History of Science

A study of the historical connections linking sex and gender to major social, political, and economic transformations. Comparative approaches are taken either in time or by region, or both. Topics may include family, gender, and the economy; gender, religion, and political movements; gender and the state; and gender and cultural representation.

Science fiction (SF) writing may seem a definitively modern phenomenon, but it has a rich and varied history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course, we examine early modern SF not only a vehicle for popularizing the new philosophy of the "scientific revolution," but as a space for the interrogation of competing beliefs about the relationships between humankind and the cosmos, knowledge and belief, or public and private living. Through early modern SF, we explore the self-consciously literary and poetic ways in which early modern natural philosophers worked through their ideas. No "two cultures" here.

Problems in the history of medicine and the medical sciences. Topic varies from year to year. Representative subjects would include the history of health and disease, medicine and the body, and the history of the mind and mental illness.

Introduces beginning graduate students to the central problems and principal literature of the history of science from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. Course is organized around several different methodological approaches, and readings include important works by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by historians of science.

This course explores special topics in the history of science. The precise topic varies from year to year.