Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Programs of directed reading and research to be conducted by a person approved by the Department.

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.

This one-semester junior tutorial is a research-oriented tutorial taken in small groups. Focuses on enhancing research and writing skills through the completion of a directed research paper on subject matter of the student's interest. Must be taken during the fall semester (except for students not in residence).

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

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.

Explores the development of scientific ideas and practices in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, focusing on the circulation of texts, people, and objects. Special attention to intellectual, social, and institutional contexts.

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.

This course will examine the ways in which medical, religious, cultural, and political discourses and practices interacted in the medieval and early modern Middle East to create and reflect multiple understandings of human bodies and sexualities. Special attention to debates on health, sexuality, and gender and racial identities.

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.

Explores the emergence and consolidation in the Islamic Middle East of a new science and philosophy constructed in part out of Persian and Greek materials; the consolidation and development of this science in an Islamic context; and its connections with novel developments in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European science. Attention to cultural context, including imperial projects, societal transformation, and religious worldviews.

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.

Surveys the recasting of Islamic medical practices, traditions, and institutions in response to the many health challenges of the turbulent Middle Ages, from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, including wars, invasions, and epidemics.

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.

What is an instrument? Can there be more than one definition? What, if any, is the epistemological difference between Galileo's telescope and rolling balls? Between Newton's prisms, Hooke's microscope, and Reaumur's thermometer? This course looks at three centuries of science and particularly at its material culture. What makes an "instrument" a "scientific" instrument? Are all instruments "scientific"? How does an object become a scientific instrument? What are the relationships between theory and instruments? Readings and discussion, though at the core of the course, will be supplemented with visits in other Harvard museums and hands-on classes using 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.

Do your parents tell you stories about nuclear bomb drills in their elementary schools? Would you want to live in the same neighborhood as a nuclear power plant? Why did Stan Lee choose a radioactive spider to turn Peter Parker into Spider-Man? Our culture has strong ideas about radioactivity. How have those ideas changed over time? And how do they relate to the science of radioactivity? This seminar will explore the cultural history of radioactivity. Sample topics include newspaper coverage of nuclear science, ways people have prepared for possible nuclear catastrophes, and literature and films with nuclear themes.

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.

The sciences of human heredity and reproduction from Aristotle to Margaret Atwood. Readings include classic philosophical, scientific, and literary sources. The course takes up themes of technology and control; gender, race, class, and sexuality; scientific ethics; and interactions between biology and society.

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.

Advanced seminar for undergraduates. We concentrate on the history of animal and plant collecting, exploration, and the way that "nature" is put on display in museums, zoos, botanic gardens, etc. ranging from the 17th century to the present. We also think about media and imagery including illustrations in books to early wildlife film. The course hopes to enlarge your understanding of the complex relations between display, entertainment, and scientific knowledge-as well as the natural history tradition in North America. Visits will be made to museums and archives at Harvard.

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?

What becomes of life when researchers can materially manipulate and technically transform living things? In this course, we will historically investigate biotechnology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying attention to how efforts to engineer life are grounded in social, cultural, and political contexts. Topics include reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and cloning, genetically modified foods, genomics, stem cells, intellectual property, and biosafety and biosecurity. The course is organized around five crosscutting domains in which we will explore the ethical, legal, and social impacts of biotechnology: (1) food, (2) property and law, (3) sex and reproduction, (4) disease and drugs, and (5) genomic identities. We will read and discuss historical accounts of biotechnology, primary scientific publications, and legal cases. We will learn to evaluate the social constitution and impact of biotechnology on daily life, as well as how to place contemporary issues and debates in biotechnology in historical context.

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.

Joining "postgenomic" assessments of the genome projects, this seminar examines the history and contemporary practice of genomics from a multidisciplinary perspective. Topics include the role of technology, government funding, private industry, and race, gender, and nationality in the historical development of genomics, the ways in which genomic research challenges traditional conceptions of biology and science, and the implications of emerging trends such as direct-to-consumer genomics and whole-genome sequencing.

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.

This course will investigate the history of a number of stigmatized conditions and diseases including, for example, cancer, mental illness, addiction, obesity, AIDS, and disability. A central goal will be to understand the stigmatization of disease and its effects in diverse historical and cultural contexts. The course will evaluate both the impact of stigmatization on health disparities and outcomes, as well as attempts to de-stigmatize conditions that are subject to discrimination, prejudice, and isolation.

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 growth and development of social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychology, political science, and economics from the Enlightenment to the present. Innovators devised these fields to provide new, scientific ways to gain insight into age-old philosophical and religious questions, such as, What is the nature of the "self" or the "soul"? What binds human beings to one another? What is free will? What are the limits of social control, behavioral engineering, and the possible reach of techniques for adjustment and manipulation?

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.

This conference course looks at the long history of anthropological inquiry. We will begin with early modern "Curiosity Cabinets" that sequestered anthropological materials alongside the miraculous, marvelous, and mundane. We then turn to the age of exploration with its first-hand encounters between high-seas explorers or cross-continental travelers and tribal or non-Western groups sometimes known as "natives." After some attention to anthropological zoos and world's fairs, we will discuss the dawn of anthropology's professional golden age in the twentieth century; the arrival of epistemological and political crises during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and finally the current day's ontological turn, circling back to the interpretive and epistemological goals that have often animated the field.

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.

From Immanuel Kant's answer to this question in 1784 to Michel Foucault's engagement with the same question and answer in 1984, two centuries had passed and much water had flowed under the bridge. From the inception of its ideals in the Anglo-Saxon world in the seventeenth century at the hands of Spinoza, John Locke and Isaac Newton, to its development in France in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau and culmination with the writings of Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment developed into an important intellectual movement which helped shape modernity and its repercussions in the contemporary world. This course will trace the history of Enlightenment in primary sources, enriched by a collection of secondary readings, and will explore contemporary reflections on Enlightenment from various schools of thought, ranging from romanticism to marxism, and from feminism to postmodernism. Some of the themes addressed include the politics of the Enlightenment, philosophy and morality, rationalism and empiricism, science and education, and religion and toleration.

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.

An exploration of the complex relationship between the making of brain science and the human stories/experiences of brain damaged people. We will look at iconic cases of brain damage including Phineas Gage and H.M. (and who speaks for them), the emergence and historical function of neurological case histories, the study of brain-damaged soldiers in WWI, the "neurological novels" of Alexander Luria, the popularization of neuroscience via authors like Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran, the brain-injured patient as author, including how nowadays patients may use social media to narrate their own experiences with neurological impairment, and the notion of "neurodiversity."

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?

This course examines the phenomenon of "brainwashing" as a modern set of techniques that can apparently force a subject radically to alter her beliefs against her will. The Cold War roots of 'brainwashing' - both the myth and the reality -- lie in the politics of twentieth-century anti-Communism and the deeper fear that people's most strongly held thoughts, ideas, and ideological commitments could be vulnerable to powerful infiltration. In order to understand the dynamics of this process we will examine case studies beginning with the Korean War-era emergence of the term 'brainwashing', the American interdisciplinary science of "coercive persuasion" that arose in response, and successive waves of technological, political, and sociocultural developments. We will also look at how brainwashing and analogous persuasive techniques may operate among larger groups, crowds, organizations, and mass societies.

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.

Explores the consolidation and rise to prominence of a distinctively modern psychological perspective on human nature, motivation, and desire from 1900 to the present. Opens with the debut of therapeutic culture and the Freudian recasting of the self, with attention to dreams, sexuality, interiority, gender, and cultures of trauma. Moves to the mid-century period and beyond, the heyday of the psychological perspective in the United States, looking at the psychology of affluence, the invention of "identity," the new narcissism, and personalities and power in the workplace. Ends with an assessment of the virtues and liabilities of the 21st century expressive self.

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.

Science doesn't just happen in the lab. Scientific results have to be communicated among scientists, and to the public. This course investigates the ways in which scientific knowledge circulates, and pays special attention to how new communications media have shaped knowledge-in-the-making. Topics will include the history of scientific genres (letters, encyclopedias, periodicals), popular science, peer review, intellectual property, and new information technologies. Selected classes will take place in Houghton Library.

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.

This course uses science fiction as a lens through which to view the history of science and technology. By reading sci-fi literature (including novels and short stories by Shelley, Wells, Verne, and Butler, as well as more recent works by Heinlein, Asimov, Le Guin, Gibson, and Atwood) and viewing sci-fi films, this course asks how science is fictionalized, and what such representations tell us about science as an enterprise that melds present contexts with futurism and fantasy. Topics include: time travel, utopias and dystopias, other worlds, artificial intelligence, robotics, alien life.

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.

Investigations of the natural world have focused on different concepts at different historical moments. In America, for instance, the notion of "wilderness" was most prevalent in the late-nineteenth century; that of "environment" became central in the twentieth; and, from the postwar era to the present, analyses of the inextricability of spatial form and social organization have dominated scholarship and social activism alike. The aim of this seminar is to examine these shifts, exploring how they were employed within particular historical contexts, and to assess their implications for the past, present, and future of environmental movements in Europe and America.

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 100, Knowing the World: An Introduction to the History of Science.

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.

An examination of the notions of hypothesis and hypothetical method in science and mathematics, with attention to key issues in the philosophy of science such as the realism/instrumentalism debate and the role of models in scientific practice. Readings drawn from ancient Greek philosophy, ancient and early modern astronomy, and contemporary mathematics and physics. Open to graduates and qualified undergraduates with permission of the instructors.

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.

Climate change threatens severe dislocation of our environment, culture and infrastructure, as well as substantial losses to biodiversity and natural beauty. Virtually all experts agree that to avoid extensive disruptive climate change, we must transform our energy system from one based on burning carbon-based fuels to renewables or other energy sources that are net carbon-neutral. This will require a technological transformation. This course examines that challenge in light of past and present transforming technologies. In the first part of the class, we examine past examples of technological transformation, and consider what we might learn from them. In particular, we consider the questions: where do new technologies come from? What has been the role of the free market v. the role of conscious planning? Does technology drive social change or does social change drive technological innovation? Above all, how do we get the technologies we need? Do we get the technologies we need? In the second part we examine the required energy transition to prevent anthropogenic climate change, and the obstacles to it.

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?

Joining "postgenomic" assessments of the genome projects, this seminar examines the history and contemporary practice of genomics from a multidisciplinary perspective. Topics include the role of technology, government funding, private industry, and race, gender, and nationality in the historical development of genomics, the ways in which genomic research challenges traditional conceptions of biology and science, and the implications of emerging trends such as direct-to-consumer genomics and whole-genome sequencing.

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 will chart the emergence of dominant themes and methods in the history of medicine over the last thirty years. Through an examination of pivotal texts, we will seek to explain how scholars have excavated new sites of historical interrogation and introduced new perspectives on established objects of historical inquiry. Topics will include the illness experience, representations of the body, the doctor-patient relationship, medical technologies, hospitals, and race and medicine.

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 recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of life in both medicine and biology. Topics include: natural history and medicine before the emergence of biology; the history of heredity and molecular biology; race and medicine in the colonies and the metropole; bioeconomic exchange; old and new forms of biopower at molecular, organismic, and global scales. The seminar trains students to engage in scholarly debates in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences about the nature of life, the body, and biomedicine. Co-taught with Professor Stefan Helmreich (MIT Anthropology); the class will meet at Harvard.

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.

Examines the tensions felt by historians and physicians between historicizing past ethical behaviors and norms and wanting to pass judgment on past actors and actions. Topics include contested diseases and accusations of unethical research; the focus in Spring 2014 will be on controversial therapeutics.

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

A critical survey of conceptions of the history of science over the past hundred years or so and an interpretative engagement with why what's been said about science and its history has mattered so much.

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.

This seminar introduces students to Science and Technology Studies (STS), an interdisciplinary field seeking to understand the natural sciences as cultural and social practices. STS increasingly draws upon a diverse methodological and analytic toolkit: not only sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, but cultural studies, critical theory, gender, race, and postcolonial studies, and laboratory studies. Each unit in this course combines theories and methods in the social study of science with a series of cross-cutting themes including: proof, controversy, practice, actants and agency, post-humanism. Students will investigate the relation of STS to the History of Science and explore recent trends and theories in STS.

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.

Many scholars have considered how the modern self became an object of expert knowledge, scientific experimentation, and institutional discipline. This seminar focuses on cases, past and present, in which individuals treat their own habits, bodies, moods, and thoughts as objects of scrutiny, analysis, and intervention. Ranging from 19th century diary writing and the Buckminster Fuller Chronofiles to contemporary diet techniques, Benjamin Franklin's self-monitoring practices to the Quantified Self movement's digital data collection apps, the seminar explores what shifting modes of self-tracking, self-care, and self-governance reveal about changing understandings of the self, and how they remake subjectivity.

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.

An introduction to issues and concepts in psychoanalysis, considered clinically in cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts. Major texts, figures, and controversies from Freud to the present. The course will focus on conceptualizations of theory creation and change, and on research and writing strategies.

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.

Selected topics in psychoanalysis from Freud to the present, with attention to conceptualizing and writing the discipline's history. Among topics to be covered are the conditions of theory change, historicizing the analytic self, and assembling the analytic archive; locating major figures and national schools (Klein, Lacan, Kohut; Britain, France, Argentina); case studies in thinking with psychoanalysis-understandings of people and possessions, conflict and aggression, warfare and welfare; and pathologies of everyday life, from the abused wife to the corporate titan. Throughout, the seminar will focus more generally on writing intellectual and disciplinary histories. 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 seminar introduces students to the major contributions of the field of science and technology studies (STS) to the understanding of politics and policymaking in democratic societies.

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.

This is the graduate section to History of Science 192v, Science and Security. Students are required to attend History of Science 192v. In addition to the undergraduate emphasis on studying the nexus between science, technology and security, this graduate section will use the nexus as a basis for considering how modes of inquiry have developed in the discipline of Science, Technology, and Society (STS).

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.

Through regular meetings with faculty advisor, each student will focus on research and writing with the purpose of developing a publishable research paper.

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.

Over the course of the last hundred years-from World War I to the present-the world has assembled a massive system of state secrecy, censorship, security and surveillance. This course introduces the problem, tracking not only how the national and now global system of watching and archiving came into place, but exploring the consequences of this apparatus for identity, deliberation, and democracy. Enrollment limited to 12, by permission of the instructor.