April 22

“Re-orienting Ancient Medicine Courses”

Aileen Das (University of Michigan) and Jay Crisostomo (University of Michigan)

This pedagogy workshop is aimed at (past, current, and would-be) instructors of ancient medicine, science, and technology courses who would be keen to integrate material from the pre-modern Middle East. Popular and more academic narratives often equate ancient medicine with Greco-Roman medicine and frame its study as an originist history of a monolithic western medical tradition. When these narratives introduce content from the pre-modern Middle East, such as from Assyria or the medieval Islamicate world, they define the contribution of Middle Eastern knowledge-makers in terms of their anticipation or preservation of a western science. This workshop will discuss ways of foregrounding the theories and actors of pre-modern Middle Eastern science, technology, and medicine without rendering them subservient to a hegemonic “western tradition”. Moreover, we will review a range of primary and secondary source materials that we utilize in our own teaching of these subjects.

1–2 PM PST, Zoom.

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Co-sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine and Pharmacology

May 14

“The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science”

Alisha Rankin (Tufts University)

12–1:30 PM PST, Zoom.

Wednesday, January 13

Singing Nature’s Secrets: Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) and Furnace and Fugue (2020)