Selected Past and Upcoming Courses
The History of Medicine and Public Health
Ideas and words like medicine, disease, hospital, pain, or physician may seem old and well-established. However, widespread agreed-upon definitions of such things are quite new, at least here in the United States. Many of these categories carry other meanings around the world. In order to learn how these ideas developed, this course will explore medicine and epidemics between Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern era, and more recent history. We will look at how people interacted with diseases and explore the foundations of major medical institutions like the hospital, nursing, and medical schools. By looking into this history, students will be better prepared to understand and reinforce positive change in the world of medicine.
Technological Revolution(s)
How has technology evolved? Why has it changed? With what consequences? This course examines the development of technological systems from the 1700s to the 2000s by considering their influence on the cultural values of everyday people, their economic and environmental effects, and their shaping of our current technological society. We will unpack major technological shifts in human history and make a special effort to focus on the mundane. Too often in the history of technology, people pay attention to the “big technologies” - steam engineers, dams, automobiles and rocket ships. While these are important, they frequently overshadow the smaller or invisible technologies that play a formative role. Therefore, in this class, we will explore major technological shifts and focus on the power of the mundane.
New Zealand and Paraguay
Students engage in a global history of two “small” states, New Zealand and Paraguay. By analyzing how these “small” nations formed, govern themselves, and interact with the “larger” world, students will be able to question modern framings of the nation-state as a political entity, examine the legacies of colonialism, and consider new analytical categories for understanding modern sovereignty. In addition to covering the history of the two countries, we will take a closer look at three practices of statecraft – public health, war, and electrification. During the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the ability to wage war, manage environments, and build electric power infrastructure defined functions of modern statecraft. We will analyze how New Zealand and Paraguay engaged in these acts of statecraft and what it meant for everyday people and for the evolution of their small nations shaping and being shaped by the winds of global pressures.
Electrification in Europe
This seminar will explore the history of Europe through the history of electric power infrastructures. Students will examine a series of case studies that examine how electricity intersected with European political, sociocultural, and economic infrastructure. We will discuss how Europeans generated and consumed electric power to enforce their visions of modernity in Europe and their colonies. At the same time, we analyze how people challenged or rearranged those visions. By the end of the semester, students will better understand how electric power and the associated sociotechnical systems that create it allow us to cross geographic and temporal borders and tell histories that provide new perspectives on European history.
Nineteenth-Century-Europe
In Europe, the nineteenth century contains some of the most transformative political and cultural shifts in Global History. Empires rose and fell, nation-states formed, science and medicine fundamentally changed, industry forged new conceptions of energy and production, and people developed ever more efficient measures of control and violence. During this course, we will observe and analyze some of these moments and work to connect them to the present.
Scientific Controversies
European history is replete with turbulent changes in geographic boundaries, political structure, and religious ideology. Between all those shifts, science, the mechanism through which people attempted to understand the world and employ – and sometimes abuse – that knowledge, underwent dramatic changes too. During the next sixteen weeks, we will explore moments of controversy in the history of science, from Empiricism to Anti-Vaccination movements. We do this for two reasons. On the one hand, they help us understand how scientific knowledge has changed over time. And on the other hand, we can trace how society and culture intertwined with those changes in science.
World History
Designed to develop historical ways of thinking, effective written communication, and information literacy skills, this course compares selected African, American, Asian, and European civilizations from ancient times to the present, exploring the variety of activities that divide and unite humans across culture, time, and space. This class will also take a game-based approach, based on written and oral analyses of primary sources, to explore key historical moments in world history.
Energy and Engineering Ethics
This class encourages students to explore the neutral and concrete definitions they have of scientific and technological concepts. Learning to think of technology in more complex ways has very real impact on the decisions we make as we interact with technology everyday as designers, users, and consumers. Whether it be the complication of a word like technology or breaking apart the construction of a concept like efficiency. We must engage with these issues to begin understanding how individual technologies and infrastructures affect the world. Technology is not immune to the racist, classist, sexist, and unbalanced ills of society, nor is society immune from the way technology reinforces or applies these prejudices. We will be reading the works from the history and philosophy of technology, as well as more specific case studies that explore the ethic decisions made around technology and technological systems. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and prepare a final project relating to the subject.
The Scientific Revolution
This course explores the emergence of scientific ideas and institutions during the Scientific Revolution (1450-1800) by examining how scientists built on the work of earlier thinkers, how their work was fostered and/or constrained by religion and politics, and why their ideas endured. Students explore the history and historiography of the “Scientific Revolution” of the 16th century and compare it with other major shifts in scientific practice and thinking. In particular we will cover major transitions in Astronomy (16th-17th century), Chemistry (18th Century), Evolutionary Theory (19th Century), and Electrification (19th-21st Century). Students will learn to understand and describe the social construction of scientific ideas and practices. By the end of the semester, they will be able to identify and explain how science is bound up in ideas about colonialism, gender, politics, and race. Scientific facts, data, and expertise are all part of the social setting in which they exist. Science is not neutral.