Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Sophomore tutorial is a hands-on course that introduces students to some of the most exciting and productive questions in the history of science, technology and medicine, while developing critical reading, presentation and discussion skills. Small groups of students will tackle different aspects of a larger theme each week and share discoveries in sessions led by the faculty instructor. The course will be further enhanced by a series of supervised individual projects.

Faculty-led seminar and intensive work with an individual advisor, directed towards production of the senior honors thesis.

What are the origins of modern science and of the scientific method? Have the ways of knowing the world of different cultures and societies changed over time? How has scientific knowledge been related to other enterprises such as art, religion, literature, and commerce? We will ask these questions and more through a broad survey of many of the crucial moments in the development of science from the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century to the present day. Topics and figures will include Galileo, evolution, eugenics, the atomic bomb, and the human genome project.

An examination of key aspects and issues in the development of ancient science, focusing on natural philosophy from the Presocratics to Aristotle as well as its relation to early Greek medicine and mathematics. Some consideration will also be given to the historiography of natural philosophy within this period.

The course addresses the history of questions of science and religion in the Middle East from the medieval to the modern period, looking at how different scientific and religious views and discourses interacted through history. From translation of Greek science and philosophy in the ninth century, to educational reform, legalizing dissection, and organ transplantation, the course surveys important discussions on science and religion in the Middle East and Islamic world, and sees how scientific and religious views and discourses developed over time. The course pays special attention to questions of colonialism, translation, and the development of different institutions of learning in the Middle East.

An introduction to theories and practices of healing in the medical, religious, and magical realms. Topics include the construction of medical authority and expertise, potions and incantations, saints' cults, the play of sex and gender among healers and patients, the multiple social and cultural roles played by early hospitals, and responses to "new" diseases such as syphilis and plague.

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of courses dedicated to the work of historians of science who have considerably influenced our methods of studying and thinking about material culture. This Fall, we will focus our attention on Simon Schaffer, the 2013 Sarton medal recipient. His extensive scholarly, grand public, and media productions span the period between the 17th and the 19th century, offering a comprehensive look at things from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, technological, sociological, cultural, experimental, and museum studies. The classes will consist of half lecture, half discussion. We will try to answer this simple, yet loaded question: What is an instrument? There will be two short assignments and one final study of an instrument coming from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

The Cold War was an era of unprecedented growth in the sciences -- and unprecedented political stakes for scientific research. This course will cover the history of the physical, biological, and human sciences during the Cold War. We will look at science on both sides of the Berlin Wall, paying particular attention to intersections between science, politics, and governments. Topics will include the Manhattan Project, the development of "big science," genetics and Lysenkoism, the nuclear arms race and the space race, scientific espionage, and communication between scientists in the West and in the Soviet world.

This course surveys the history of the physical sciences from the late eighteenth century to the present. The course will cover major events and themes in the history of the physical sciences, placing particular emphasis on the interaction between the physical sciences and social and political changes. Students will work with primary sources and will also gain familiarity with some of the most important secondary sources in the history of physics, chemistry, and the earth sciences. Topics include the Chemical Revolution, thermodynamics, the Industrial Revolution, quantum mechanics, the atomic and hydrogen bombs, plate tectonics, and cold fusion.

This course examines our changing view of the Earth and the environment from the 19th century to the present, highlighting the interrelatedness of science, society, and culture. Our changing understanding of the Earth - as our home planet has become older, more dynamic, and more vulnerable to human activity - has accompanied changes in our relationship to Earth's environment, the nature of global problems, their causes, their impacts, and our ability to mediate them. These changes have led to some very heated and persistent political debates. Topics include the age of the earth, plate tectonics, planetary science, environmentalism, pesticides, and climate change.

This course surveys the history of modern biology, from the nineteenth century to now. Drawing on primary sources in biology, as well as readings from historians and anthropologists of science, students will be introduced to major themes and questions in the history of the modern life sciences. Topics include theories of natural selection, genetics, eugenics, genomics, ecology, molecular biology, artificial life, and biotechnology. Students will explore questions such as: what has "life" meant at different historical moments? What approaches have life scientists taken to investigating life - from cataloging to experimenting to making new living things? How have notions of "diversity" shaped biology, from Enlightenment taxonomies of nature to modern-day efforts at conserving biodiversity?

Evolutionary theories of sex and gender and central controversies in human evolutionary biology from Darwin to the present. Topics include debates over the theory of sexual selection and the evolutionary basis of monogamy, sexual preference, physical attraction, rape, maternal instinct, and sex differences in cognition. Readings: primary texts and historical, philosophical, and feminist analyses.

This course examines how bodies, genders and sexualities in the modern Middle East, from the nineteenth century to the Arab revolts, have been shaped and represented via changing and competing discourses. Through a variety of historical, ethnographic, media and literary readings, the course studies multiple and dynamic representations of bodies in flux: medicalized bodies, gendered bodies, sexualized bodies, (re)productive bodies, aging bodies and bodies in revolt. The course pays special attention to medicine and science in their interaction with laws, traditions and religious practices. Some of the topics covered include analyzing histories of and discourses on slavery, femininity and masculinity, homosexuality, health, reproduction, disabilities, circumcision and genital cutting/mutilation and gender-based violence.

Outbreaks of epidemic disease have played a role in shaping human societies from the beginning of recorded history, transforming demographic patterns, social practices, and cultural expectations. Although they take fewer lives than the diseases we encounter every day, epidemics possess an extraordinary hold over our collective imagination. This course seeks to understand why. Through an analysis of outbreaks ranging from the Black Death to Avian Flu, we will explore the place of epidemic disease in human history, taking into account how those living in different times and places have responded when epidemics have appeared.

Examination of the theory and practice of capturing scientific practice on film. Topics will include fictional, documentary, informational, and instructional films and raise problems emerging from film theory, visual anthropology and science studies. Each student will make and edit short film(s) about laboratory, field, or theoretical scientific work.

Scientific inquiry is often considered an endeavor pursued using one's sense of vision: scientists peer into microscopes and telescopes, and stare at graphs, diagrams, and computer screens. But on what other senses do scientists rely? How do they gather data using senses of hearing, smell, taste, and touch (or, for that matter, less acknowledged perceptual systems, among them, balance, temperature, movement, pain, and time)? How do researchers evaluate sensory evidence? Further, what is the history of scientific studies of the senses? To address such questions, each week we will explore a different sense (from the canonical five to synaesthesia and ESP) by combining readings in the history of science with classic primary sources. Throughout, we will examine critical questions regarding how the senses are culturally and historically constructed, evaluated, and technologically mediated.

This course offers a history of exploration in science and science in exploration from the 16th century to the present - roughly from Columbus to the Mars rovers. We will approach exploration not as an abstract concept, but as a human enterprise that grows out of, reinforces, and occasionally confronts elements of culture. In addition to examining the voyages of exploration conducted during the periods of European expansion, the Enlightenment, the 19th century and 20th centuries, and the Space Age, we will also study exploration as depicted in popular culture, fiction, television, and film.

This course focuses on high-impact experiments - among them, the Milgram "Obedience" experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment - carried out in the twentieth-century human sciences by anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, and/or experimental psychologists. Many dreamed of a "technology of human behavior" and conducted experiments toward this end. What were the results, and how do they continue to affect our thinking and daily lives today?

Examines the history of the current psychotherapeutic landscape, looking at the development, methods, aims, efficacy, and limitations of a range of psychotherapeutic modalities from Freud's time to our own, among them psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral, manualized, and evidence-based treatments; individual, play, family, and group therapies. Explores tensions between therapy as a quest for self-improvement and a means of relieving symptoms, between focusing on cognition and on behavior, and between mind and brain. Looks at providers and patients, at the testimonies of writers and poets, and at office-based, hospital, and computer therapies. The question of the relationship between professional practices and the rise of a popular therapeutic sensibility is central to the course.

This course aims to survey the history of science and technology in East Asian countries-China, Japan and Korea-since the late 19th century. It will emphasize the mutual influence between science & technology and society to answer how they become major industrial powers in the 21st century.

From the cotton gin to the green revolution, gas lamps to LED streetlights, scientific management to automation, and prosthetic limbs to the posthuman condition, this course will examine key themes in the history of technology and engineering in the nineteenth and twentieth century with special attention to the social and political context of technology and its impact on everyday life and experience.

When and how should scientific research become a matter of security concern? This upper level undergraduate seminar explores this question through several areas of science including chemistry, physics, and biology, and includes both historical and contemporary examples. At the center of our readings are questions about the relationship between science and the state, and how that relationship structures, and is structured by, the objects of security concern. What constitutes the purpose and process of science, and what we should be worried about, are at the heart of our analysis rather than the start of our assumptions.

Science is supposed to give us factual knowledge, yet scientific results often become mired in political controversy. This course examines the sources of controversy around scientific matters that bear on political questions. Topics include the role of experts in a democratic society, the role of values in scientific research and reasoning, the demarcation between controversy in science v. controversy about science, and the matter of whether any question can ever be deemed to be "purely" scientific.

This is the graduate section to History of Science 101, Communities of Knowledge: Science, Religion, and Culture in Medieval Europe and the Lands of Islam. Students are required to attend the lectures in History of Science 101.

Critical examination of different methods and theories in history and philosophy of science and STS (Science, Technology and Society studies) along with discussions of a number of tools in the study and history of culture and religion and how they can be utilized in the study of science and religion; away from the conflict/reconciliation paradigms and towards examining the perceived relations and exchanges of science and religion through analyzing paradigms, discourses, traditions and authorities. The course can serve as a methodological introduction to history and philosophy of science and STS. The course is a research workshop with a focus on training and professionalization and an emphasis on methods tools in academic writing and research. Students work on specific projects throughout the semester from topic selection, question formation, to research and writing to produce a piece of academic writing such as research papers, conference papers, articles, book reviews, prospectus, syllabi, etc.

This seminar tracks the history and current status of concepts of the biological. We will interrogate how the category of "life itself" has been transfigured by experimental, medical, and theoretical interventions into living things, from animal experimentation in the eighteenth century, to nineteenth century theories of inheritance, to mid-twentieth century breakthroughs in immortalizing cell cultures, to contemporary attempts to fabricate organisms from synthetic genetic components. We will focus primarily on recently published work in the history and anthropology of biomedicine, as well as cultural theory, philosophy, and media studies addressing the life sciences. Throughout, we will pay special attention to where biologists have imagined the seat of vitality, whether organismic, cellular, genetic, or informatic. How has life recently entered into new circulations of capital, intellectual property, and political rhetoric as it is sequenced, synthesized, licensed, patented, cut up, frozen, cloned? What has life been, what has it become, and what will it be next?

Taking Charles Darwin as a well-documented case study, we will explore the historiography of evolutionary ideas from 1900 onwards, covering the political , social, and scientific commitments involved in the concept of a "Darwinian Revolution." We take a special interest in tracking evolutionary ideas in Victorian literature. There will be an opportunity for graduate students to read key Darwin texts and put together their own syllabus on the history of Darwinism.

This course explores the history of the concept of "race" as used by biologists, anthropologists, and physicians from the 17th century to the present and social and political responses to the concept of race in these fields.

Explores new methods for understanding disease, medicine, and society, ranging from historical demography to cultural studies. Topics include patterns of health and disease, changes in medical science and clinical practice, the doctor-patient relationship, health care systems, alternative healing, and representations of the human body. The course will focus on historical problem-framing, research strategies, and writing.

Seeks to identify and explore salient ethical, legal, and policy issues - and possible solutions - associated with developments in biotechnology and the life sciences.

This course surveys monographs in the ethnography of science, both canonical and current. How have the methods and tools of the interpretive social sciences been applied to cultures of science and technology? What is the relation of description to analysis in ethnographies of science? How do such ethnographies approach theory-building and interpretation? Beginning with early work in the sociology of scientific knowledge and laboratory studies, students will read work in feminist science studies, field and environmental studies, multi-sited ethnography, sensory ethnography, and ethnographic accounts of digital worlds. Throughout, pressure will be placed on issues of method, style, and representation.

How social, human and behavioral scientists pursued a science of the self from French-revolution-era theories of the "bourgeois self" to Freud's insights about hysterics to mid-twentieth-century American theories of "personality" to biological and computational models of the late-twentieth century (e.g., the "quantified self" movement). What is the relationship of self to soul and self to society? Some attention to the historiography of the psychological and social sciences will also be given.

The goal of this class is to understand more deeply the roots and current practices involved in "Big Data," an umbrella term and current buzzword used to mark the revolutionary potential inherent in working with scaled-up collections of data and new data-processing and -storage technologies. We will begin by examining claims that Big Data has ushered in a new era of epistemology and scientific understanding. Next, we will investigate the historical development as well as material and political conditions that produced the current moment. We will read histories and ethnographies of Big Data and its historical precursors across fields as diverse as (but not limited to) bioinformatics, climate science, anthropology, library science, and paleontology, and will consider the interpenetration of Big Data's practices in commerce, national security, personal life ("self-tracking") and the project of self-engineering. The aim of the course is to be better able to assess the challenges and opportunities the current "data deluge" poses to society.

In this course we will chart the history of psychoanalysis-from its foundations in Freud to the modern relational mainstream-through the lens of clinical practice. Attention to classic texts and field-defining controversies, focusing on the ways in which analysts have conceptualized technique and the analytic setting; abstinence and gratification; therapeutic action and efficacy; reality, both inner and outer; attachment and separation; analytic paradigms, schools, and movements. The issue of how the historian can best capture, conceptualize, and write about the clinical encounter-as theorized and experienced-in psychoanalysis as well as in other clinical disciplines will be a central concern of the course. Special attention to the concept of trauma as seen by both analysts and historians: trauma both individual and societal, developmental and war-induced, in patients and refugee analysts, in culture and social policy, and from hysteria to PTSD. Note: Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

How and to what extent is knowledge shaped by the forms and genres through which it has been produced? Bringing history of science and technology together with media studies, book history, and cultural theory, we will consider histories and theories of representation, textuality, authorship, reading, illustration, translation, and the archive. Readings will include Foucault, Chartier, Latour, Kittler, Daston, Biagioli, Gitelman, Elshakry, and Kirschenbaum.

This course focuses on things: from the Indian sari to the iPod. Its aim is to look at objects from a variety of angles (science, anthropology, art, cultural studies) and to investigate what makes them such powerful anchors--actors--of our daily lives. The readings and discussions will provide a strong theoretical background to the final assignment: designing and mounting a temporary exhibit.

What are the tools of our trade? How can media augment scholarship? How are theories represented? Arguments diagrammed? Data visualized? From building a research database to actor-network mapping, this seminar will explore the power and peril of the digital humanities in relation to our own scholarly practices. As a practice-oriented course each student will be expected to explore over the course of the semester new methods, tools and presentational modes in connection with their current research or developing projects.

Individual work in preparation for the General Examination for the PhD degree.

What is history of science about as a discipline and profession? This half-course meets throughout the academic year to introduce first-year graduate students to the range of debates, questions, and research practices currently shaping the field.