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This research seminar focuses on “historical catachresis” as a mode of analysis. Drawing inspiration from Gayatri Spivak's adaptation of Derrida's concept of catachresis, historical catachresis (as developed by feminist intellectual historian Tani Barlow) treats ubiquitous terms not as stable referents, but as repositories of social experience and normalizing strategies. By focusing on these terms as sites of "occulted evidence," historians can uncover the ways in which ideas, objects, and subjects were constructed and contested in specific historical moments. This seminar will examine different categories such as “scientist,” “woman,” “medicine,” and “magic,” without presuming them to be universal or transhistorical entities. Doing so emphasizes the future anterior, or what objects/subjects "will have been,” as a way to keep open the possibilities and contingencies of the past.