September 2020

Welcome to the first installment of the Women's Caucus newsletter, Coffee Break! 

We initially planned to do this weekly but lack of submissions and an overwhelming amount of other obligations and commitments meant we've had to shift our priorities. Coffee Break will now be a monthly series, with a special issue in November devoted primarily to member updates--the same way we share our news at the in-person meetings at HSS! 

Please send any submissions for inclusion to Jai Virdi at jvirdi@udel.edu 

Member News

Ellen Abrams would like to share that her PhD from the Cornell Department of Science and Technology Studies was conferred on August 17. Abrams' article, "'Indebted to No One': Grounding and Gendering the Self-Made Mathematician," was published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2020) 50 (3): 217–247.

Announcements

Call for Papers: Social History of Laboratory and Field Practices

Megan Raby is editing a new, ongoing topical collection in the Journal for the History of Biology. This collection will advance historical scholarship on the spatial practices of life scientists across the array of settings known as laboratories or field areas. Using space and place as analytic categories, the pieces chosen for this collection will explore the co-production of research sites, scientific knowledge, and biologists’ social and professional identities. We seek submissions that interrogate the categories of the “laboratory” and the “field,” as well as those that move beyond a lab-field dichotomy to examine the full range of practices that life scientists engage in indoors, outdoors, and in between. 

News & Articles 

"Planned Parenthood and its founder have often become inaccurately intertwined in conversations about sterilization abuse that occurred in hospitals in the 1960s and later, abuse that disproportionately affected black and indigenous women, said Ayah Nuriddin, a PhD candidate in the department of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who is writing her thesis on eugenics and the African American community. Nuriddin said it’s important to distinguish between Sanger’s work and views and later state-sponsored sterilization."
Samantha Schmidt, "Planned Parenthood to Remove Margaret Sanger's Name From N.Y. Clinic over views on Eugenics," Washington Post, ​21 July 2020. 


"'Radioactive,” a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject."
Manohla Dargis, "'Radioactive' Review: Marie Curie and the Science of Autonomy," New York Times 23 July 2020.
​

Resources

Report on Isis Submissions & Gender 
From the co-editors of the History of Science Society 

Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine
Compiled by Antoine S. Johnson, Elise A. Mitchell, and Ayah Nuriddin

Syllabus: Eugenics and COVID-19
Compiled by Aimi Hamraie and Jay T. Dolmage