How, then, do we interpret the significance of enclosures beyond their intent? How can we read enclosures not only as representations of division and difference, but also of proximity and intimacy? Are human enclosures somehow inherently different from those found in nature? How might historical actors have understood the human body itself as an enclosure, and what exactly was it believed to enclose? Through questions like these, and many more others, thinking with enclosures affords new ways of historicizing spaces and bodies to highlight their porosity, mobility, and ever-shifting uses. This interdisciplinary body of work also invites creative methodologies to access spaces and experiences that often leave limited archival traces in text.

This panel brings together four scholars whose works examine various enclosures in science and medicine. They demonstrate how enclosures were critical, conceptually and materially, in the histories of bodies, motion, migration, and knowledge production. From healing water structures of medieval Gujarat, to the enclosing of botanical knowledge in early modern England, as well as the mid-nineteenth-century epidemiologists of the British Empire investigating the spread of disease within ships, barracks, and port cities of the Caribbean, and the 20th-century use of aerosol spray technology to redefine the meaning of domestic space in the United States--these papers engage critically with enclosures that appear across a wide range of regions and temporalities. Bringing these studies into conversation demonstrates the expansive variety and nuance of “enclosures” across geographical and temporal contexts, and invites collaborative inquiry across subfields of history. And as we analyze the many physical, cultural, and political means of separating bodies and worlds, we must also attend to the very bodies and worlds that have complicated such separations.