Medicine as it exists in the United States today is profoundly technological. Many folks residing in the U.S. regard it as perfectly normal for clinicians to examine patients with instruments, for specialists to expose people’s bodies to many different machines, and for those machines to produce data that is mechanically/electronically processed, interpreted and stored. People are billed technologically, prompted to attend appointments technologically, and buy everyday consumer technologies to protect, diagnose, or improve our health. (Consider, for example, air-purifiers, heart rate monitors, pregnancy testing kits, blood-sugar monitoring tests, and thermometers.) Yet even at the beginning of the twentieth century, devices such as these were scarce and infrequently used by American physicians and medical consumers alike. Over the course of this semester, we examine how “technology” came to medicine’s center-stage in the U.S., and what impact this change has had on medical practice, institutions, and consumers alike.
Technology & Medicine in Modern America fulfills the Capstone research requirement for the HSOC major. Students develop and execute original research projects connected to our course questions and themes. Student topics can be wildly diverse and reflect their own interests and concentration: reproductive technologies, technology & disability, pharma & biotech, public health tech, medicalized consumers/”everyday” med tech, technology & enhancement, med tech & the military, and so on. By the end of the course, students will have honed their skills in primary and secondary source research and in constructing an academic argument and paper.
Assignments. Students formulate a research question; appropriately situate their question within the literature of a core STSC/HSOC discipline (anthropology, sociology, or history); and build an argument (an answer to their research question) based on their analysis of primary sources. In addition, students continue to develop skills in critical analysis through weekly reading assignments and discussions. Requirements therefore include: weekly readings and participation in class discussions; sequenced research assignments; first draft peer review workshop; and a final 20+page original research paper and presentation.
Course Format. The course fosters a collaborative atmosphere in which students complete an original research paper through critical reading and step-wise assignments that culminate in a final project. Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:45-3:15pm EST = class discussion, about shared texts or about research or writing. Class time will occasionally be reserved for asynchronous time to work on research assignments. All readings and reading notes are due at 1:45pm in advance of our class sessions. All research assignments are due by midnight (except peer review, which is due by class). Expect about 4 hours of homework per week, give or take, which includes a combination of reading, research, and writing.

The past is littered with interventions that worked or were thought to work that we hold in little regard today – from frontal lobotomies to bone marrow transplants for metastatic breast cancer. Since 1962 the FDA requires proof of efficacy for new drugs. Yet uncertainty surrounds the efficacy and safety of many drugs, technologies, and practices in use today. Will some future observer of today’s practices wonder, as we do about the bleeding and purging of traditional medicine, why we do the things we do?
This course will go deep into the social history of modern Western biomedicine to make sense of the ideological, economic, technical, scientific, and social forces shaping the modern medical interventions and the work they do. Students will be introduced to the rewards and challenges of studying medicine as a social and historical process. Case studies of the efficacy of contemporary biomedical interventions will be enriched by in-class meetings with prominent social scientists, biomedical researchers, and clinicians, as well as some potential visits to clinics and historical sites.
Each student will develop a research project or essay review related to the efficacy of medical interventions. Most students will likely explore a current or historical controversy over the efficacy and safety of a particular intervention. In addition, there will be two shorter writing assignments.

Medicine as it exists in the United States today is profoundly technological. Many folks residing in the U.S. regard it as perfectly normal for clinicians to examine patients with instruments, for specialists to expose people’s bodies to many different machines, and for those machines to produce data that is mechanically/electronically processed, interpreted and stored. People are billed technologically, prompted to attend appointments technologically, and buy everyday consumer technologies to protect, diagnose, or improve our health. (Consider, for example, air-purifiers, heart rate monitors, pregnancy testing kits, blood-sugar monitoring tests, and thermometers.) Yet even at the beginning of the twentieth century, devices such as these were scarce and infrequently used by American physicians and medical consumers alike. Over the course of this semester, we examine how “technology” came to medicine’s center-stage in the U.S., and what impact this change has had on medical practice, institutions, and consumers alike.
Technology & Medicine in Modern America fulfills the Capstone research requirement for the HSOC major. Students develop and execute original research projects connected to our course questions and themes. Student topics can be wildly diverse and reflect their own interests and concentration: reproductive technologies, technology & disability, pharma & biotech, public health tech, medicalized consumers/”everyday” med tech, technology & enhancement, med tech & the military, and so on. By the end of the course, students will have honed their skills in primary and secondary source research and in constructing an academic argument and paper.
Assignments. Students formulate a research question; appropriately situate their question within the literature of a core STSC/HSOC discipline (anthropology, sociology, or history); and build an argument (an answer to their research question) based on their analysis of primary sources. In addition, students continue to develop skills in critical analysis through weekly reading assignments and discussions. Requirements therefore include: weekly readings and participation in class discussions; sequenced research assignments; first draft peer review workshop; and a final 20+page original research paper and presentation.
Course Format. The course fosters a collaborative atmosphere in which students complete an original research paper through critical reading and step-wise assignments that culminate in a final project. Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:45-3:15pm EST = class discussion, about shared texts or about research or writing. Class time will occasionally be reserved for asynchronous time to work on research assignments. All readings and reading notes are due at 1:45pm in advance of our class sessions. All research assignments are due by midnight (except peer review, which is due by class). Expect about 4 hours of homework per week, give or take, which includes a combination of reading, research, and writing.

What is climate? This course examines this question by exploring the diverse perspectives of various peoples at different times and in diverse locations. We will then investigate how the myriad of conceptualizations of climate influenced a wide array of topics, including health, race, historical change, human destiny, and responses to environmental challenges. We will investigate the changing ideas surrounding climate by examining historical texts, scientific literature, and cultural artifacts. By the end of the course, students will have developed a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between climate and human society. Students will also be able to reflect on how the historical and cultural contexts that inform interpretations of climate impact contemporary discussion surrounding climate change and solutions for addressing climate-related challenges.

This course interrogates the historical connections between minds, bodies and machines in science and technology by taking a critical look at the history of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science in the 20th century. We will consider how AI has shaped our understanding of what it means to be human, just as ideas of the "human" have shaped our hopes, fears and plans for AI over time. Students will be reading primary sources alongside historical and theoretical interventions from the history of science, science studies and affiiated fields to interrogate and better understand our current moment and reimagine the future of AI.

For most of us, what’s normal feels downright natural. The normal is our baseline, invisible and unconsidered until something abnormal draws our attention to it. But a little prodding shows the contradictions within bland, boring normality: it’s defined by our internal feelings as much as by quantified standards, it describes individuals as well as populations, and it is intensely difficult to describe on its own merits without comparison. So what does it mean to be normal, anyway?
This seminar examines “the normal” as a medical and scientific concept from the Renaissance until today. Has the concept of normal always existed? What makes a person or body normal? How has such a thing been assessed? Can the normal exist without deviance – and is this relationship inherently one about power? We will examine how scientific ideas of “the normal” – and its conflation with “the natural” – shaped medical knowledge and ideologies about racial difference, sex and gender, socioeconomic class, anatomical difference and disability, and human behavior. How have the “normals” of the past shaped our current scientific understandings of ourselves and the people around us? Our goal will be to make visible the ways that “normal” gets normalized in order to deepen our critical engagement with modern medicine, wellness culture, and racial and gender politics.

From environmental crises to medical advancements and global food shortages, biology and the life sciences are implicated in some of our most pressing social issues. By looking at these issues, this course scrutinizes how developments in biology have shaped, and are shaped by, society. In the first unit, we’ll look at how institutions and technologies influence the modern life sciences, including the role of universities, public health departments, and museums in the development of biology. In the second unit, we’ll explore areas of biology that have raised controversies about regulation and access, including issues ranging from health to the environment. In the third unit, we’ll examine how scientists and the public invoke biological facts when addressing what it means to be human (or of a particular race, gender, ability, etc.).