Seminar in Historical Analysis (405-0-22)

Topic

Global Histories of Science

Instructors

Helen Tilley

Meeting Info

Harris Hall room 101: Mon 2:00PM - 5:00PM

Overview of class

This seminar will explore 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, racial and indigenous identities, psychiatry and personhood, and energy regimes and landscapes, and economics and law. Assignments are designed to help students expand their expertise in their chosen time periods and regions.

Learning Objectives

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

Evaluation Method

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

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): Americas, European, Asia/Middle East, Africa/Middle East, Global
History Minor Concentration(s): Science and Technology