During the last 500 years, science has emerged as a central and transformative force that continues to reshape everyday life in countless ways. This introductory course will survey the emergence of the scientific world view from the Renaissance through the end of the 20th century. By focusing on the life, work, and cultural contexts of those who created modern science, we will explore their core ideas and techniques, where they came from, what problems they solved, what made them controversial and exciting and how they relate to contemporary religious beliefs, politics, art, literature, and music. The course is organized chronologically and thematically. In short, this is a "Western Civ" course with a difference, open to students at all levels.

During the last 500 years, science has emerged as a central and transformative force that continues to reshape everyday life in countless ways. This introductory course will survey the emergence of the scientific world view from the Renaissance through the end of the 20th century. By focusing on the life, work, and cultural contexts of those who created modern science, we will explore their core ideas and techniques, where they came from, what problems they solved, what made them controversial and exciting and how they relate to contemporary religious beliefs, politics, art, literature, and music. The course is organized chronologically and thematically. In short, this is a "Western Civ" course with a difference, open to students at all levels.

During the last 500 years, science has emerged as a central and transformative force that continues to reshape everyday life in countless ways. This introductory course will survey the emergence of the scientific world view from the Renaissance through the end of the 20th century. By focusing on the life, work, and cultural contexts of those who created modern science, we will explore their core ideas and techniques, where they came from, what problems they solved, what made them controversial and exciting and how they relate to contemporary religious beliefs, politics, art, literature, and music. The course is organized chronologically and thematically. In short, this is a "Western Civ" course with a difference, open to students at all levels.

Early scholarship on the history of the body emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, largely spearheaded by gender and discourse theorists who saw the human body as a useful way to think about culture, language, and performativity. Soon thereafter, historians insisted on the need for a more material approach to the subject. Since both human and non-human bodies occupy a central place in the history of science, technology, medicine, this course will delve into works that seek to tell the history of these fields through body history. In recent years, the most cutting-edge scholarship in body history can be found in race, gender, and disability studies, which will be a focus of this seminar.

This graduate reading seminar engages major themes and debates in Science & Technology Studies. Bringing together scholarship in anthropology, history, history of science and information studies, the course will combine theoretical material with empirically oriented studies. It focuses on how practices, ideas, objects and tools within science, technology and medicine have been shaped by the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they emerged. Students will read texts on a set of wide-ranging topics and themes—techno-politics, actor-network theory, postcolonial technology and feminist STS among others— with the goal of engaging both the methodological and conceptual questions they raise.

Seminar for first-year graduate students, undergraduate majors, and advanced undergraduates. Reading will introduce the student to current work concerning the effect of social context on science, technology, and medicine.