The 2020 HSMT Postgraduate conference will take place online over two days, Friday 5 and Friday 12 June.

Welcome to the 2020 History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Postgraduate Conference. These days there is only one story that dominates the news, and only one place to discuss it: Covid-19 and the internet. In “Going Viral” we take you on a scholarly journey through four stages of a pandemic in the age of social media. Guiding you on this journey are one DPhil, two MPhil and nine MSc students from four different continents and a variety of institutional backgrounds. Although most of us have trained as historians, we also have backgrounds in gender studies, immunology, and physics. HSMT is an expansive and constantly evolving area of scholarship; this is reflected in our selection of research projects. Taking you up to 1800 you will hear about natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century botanical collecting practices, anatomical waxworks, and static electricity. Taking you through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries you will hear about public health in India, medical debates around transsexualism and physical education programs in the United States, cybernetics, and the history of lab mice. Like many areas of daily life, scholarship too has needed to adapt to a world consumed by a pandemic and a society which has transposed itself onto the internet (with varying levels of success). With this in mind we took the opportunity to find new and perhaps unusual ways of connecting our projects. Like most history, this conference is therefore as much a reflection of the present as it is an exploration of the past. We hope you find our panels thought-provoking. Please do not forget to wash your hands regularly.

For more information visit www.hsmt.ox.ac.uk/events