
Seminars will take place live and in person on Wednesdays
2:30PM – 4:00PM
Room 101, 3647 Peel Street
Seminars and Events - Fall 2025
Department Seminar:
September 3, 2025
Madhukar Pai (McGill University)
Reimagining global health in an era of polycrisis and nationalism
Book Launch:
September 18, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Bruner Strasser and Thomas Schlich (McGill University)
The Mask - A History or Breathing Bad Air
Comments by Thomas Schlich (SSoM), Ramona Rodrigues (Ingram School of Nursing), Jill Baumgartner (McGill Centre for Climate Change and Health), Prativa Baral (Dept. of Global and Public Health)
Book Launch:
October 15, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Laurence Kirmayer (McGill University)
Healing and the Invention of Metaphor - Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience
Department Seminar:
October 22, 2025
Geoffroy Carpier (McGill University)
Staging early phase cancer trials on the spot: how institutional review boards navigate the interface of science and ethics
November 5, 2025 6:00PM
Kim TallBear (University of Minnesota)
THE INDIAN WHO REFUSES TO VANISH – RACE, GENOMICS, AND INDIGENOUS THRIVING
Location: Charles F. Martin Amphitheatre (room 504) McIntyre Building
Recent Scholarship Roundtable
November 26, 2025
Krista Maxwell (University of Toronto) to discuss Indigenous Healing as Paradox: Re-Membering and Biopolitics in the Settler Colony (University of Alberta Press 2025)
With Tuyaa Montgomery (Anthropology, McGill), Wanda Gabriel (Social Work, McGill), Leslie Sabiston (Anthropology, McGill), Dennis C. Wendt (Education, McGill)
Seminars and Events - Winter 2026
Department Seminar:
January 21, 2026
Elise Burton (University of Toronto)
Margaret Lock Seminar:
February 4, 2026
Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)
“The Biology of Memory: Generational half-life and the Inheritance of Affliction”
Entin Lecture:
March 11, 2026
Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Roundtable:
April 1, 2026
Museums and Human Remains
Previous Seminars and Events
Winter 2025
Department Seminar:
January 22, 2025
Sophie Bjork-James (Vanderbilt University)
Race and Abortion Politics in the US
This talk covers the racial politics of the pro-life movement from Roe v. Wade (1973) to the Dobbs decision (2022). In doing so, it explores how opposing abortion changed from a primarily Catholic position to become an evangelical one, uniting evangelical values voters and helping to reshape US politics nationally. Beginning in the 1970s, white evangelicals across the United States began to politically organize against abortion by framing fetuses as the most persecuted group in history. Using language like the “abortion holocaust” and “the Civil Rights issue of our time,” evangelicals attempted to turn abortion, rhetorically, into a new racial justice issue. This talk shows how race has remained central to abortion politics in the United States.
Margaret Lock Seminar
February 5, 2025
Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS)
"What’s therapeutic about a “club thérapeutique”? On the functions and effects of a particular form of institutional psychotherapy
Recent Scholarship Roundtable
February 6, 2025
Anthony Stavrianakis (CNRS), to discuss Crucible of the Incurable: Facing ALS (Cornell University Press, 2024)
The Dr. Martin A. Entin Lecture in the History of Medicine
March 12, 2025
Monica H. Green (Independent Scholar)
How Genetics Has Changed the History of the Black Death, And How History Has Changed Genetics
Leacock Building, room 232 (Senate room)
855 Sherbrooke St W
Themed Roundtable
April 2, 2025 2:30 to 4:30pm
Place and Psyche
With Elena Vogman (Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar), Coline Fournout (McGill, Anthropology), Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (Cornell University), Ramzi Nimr (McGill, Anthropology), and Todd Meyers (Moderator: McGill, Social Studies of Medicine)
Recent Scholarship Roundtable
April 23, 2025
Nancy Rose Hunt, to discuss Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness, Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel, editors (Duke University Press, 2024).
roundtable.psychiatric_contours.april_23.pdf
Book Launch
May 1, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Edited by Rachel Elder and Thomas Schlich (McGill University)
Technology, Health and the Patient Consumer in the 20th Century
Panelists: Thomas Schlich, Rachel Elder, Lawrence Rosenberg, Cynthia L. Tang.
Book Launch:
May 7, 2025, Lobby 3647, 4:00pm
Todd Meyers (McGill University)
Gone Gone (Duke University Press, 2025).
Comments by Ramzi Nimr, Marie Lecuyer, and Setrag Manoukian.
Previous Seminars and Events
Fall 2024
Department Seminar:
September 11, 2024
Theresa Ventura, (Concordia University)
When Breast Isn't Best: Infant Mortality and the Undoing of Tropical Medicine in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898-1945
Department Seminar:
October 9, 2024
Simplice Ayangma Bonoho (Université de Montréal)
The WHO in Central Africa: History of International Health Colonialism (1956-2000)
November 6, 2024 6:00PM
Roger Kneebone (Imperial College London)
Medicine - the art of the expert performer. What clinicians can learn from the performing arts
The Jonathan C. Meakins Amphitheatre Room 521: McIntyre Building
November 27, 2024
Collections of Human Remains in the Medical Museum: Problematic Pasts, Challenging Futures
With Dominic Hall (Harvard, Warren Anatomical Museum), Catherine Turgeon (McGill, Redpath Museum), Annie Lussier (McGill, Redpath Museum), Richard Fraser (McGill, Maude Abbott Medical Museum), Alyssa Bader (McGill, Department of Anthropology) and Hugo Rueda (McGill, Social Studies of Medicine).
Faculty Council Room (M48)
Strathcona Anatomy and Dentristry Building
3640 Rue University