IHPST | University of Toronto

Captive Healthscapes: Exploring Slavery, Medicine, and Well-being in the Early Mediterranean 📅 December 18, 2025 | 🏛 Venice & online (Hybrid) 🔴 Sign up by December 7. Make sure to calculate the time difference between Venice and Toronto. The program times listed are in Central European Time.

Newsletter IHPST Newsletter

ICYMI 👀 The IHPST Newsletter is packed with stories, research highlights, and interviews from across our community — faculty, students, and alumni alike.
Take a look to the latest issue before the year wraps up 🎓
You can check all the 2025 issues here 🔗 ihpst.utoronto.ca/newsletter

Gendered Perspective of Sensory Expertise in Early Modern Europe
📅 11–12 Dec 2025 | Liège & online (Hybrid)
Prof. Lucia Dacome will present!
Scan the QR code to save your spot
🌍 Check time difference before joining!

History as an Escape Room: Professor Elise Burton’s Innovative Approach to Learning in HPS 205 Twice per semester, a third-floor room in Victoria College transforms into a portal to the past. Students enrolled in HPS 205 (Science, Technology, and Empire) step inside for an hour to see two…

Twice a semester, a Victoria College classroom becomes a historical escape room!
Learn how Professor Elise Burton and PhD student Oubai Elkerdi designed a hands-on way to explore the history of science 🔗 Read the story: ihpst.utoronto.ca/news/history...

📢 Enslaved Healthscapes: Bondage, Medicine, and Wellness in the Ancient Mediterranean Realm 📅 December 18, 2025 | 📍 Venice & online (Hybrid) - Want the link? Take a look at the flyer! Remember to check the time difference if you're joining in from Toronto or other places!

Congratulations to Myriam Iuorio and Tola Ajao!
Both were selected for the 2025 18th-Century Africa Publication Fellowships, ASA & @asecsoffice.bsky.social support emerging scholars working on Africa and its diasporas in the long 18th century.
Learn more their fellowship experience: buff.ly/qZziMFH

🤔 What if scientific success isn’t a miracle at all?
Join Markus Alliksaar for a new perspective on realism and empirical order. HAPSAT Graduate Workshop
📍 Victoria College

IHPST Alumna Helena Gagnier on Trust, Ethics, and AI in Her Work at TELUS IHPST alumna Helena Gagnier (MA, 2024) has taken her research on AI ethics beyond academia through a Mitacs Business Strategy Internship with TELUS’s Data Ethics Team. As one of the lead researchers…

We’re proud to feature IHPST alumna Helena Gagnier, who turned her graduate research in philosophy and ethics into real-world impact at TELUS.
As a lead researcher on the 2025 Responsible AI Report, she explored how Canadians understand and trust AI technologies ihpst.utoronto.ca/news/ihpst-a...

Meet IHPST alumna Alison Li (PhD 1992), who was awarded the Jason A. Hannah Medal by the Royal Society of Canada for Wondrous Transformations (UNC Press, 2023).
🏅 The medal honors outstanding work in the history of medicine published in the past five years.

📣 Event Update - The talk “Quantifying Race: Histories of Statistical Modeling in Human Population Genetics” with IHPST professor Elise Burton has been rescheduled.
We’ll share the new date and details as soon as they’re confirmed.

“It would be a statistical miracle if the patterns in our data were mere coincidence.”
Don’t miss Markus Alliksaar’s Reverse No Miracles Argument at the next HAPSAT Graduate Workshop!
📅 Dec 3 | 🕛 12–1:30 PM | 📍 VC303

What if your midterm took place inside a 19th-century escape room? In HPS 205, students solve historical puzzles to unlock the past. Watch how history comes to life ⬇️ 🎥 Interested in learning through experience? This course might be for you!

🗞️ The latest IHPST Newsletter is out!
🔗 viewstripo.email/49225ff4-7d2...
Catch up on the accomplishments and research of our faculty, students, and alumni — plus interviews, videos, and podcasts featured in this issue.
🗓️ Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our upcoming events!

🎥 Watch how Professor Burton’s historical escape rooms invite students to touch, think, and discover the past. There are still spots available in HPS 205 for the Winter 2026 semester. Don’t miss the chance to join! Share with undergraduates that may be interested!

Tomorrow 📆 November 12 ⏰ 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Scan the QR code to access the live transmission

Can biology tell us anything about morality? Alex Rose will talk about the relation between biology and ethics at the upcoming Graduate Student Worshop. Join us this Wednesday! For more details, visit: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/hapsa...

Join us in celebrating our IHPST graduates, a remarkable group whose work and curiosity enrich our community every day!

IHPST Colloquium Second Session | Fall 2025 You are cordially invited to attend the Fall 2025 Colloquium series of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology organized by Professor Rebecca Woods

Join us today for an enlightening talk by Aaron Gluck-Thaler on the historical and current influence of patterns explored by scientists from various fields. The event, organized by Prof. Rebecca Woods @professorbopeep.bsky.social takes place at Victoria College 🔗

Portrait of Camille Labchuk, Executive Director of Animal Justice, wearing formal black-and-white attire and standing against a light stone background.

What happens when laws are designed to silence those who expose cruelty?
🐖✨ Join @CamilleLabchuk (@Animal Justice) for a thought-provoking talk on The Rise and Fall of Canadian Ag Gag Laws.
📍VC206, Victoria College
🗓️ Nov. 6 | 4:10–5:15 PM
🔗 ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/rise-...

We’re celebrating @reneeasirbu.bsky.social for winning 🥇 1st place in the graduate student competition at the “Who’s Afraid of AI?” Conference by @utoronto.ca and BMO Lab. Renée examines AI's impact on our understanding of mortality, linking philosophy, cognitive science, and ethics 🎉

Curious about Canadians' views on AI? IHPST alumna Helena Gagnier, part of TELUS’s Data Ethics Team, helped reveal insights in the 2025 Responsible AI Report, one of Canada's most thorough explorations of AI perceptions. Discover more: ihpst.utoronto.ca/news/ihpst-a...

🐖 Learn about “Ag Gag” laws and Canada's animal protection movement's efforts to block and overturn these laws. Join Camille Labchuk from Animal Justice for a talk on activism, transparency, and animal welfare. 🗓️ Nov. 6 | ⏰ 4:10–5:15 PM More details: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/rise-...

What happens when humans introduce new species into an environment and what does it have to do with the woolly mammoth? 🦣 Rebecca Woods @professorbopeep.bsky.social explains in this clip from her interview on News with Lauren McNab (CJOB Winnipeg) 🎙️ In full here: archive.tveyes.com/18120/455385...

📅 Mark your calendars! What are patterns and how can they be recognized? This talk by Aaron Gluck-Thaler situates this development historically, with special reference to the co-extensive emergence of machine learning and data-driven surveillance techniques 🔗 ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/ihpst...

🤔 Are chatbot therapies safe? Effective? Biased?
Find out TODAY with Prof. Catherine Stinson.
🗓️ Oct 15 | 3–5pm
📍 UofT Centre for Ethics @uoftethics.bsky.social
💻 Online option available. Scan the QR code to join!

Amazing to have Elliott Sober delivering his keynote "Richard Lewontin - Biologist, Philosopher, and Marxist" at the Dialectical Biology Today Conference! 🌱🐋 @ihpst-uoft.bsky.social

The Myth of the “Refrigerator Mother” Set Autism Research Back for Decades. Here We Are Again. The idea that kids were autistic because their moms were too intellectual made everyone's life worse.

Alarmist claims linking Tylenol use in pregnancy to autism revive old, damaging myths.
In @Slate historian Marga Vicedo unpacks how mother-blame narratives distort science and harm families (Paywall article) 🔗 slate.com/life/2025/10...

How did a peasant-turned-agronomist persuade Stalin that wheat could become rye? On HISTORY This Week, Prof. Nikolai Krementsov discusses Stalin’s War on Genetics, exploring the consequences of ideology overruling science 🎧 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

.#ICYMI In this interview, Jessie Hall, a former postdoctoral fellow at IHPST with a background in philosophy, physics, and computational experimentation talked about AI, Philosophy of computing, and her time at the IHPST Learn more: ihpst.utoronto.ca/news/explori...

We are thrilled to have Elliott Sober as the first guest of the IHPST colloquium. Today he will use the Law of Likelihood (so named by Ian Hacking) to analyze Darwin's assumptions about common ancestry. See you there! ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/ihpst...