Member News

Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, University of Rochester, curated the special collection “Reproductive Rights in France” for French Historical Studies. The five articles in the group contribute to the history of the human sciences by considering the history of debates over women's reproduction in a range of fields that include medicine, midwifery, demography, anthropology, religion, and law.

Starting in summer 2025, Martyn Pickersgill (University of Edinburgh) will be co-leading with Principal Investigator Emilie Cloatre (University of Kent) a new Wellcome Trust Discovery Award: “Between Deception and Dissent: Regulating Unproven, Disproven, or Misleading Health-Related Claims.” This $6 million project involves a team across eight countries over 6 years. Martyn will be leading a package of work on the contemporary history of contested practices in relation to the care of the brain, psyche, and self.

Per Wisselgren, Hampus Östh Gustafsson, and Tobias Dalberg have received a 3-year grant from the Swedish Research Council for the project “Funding Effects: The Emergence of Public Research Councils and the Formation of the Human Sciences in Sweden, 1947–1977.” A project description can be found at: www.uu.se/history-of-science-and-ideas/funding-effects.

Alison Wylie received an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University at their Dies Natalis ceremony on November 8. A recording of the proceedings can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrp_vzI1LRo. The presentation of her sponsor and her talk on engaged research begin at ~28 min in.

Cheiron is thrilled to announce that Professor Jill Morawski of Wesleyan University will be the upcoming Elizabeth Scarborough Lecturer at the ESHHS, CHEIRON & SHP Three Societies Meeting in Paris, France, July 1–5, 2025. See more details below.

ESHHS, CHEIRON & SHP: Three Societies Meeting: Paris, France, July 1–5, 2025

ESHHS (the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences), CHEIRON (the International Society for the History of the Social and Behavioral Sciences), & SHP (the Society for the History of Psychology [APA Division 26]) invite submissions for papers, posters, and symposia for their first “Three Societies Meeting” to take place in Paris, France, from July 1–5, 2025, hosted by the American University of Paris.

We invite proposals for oral presentations, posters, sessions, round tables, and workshops that deal with any aspect of the history of the human, behavioral, and social sciences or with related historiographic and methodological issues. This year's featured theme will be Environments, Milieux and Places in the History of the Human, Behavioral and Social Sciences, and we particularly encourage submissions related to any aspect of this theme. With 2025, the bicentennial of J.-M. Charcot's birth, submissions related to Charcot's work and milieux would also be of topical interest.

Guidelines for submission

Please send your proposal as attachment in MSWord (.doc/.docx) via the link that will soon be posted on the societies' websites: eshhs.eu, cheironsoc.org, historyofpsych.org.

Deadline for submissions is February 25, 2025.

Environments, Milieux and Places in the History of the Human, Behavioral and Social Sciences

Global concern for the environment features prominently in public discourse, political controversy, and academic research. This can raise questions about the popularization of the English term “environment” and its appropriation by other languages, as well as the comparative disappearance of related concepts from many national, cultural, and linguistic contexts. This year's conference theme is an invitation to interrogate the meanings, uses and possible heuristic value of this ubiquitous, powerful yet polysemic term “environment” and to provide a space for the exploration of its related concepts within and across disciplines and periods.

Although planetary concern for “the environment” is recent, scholarly interest in particular environments, milieux, and local climates has a long history in the human and natural sciences (Robic 1992; Feuerhahn 2023). Furthermore, philosophical, medical, legal, and religious ideas on Nature go back to antiquity. Foundational binaries in Western scholarship such as Organism/Milieu, Nature/Nurture, Mind/Body, Nature/Culture, Human/Animal, Life and the Inanimate, have been borrowed or transformed, questioned, or challenged, in different times and places across the history of the human, behavioral, and social sciences. Notably, environment, nature and milieu are not just around us but may be inside us, as is the case with “human nature,” psychological “inner worlds,” and physiology's “internal milieu” (Bernard 1865).

We welcome work from the history of the human, behavioral, and social sciences that can help contextualize specific local, institutional, and political settings that have given shape to particular epistemologically and historically situated understandings of environments and their related concepts. Intellectual history, social or political history, as well as critical historiography and other approaches.

On the one hand, social, political or economic thought has participated in shaping the theories, practices, and meanings of medical, natural history, or religious thought on “nature” and its organization. On the other hand, social, political, and economic theories of nature have borrowed or transformed those stemming from natural history, medicine, and biology. This may impact the way human, behavioral, and social scientists think about, for example, social or cultural environments, interpersonal or family environments, work environments or institutional environments. But beyond these disciplinary circulations, historicizing environments also means differentiating earlier concepts or terms, and those from other languages, used to designate our surroundings (Feuerhahn 2017, 2023) and our exchanges with them; notably, in honor of our Paris venue, the notion of milieu, its origins and its receptions, could usefully be revisited.

In addition to historical work per se, Bruno Latour's (1999) Politiques de la Nature and Philippe Descola (2013) Beyond Nature and Culture have examined current political and cultural implications of past understandings and taxonomies. Feminist philosopher Lorraine Code (2006) model of ecological thinking—“a model of knowing that is at once situated in and in relation to multiple aspects of the human and other-than-human world, interwoven with moral-social-political epistemological issues, and committed to exposing the effects of power-knowledge intersections, be they benign, malign, or ‘in-between/in-among’”—suggests that practices of historiography can themselves be conceived as ecologically situated, in relation to academic institutions, networks, and geopolitical environments.

The spatial turn (Livingstone 1995, 2003) that originated in the history of geography is a trend that has brought increasing attention to “place” and can help provide a focus on local meanings of environment and/or milieu, and specify their circulations and appropriations. The spatial turn has also called attention to places where knowledge has traditionally been produced and/or validated (Ophir and Shapin 1991), such as laboratories, fields, clinics, and schools, and highlighted the effects these have had on subjects, participants, patients, and students. Today's virtual environments have become powerful platforms for discourse and change, that may invite historians to rethink categories of “place” and consider new geographies of knowledge production and diffusion.

The different and complementary approaches suggested in the theme of this call for papers are far from exclusive, as ESHHS–CHEIRON–SHP 2025 wishes to showcase a diverse range of contributions that address specific understandings or uses of environments, milieux, or places and their historiography. The conference is also open to contributions from outside the scope of this year's highlighted theme.