Topics in History (492-0-24)

Topic

Global History of Science, Medicine and Environmen

Instructors

Helen Louise Tilley
847/467-3014
Harris Hall - Room 335

Meeting Info

Harris Hall room 101: Fri 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This seminar examines the historical geography of science, technology, and medicine, focusing especially on cross-cultural entanglements over the last five hundred years. While economic historians have been animated by questions of a "great divergence" between Asian and European economies in this period, historians of science have circled around questions of a great divide between Western and non-Western knowledge systems since the so-called "scientific revolution." The readings will include 8 or 9 monographs and about a dozen articles covering the major world regions: Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. We will historicize a number of relationships, including scientific disciplines and dominant ideas about reality, technologies and industrial economies, pandemics and public health, warfare and digital worlds, geology and geopolitics, racial and indigenous identities, and energy regimes and ecology. Assignments are designed to help students expand their expertise in their chosen time periods and regions.

Registration Requirements

Graduate Students Only

Learning Objectives

To think, read, and write about different ways of knowing and changing the world over time.

Evaluation Method

Short reviews, a curriculum assignment, a final historiographical essay, and discussion in seminar.