become more important in recent years. At one time, the History of Medicine was merely the province of physicians-turned-amateur historians, who chronicled the history of their profession more as a hobby than for reasons of social analysis. In the waning decades of the twentieth century, however, the History of Medicine emerged as a crucial element in the intellectual arsenal with which pressing contemporary problems in medicine could be understood, made sense of, and ameliorated. Increasingly over the past decade, historians of medicine have been asked to bring their particular scholarly approach to bear on health issues of national and international importance - including rising health care costs and various crises in the cost and quality of medical care, the failure of 'war on' disease campaigns to effect reasonable decreases in mortality or morbidity, the persistence of inter- and intra-national health disparities, emerging global and local epidemics, medicalization (the redefinition of social and behavioral characteristics as health problems), ethical issues, medical activism, complementary & alternative medicine, and the balance between personal and social responsibility for controlling disease. In the more than forty years that the History of Medicine Working Group has held its seminars, historians of medicine have re-enfranchised and re-constituted many of the historical actors that had been omitted from the medical histories of the mid-twentieth century - the stories of allied health professionals, suffering patients, family caregivers, and minority activists have increasingly been integrated with more traditional considerations of the institutional world intellectual history of medicine. Even the definition of disease itself, once almost entirely the purview of sociological and anthropological scholarship, has increasingly become the object of nuanced historical analyses that blend intellectual, social, and cultural history with an acknowledgement of the material, biological reality of both the experiential suffering and the disease pathology under consideration.
Attendant with these shifts in the purview of the History of Medicine has been the increasing extra-disciplinary relevance of the field. The tools which Historians of Medicine have at their disposal to trace and interpret changes in medical practice have expanded to include analytic techniques from anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, literary theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies; at the same time, historians of medicine increasingly find themselves bringing the tools of history to bear on these other disciplines and participating in interdisciplinary scholarly conversations such as those on Health Policy or Science & Technology Studies. Our group interrogates these new developments, educating ourselves and training graduate students academically and professionally in the process.
Modern Sciences and Technology Working Group (MSTWG)
Coordinators: Karuna Vikram (History of Science) and Nyamal Tuor (Anthropolgy)
Faculty Sponsors: Alex Csiszar and Rijul Kochhar (History of Science) and Gabriella Coleman (Anthropology)
Click here to join the MSTWG Mailing List!
The Modern Sciences and Technology Working Group is a student-led forum for graduate students, faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and visiting scholars in the History of Science and in Anthropology to share ideas and discuss their work. During the term it meets most Wednesdays at noon in hybrid format.
Topics generally focus on the history and anthropology of the physical, life, and social sciences post-1800, as well as the history of technology. Through regular meetings, the group generates lively and productive conversations about relevant topics, gives graduate students the opportunity to obtain useful feedback on their projects, and keep students in contact with scholars in the history of modern science community. It is funded by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
The Modern Sciences and Technology Working group is the product of a merger of the History of the Physical Sciences Group and the History of the Life Sciences / Environmental Science Group. The merger took placed when we realized that many of the graduate student attendees of the respective groups were writing on topics that cut across the traditional boundary between physics and biology. Further, insofar as historians of biology and physics continue to work on somewhat distinct sets of historical actors, we all encounter similar thematic and methodological opportunities and challenges. For these and other reasons, it has become increasingly obvious that historians of biology, physics, human and social sciences, and technology have much to say to and learn from one another.
Our primary aim is to encourage graduate students to present their research in-progress, including drafts of dissertation chapters, prospectuses, seminar papers, and practice conference talks. However, we supplement these presentations with outside speakers, graduate student led discussions of recent literature in the field, classic books and monographs, and other important materials, as well as with guest speakers.
Fall 2025 Schedule
October 1
Caleb Shelburne, "In Search of 'Osmanlis': Affinity and Admixture in Ottoman Race Science"
October 8
Faculty roundtable: Before and After AI. with Marc Aidinoff (History of Science), Moira Weigel (Comparative Literature), and Alex Csiszar (History of Science)
October 22
Martin Meiske, "Cultures and Costs of Maintenance: The Rise of Creosote and its Precarious Legacy"
November 6, 12:00-2:00 [Note special date and time],
Practice Conference Talks (HSS / AAA) (co-sponsored with HMWG)
November 19
Haden Smiley, "Tablet Computers in Texas Prisons: A Prison Ethnography of Technology"
December 3
Kelsey Ichikawa, "The Datafication of Terror: The RAND Corporation and International Terrorism"