Global Arc

Today, we can easily imagine science as a way of knowing and film as a medium of communication. Yet throughout the history of science and film, their fates have been woven together. This class explores their histories from the 19th-century origins of film as an experimental tool of visualization and scientific research, through to 21st-century cinematic depictions of scientific theories and adventure. Along the way, we will attend to three major themes: the development of new forms of perception, the politics of representation, and the power to engage and explain. Weekly assignments for the course include both textual and filmic sources.

The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.

This course covers the history of African American families. It traces the development of family life, meanings, values, and institutions from the period of slavery up to recent times. The course engages long-standing and current debates about black families in the scholarship across disciplines and in the society at large. The course will look at the diversity of black family arrangements and the way these have changed over time and adapted to internal and external challenges and demands. It will also situate the history of black families within a broader cross-cultural context.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a wave of revolutions swept across the Atlantic world. They shook the empires that had controlled this area of the globe, launched bold new experiments in democratic politics, challenged or overthrew existing social, cultural and religious hierarchies, and were accompanied by considerable violence. This course will examine this remarkable period in world history, concentrating on the American, French and Haitian revolutions, and devoting significant attention to issues of gender and violence, the overall global context, and theories of revolution.

World War II was the crucible of much of the world we now know, not just in geopolitics and economics but also in science and technology. This course focuses three key military technologies that emerged to prominence then: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and digital computers. Each would define its own "Age" - Atomic, Space, and Information - in the popular imagination. That popular vision is often highly Americanized, located paradigmatically at Norad, Cape Canaveral, and Silicon Valley. As an exercise in interrogating that teleology, we will examine the USSR's own distinctive "Ages" from the end of the war to the post-Soviet era.

Although the word "scientist" was coined in the 1830s, it caught on slowly. Even in 1924, the British journal Nature preferred the term "men of science." This seminar explores the history of how practitioners of science, from Isaac Newton to Neil deGrasse Tyson, sought to define themselves and their research activities. The themes we will discuss include science in the field and lab, the professionalization of science, science on the international stage, gender and science, and the political activism of scientists.

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.