Welcome to the first edition of the History of Science Society Graduate and Early Career Caucus (GECC) newsletter! This monthly publication will highlight news and events — upcoming conferences, CFPs, and job postings — relevant to the history of science. It will also feature and celebrate the work of graduate students and early career scholars in the HSS community.

Are you graduating and starting a new position? Spending a month or year researching somewhere? Have a paper or chapter coming out? We want to hear about it!

If you have an event, opportunity, or news item you would like featured in the newsletter, please send the details to [email protected].

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Meet the GECC Team

Earlier this year, GECC elected a new slate of officers. You can find brief bios and introductions below, and we encourage you to consider a role in future years.

Co-Chairs

Iris Clever is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on how scientists and doctors use data to understand human bodies and how these efforts have marginalized certain groups.

Taylor Elizabeth Dysart is a PhD candidate in History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania (and second year Co-Chair of GECC). Her work examines the histories of ayahuasca, caapí, and yagé, along with other sacred non-human beings, as they became entangled with modern science in the northwestern Amazon during the twentieth century.

Diversity Officers

Elizabeth Hunter is a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago in the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Her interests are the history of mathematics, classical reception, and ancient philosophy. Her dissertation, “Science as a European identity: Early Modern Reception of Archimedes and the Fiction of Scientific Progress,” analyzes the original narrative of the scientific revolution, the mathematization thesis, through the reception of Archimedes in the early modern period and investigates why both early modern thinkers and twentieth-century scholars credited the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer as its catalyst. She also organizes a reading group for the Forum for the History of the Mathematical Sciences.

Dalena Ngo is a student in the History Department at Yale University. Her main work focuses on the intersection between healthcare equity, institutional diversity, and the neoliberal university. She has published in Plos Computational Biology and the International Journal for Behavioral Medicine and is working on another article regarding COVID-19 and chronically ill. Her current project centers on the University of California as a dominant force for the social reproduction of inequality; she is particularly concerned with how academic medical centers function as unique delivery mechanisms for tertiary/quaternary care and how they might operate to promote health in underserved regions.

Mentorship Officers

Ellie Louson is a learning designer at Michigan State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation, formerly the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology. She leads the Spartan Studios project to support interdisciplinary, experiential, community-engaged teaching at MSU, and she is a faculty mentor for the CTLI grad fellowship which introduces grad students to collaborative academic work that connects different parts of campus. She also is part of the Science and Society teaching faculty at MSU’s Lyman Briggs College. Her Ph.D. is from York University’s Science and Technology Studies program about wildlife films and their representation of animal behavior. She is originally from Montreal, Canada.

MaryKate Wolken is one of the GECC Mentorship Officers and a PhD Student at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests revolve around health and gender in the Iberian world, and she’s excited to be involved with GECC!

Communications Officers

Brad Bolman will start as a Postdoctoral Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in September 2023. His research focuses on the production and transformation of knowledge about organisms and life in science, medicine, and technology, from beagle dogs to fungi.

Andy Hoyt is completing an MA in history at Trent University, after which he will begin a PhD in the history of science at Princeton University. His work examines the twentieth-century history of ecology and its relation to environmental policy and settler colonialism in the United States.

Upcoming Conferences & Calls for Papers

HSS 2023

November 9-12; Portland, OR

The 2023 HSS conference in Portland, Oregon is now open for proposals. The theme this year is “Shifting Standards, Creating Change.” The deadline for submission is April 24, 2023.

HSS attendees might also consider applying for the RESLAC workshop, “Incorporating Latin America and the Caribbean into Teaching in Environmental History,” which will take place right before the conference (November 8) in Portland. Find more information here.

4S 2023

November 8-12; Honolulu

The Society for Social Study of Science (4S) meeting call for papers opens April 10, and the deadline for submission is May 26, 2023. Note that 4S overlaps with the HSS meeting this year.

Exploring the Opioid Industry Documents (Workshop)

May 5; Virtual

The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) invites you to Exploring the Opioid Industry Documents: Research Communities, Educational Opportunities, and Community Data. This event will feature a webinar where scholars will discuss how they successfully used OIDA and other Industry Documents Library (IDL) collections. We will also conduct a hands-on virtual workshop that will help researchers navigate and explore the OIDA’s under-researched and rich collections.

SHOT 2023

October 25-29; Long Beach, CA

The deadline for paper and panel submissions for the Society for the History of Technology has passed, but information about the conference is available below.

Prizes and Fellowships

BSHS Outreach and Engagement Grants

“British Society for the History of Science Outreach and Engagement Committee offers grants of up to £500 to support engagement and outreach projects in the history of science.” The first upcoming deadline is May 12, 2023.

SHOT Fellowships and Prizes

There are also three SHOT fellowships and prizes geared toward early career scholars with deadlines of April 30:

Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship

“The Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship is presented annually to a doctoral student engaged in the preparation of a dissertation on the history of technology, broadly defined.” $4,000, unrestricted, for research and travel.

Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship

“The Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Technology honors the contribution of Brooke Hindle to the work of the Society for the History of Technology.” Applicants must hold a doctorate in the history of technology or a related field, awarded no more than four years before the application deadline, and no later than nine months after the application deadline, but see page for further details.

Levinson Essay Prize

“The Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize is awarded each year for a single-authored, unpublished essay in the history of technology that explicitly examines, in some detail, a technology or technological device or process within the framework of social or intellectual history. It is intended for younger scholars and new entrants into the profession.”

Community News

Starting in our May issue, we will use this space to highlight more informal news from the community.

Share Your Ideas!

We want this newsletter to be a space for community discussion and reflection, so we’re eager to hear from you about issues that could serve as topics for the newsletter. We would also love to see and share creative outputs from our community: art, poetry, etc. Please send any contributions, ideas, or suggestions to [email protected].