This course is focused on comparing and contrasting ethnographic and historical approaches to health and medicine. We will engage ethnographic and historical approaches to health and medicine to explore the methodological, empirical, and theoretical stakes of thinking medicine, disease, and the body across and within disciplines. Taking a methodological and comparative approach, the course will explore ethnographic and historical approaches to such themes as the body, disease, pharmaceuticals, and biomedical knowledge-production in global and historical context. We aim to develop skills and knowledge for critically reading anthropological, historical, and sociological literatures on medicine, the body, and disease. As such, students will develop a research project, which may be in either the history or anthropology of medicine and/or science, or a project, which combines such approaches, utilizing the comparative and methodological frameworks of the course to develop an original analysis on a topic of their choosing.

What accounts for the persistence and resilience of racial conceptions in science? In this course we will look for answers to this and other questions by examining the historiography of race, colonialism, and science. The standard historiography has focused on the rise and fall of racial typologies in the north Atlantic and their contributions to troublesome political projects such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow policies, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust. More recent histories have taken inspiration from postcolonial studies, standpoint theories, and indigenous studies to insist on a more global reckoning of race and science. If we focus on the southern hemisphere, for instance, we can see scientific racial conceptions enrolled for a different though not necessarily less innocent set of projects: the dispossession of indigenous lands and effacement of indigenous peoples, the glorification of race-mixing as a tool of nation building, and the cultivation of whiteness as a means to modernity. By examining classic and recent approaches to race and science we will grapple with the following questions: Is 'race' a product of 18th century French and English science? Or can we find earlier iterations in the idioms of conquest of Spanish America during the early modern period? Do the standard narratives concerning the history of racial conceptions in science change when looked at from the frame of the global south? Does race get 'buried alive' after WWII? And do recent developments in human genomics bring "race" back from the dead, albeit in an anti-racist form?

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.

We are said to live in an “information age.” Information technologies have been credited with ushering in an era of unprecedented information creation, collection, storage, and communication. We experience the impact of this firsthand: these technologies increasingly pervade our homes, our workplaces, our schools, our most private spaces. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of the information age? When and how did it come into being? What developments—social, economic, political, or technological—made the digital world possible? How do these fit in the longer history of technology and society? And how is all this different from earlier eras? In this course, we explore these questions by looking to the history of information, information technologies, and information sciences, a history that long predates the digital computer. Although, at the center of our story will be the development of new information technologies—from the printing press and the telegraph to the computer and of course the Internet—our focus will not primarily be on machines, but on people and how individuals conceptualized, contributed to, made sense of, and dealt with the many transformational changes that have shaped the contours of our modern digital world. We will explore forms of identity, knowledge, and community that have emerged within this information age. Our goal will be to deepen historical perspectives and build analytical tools to critically evaluate the role of information in our increasingly digital world today.

This course covers the history of biology in the 19th and 20th centuries, giving equal consideration to three dominant themes: evolutionary biology, classical genetics, and molecular biology. The course is intended for students with some background in the history of science as well as in biology, although no specific knowledge of either subject in required. We will have three main goals: first, to delineate the content of the leading biological theories and experimental practices of the past two centuries; second, to situate these theories and practices in their historical context, noting the complex interplay between them and the dominant social, political, and economic trends; and, third, to critically evaluate various methodological approaches to the history of science.

In this survey we explore the relationships between technical knowledge and warin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We attend particularly to the centrality of bodily injury in the history of war. Topics include changing interpretations of the machine gun as inhumane or acceptable; the cult of the battleship; banned weaponry; submarines and masculinity; industrialized war and total war; trench warfare and mental breakdown; the atomic bomb and Cold War; chemical warfare in Viet Nam; and "television war" in the 1990s.

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.

In this survey we explore the relationships between technical knowledge and warin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We attend particularly to the centrality of bodily injury in the history of war. Topics include changing interpretations of the machine gun as inhumane or acceptable; the cult of the battleship; banned weaponry; submarines and masculinity; industrialized war and total war; trench warfare and mental breakdown; the atomic bomb and Cold War; chemical warfare in Viet Nam; and "television war" in the 1990s.

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.

Approved independent study under faculty supervision.