UCSF Archives and Special Collections

Submit a proposal: http://tiny.ucsf.edu/A2nohy

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is an interdisciplinary symposium exploring and reflecting on topics related to archives and the practice of documenting the stories of HIV/AIDS. 

The task of documenting the history of HIV/AIDS and thinking about the present and future of the epidemic is daunting. The enormity and complexity of the stories and perspectives on the disease, which has affected so many millions of patients and families around the world, present significant challenges that demand continual reexamination. Questions of "what do we collect and from where" and "whose stories do we know best."  The ways in which we handle documentary evidence and produce knowledge from that evidence has profound effects on a huge range of social, economic and health outcomes. In examining and reflecting on our knowledge of the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its future, we hope to improve our understanding of the true effects of the disease, and what it can teach us about future epidemics.

The program committee invites submissions for presentations addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the wide-ranging perspectives of historians, archivists and librarians, artists, journalists, activists and community groups, scientific researchers, health care providers, and people living with HIV. We invite proposals from individuals with diverse experience and expertise on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in scholarship, research and advocacy. Proposals will be considered in a variety of forms including paper presentations, panel discussions and posters. 

The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco, October 4th and 5th 2019.  The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception the first day, followed by a full day of presentations the second. 

The Program Committee has identified the following themes to consider when developing your proposal, though we encourage creativity and experimentation in exploring themes, partnerships, and narrative ideas. 

Documenting the epidemic: Gaps, silences and unheard voices

Creating an interdisciplinary narrative of an epidemic

Silent no more: Community, caretaker and patient stories 

The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic 

Biomedical story: From mystery disease to cure 

From local to global: Learning from AIDS to address future epidemics

The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers, panel discussion and posters. Individual papers with a similar focus will be assembled into a single session by the program committee. Usually 3-4 papers are included in a session.

To allow adequate time for questions and discussion,  panels should be limited to four participants in addition to a chair/facilitator.

Please include the following in your complete proposal

Session title if submitting a full panel proposal (of no more than 20 words)

Session abstract if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 500 words)

Short session abstract for the program if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 50 words)

Paper or poster or presentation titles (if any), and names of corresponding presenters

 Biographical paragraph for each presenter

 E-mail address for each participant

 Affiliation, city, state, and country for each participant

 Social media handles or web addresses for each participant (optional)

 Audiovisual needs

Special accommodation needs

The deadline for submissions is June 17. We will notify presenters if their proposal has been accepted by July 22. 

Memory Lives On

Program Committee

Monica Green, Ph.D.,  Professor of History, Arizona State University

Victoria Harden, Ph.D., Director (retired) of the Office of NIH History

Richard  McKay, DPhil,  Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

Barbara A. Koenig, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program

Jay Levy, MD, Professor UCSF School of Medicine

Eric Jost, Digital Marketing Manager, SF AIDS FoundationJon Cohen, Staff writer for Science Magazine

Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group

William Schupbach, Wellcome Library

Jason Baumann, Susan and Douglas Dillon Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections, NYPL

Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library

Submit a proposal:

http://tiny.ucsf.edu/A2nohy

For any inquiries contact David Krah

[email protected]

 More information about the UCSF AIDS History Project:

https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/

Facebook:

In 1948, the UCSF School of Dentistry Junior class included one (1) woman, Holly Hay. 

Cutting edge UCSF Library technology, circa 1991!

Check out newly digitized material from the collection of dentist and HIV/AIDS researcher John S. Greenspan on Calisphere!

- John Greenspan and California Governor George Deukmejian at microscope in UCSF AIDS research laboratory, 1986. UCSF Archives.

Check out our blog, Brought to Light, for a 1 year update on our National Endowment for the Humanities Implementation Grant: The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic.

Inside the UCSF Medical Sciences Building, circa 1955. 

UCSF Archives has been awarded a $99,325 “Pitch-An-Idea, Local” grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library Services and Technology Act. 

The Archives will take the nearly 200,000 pages of textual AIDS/HIV historical materials which have been digitized as part of various digitization projects and will extract unstructured, textual data from these materials using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and related software. The project team will prepare the text as a research-ready, unstructured textual dataset to be used for digital humanities, computationally-driven cultural heritage, and machine learning research inquiries into the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

A look at two of our late 18th to early 19th-century surgical instruments: A trephine and a trepan. Both tools were used during brain surgery. Practitioners cranked them like drills to bore holes into the skull.

An excerpt from a recent blog post by PhD student Aaron J. Jackson on Base Hospital No. 30 during World War I:

On September 22, 1918, when the hospital was near full capacity, a train full of French patients arrived in the middle of the night without prior notice. Due to the hour, the hospital staff decided that the best course of action was to distribute the new patients throughout the hospital wherever a spare bed could be found. Unfortunately, they discovered that practically all the new patients were suffering from acute respiratory infection. Distributing them through the hospital into crowded rooms exposed other patients as well as the staff to infection. By the end of September, as many as 40 of the 150 enlisted men assigned to Base Hospital No. 30 had to be hospitalized themselves, and many officers and nurses were also afflicted to a milder degree.

Boy Scouts trying to beat the heat outside of San Francisco General Hospital, circa 1937.

In the 1980s, actress Zelda Rubinstein (known for Poltergeist) helped raise awareness about AIDS and safe sex in a series of advertisements sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.

- Don't Forget Your Rubbers, AIDS History Project Ephemera Collection, UCSF Archives.

Vintage pharmacy product labels from Klinkner’s Drug Store in Oakland, CA.