Global Arc

Attention lies at the nexus of perception and action, aesthetics and ethics, wealth and power. Whose eyes (and minds) are where? And for how long? These are central questions driving the evolution of "surveillance capitalism" (not to mention social life itself). New technologies, and new practices, are reshaping our understanding of the attentional subject -- with consequences for learning, politics, and collective existence. This course will take up these problems, delving the history of changing ideas about attention in the modern period.

The ancient Greeks imagined a woman's body ruled by her uterus. Medieval Christians believed in a womb touched by God. Renaissance doctors uncovered the 'secrets' of women through dissection, while early modern states punished unmarried mothers. This course will ask how women's reproductive bodies were sites for the production of medical knowledge, the articulation of state power, and the development of concepts of purity and difference from ancient Greece to 18th-c. Europe. The course will incorporate sources as varied as medieval sculptures of the Madonna, Renaissance medical illustrations, and early modern midwifery licenses.

We live in a therapeutic society. This upper-level seminar aims to understand and complicate the reach of therapeutic culture by looking into crucial moments of its history. We will explore a range of formulations of the therapeutic, including psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and psychiatric drug treatment, but also move beyond the psychologist's office to explore therapeutic culture in social work, pastoral counseling, self-help groups, education, and TV.

Testing is critical to modern technological and decision-making systems, from college admissions to nuclear weapons. Tests may include many different things: detection devices, assays, simulations, diagnostics, and rehearsals. Standardized tests play a major role in education, professional licensing, clinical medicine, and environmental regulation, even when their predictive value is acknowledged to be limited. Is testing a single coherent activity, albeit with variants, or a disparate collection of practices and tools lumped together under the same name? Why do we test? We will explore the histories of testing to answer these questions.

An exploration of the complex relationship between the making of brain science and the human experiences of brain damaged people. Topics include iconic cases of brain damage like the railway worker Phineas Gage who survived an iron rod perforating his brain, the emergence and historical function of neurological case histories, the study of brain-damaged soldiers in WWI, the "neurological novels" of Alexander Luria, and the popular writings of Oliver Sacks.

Alchemy provides a core theme in medieval and early modern European culture, and a key to understanding early science and medicine. From transmuting base metals into gold and silver, to prolonging human life, alchemy offered fabulous rewards. Alchemical books were studied by princes, physicians, priests, and noblewomen, who sought experimental instructions, medical remedies, and political influence. Yet alchemical ideas also challenge modern perceptions of the relationship between art and nature, science and religion, and learned and craft knowledge. We will explore these contrasts using texts, images, objects, and laboratory reconstructions.

The neurosciences have adopted a leading position among the natural sciences. They have also emerged as a dominant viewpoint for examining all aspects of human life, from social relations, to economics, even religion. But while the truths the neurosciences teach seem to be eternal, the disciplines themselves are of a very recent vintage. In this course we will focus on their history, showing how they participated in larger scientific developments after WWII in order to understand their immense cultural authority. We'll pay careful attention to leading primary sources from the field and draw on relevant secondary texts from science studies.

The sourcing, preparation, and consumption of food (and drink) represent essential aspects of human culture, even as these activities have long had massive implications for the planet. Science and technology are deeply implicated in the history of changing diets, and industrialized agriculture has profoundly shaped both human populations and global environmental conditions. This course aims to introduce students to a range of recent writings that take up these problems, with an emphasis on scholarship in history and history of science.

The history of the border between what counts as science and what does not tracks the complex tensions in different times and places among science, religion, politics, and culture. This course explores the boundaries science has staked for itself -- or has had staked out for it -- by focusing on the elusive category of "pseudoscience." What have people considered the character of natural knowledge, and how to attain it? What is at stake in appearing scientific? Why exclude certain things from this designation? Each week this course moves backward in time to highlight the diversity of phenomena at the margins of science.

A review of recent thinking/writing about objects; an effort to experiment with activations of this work. Our course will explore approaches to material culture from the early modern period to the present, with particular attention to new philosophical and anthropological perspectives. Historical questions will be paramount, but aesthetic and epistemological problems will also be engaged. Guided by diverse readings, we will endeavor to heed Wordsworth's bold injunction--to "see into the life of things."