How and why did science - natural history, astronomy, alchemy, medicine and mathematics - shift so radically from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment? Subjects to include: intellectual and social explanations; the clash of natural philosophical and mathematical claims to higher knowledge; relationships with religion; different sites for natural knowledge; new 'scientific' accounts of gender and difference; new institutional, representational and rhetorical forms; artisans, demonstrators and their relationship to 'philosophers'; how 'western' science came to be understood to be something distinct from what came before.

In our contemporary world, science, technology, and medicine enjoy tremendous cultural and intellectual authority. This class introduces a set of analytical tools historians use to understand the origins and consequences of these ways of knowing, across space and time. We will discuss a variety of ideas and methods that describe the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions of possibility for creating knowledge about the natural world. In addition, the class materials invite students to reflect on the cultural and intellectual constraints that shape how societies determine which knowledge is worth pursuing and why.

This seminar provides a unique angle of studying Chinese history from antiquity to our present moment through the lens of medicine. Using China as method, it also aims at cultivating a pluralistic and historically informed understanding of medicine as evolving science, cultural system, socio-economic enterprises, and increasingly in the modern world a vital component of domestic and global governance. This year, the thematic focus will be doctor-patient relationship and medical ethics.

Throughout their histories, science and film have been woven together. Film is a medium of communication enabled by scientific research; science is a way of knowing depicted in cinema; and scientific communities use film as a tool of knowledge production. This class explores these entangled histories from film's 19th-c experimental origins through to 21st-c cinematic depictions of scientific ideas. Along the way, we discuss the development of new forms of visualization, the politics of representation, and the power of science and film as means of communications. Weekly assignments include engaging with both textual and filmic sources.

In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, we will explore the making of the medicine of mind and brain, paying particular attention to the complex relationship between biological investigations of the brain and subjective experience of mental and neurological illness. We will look at patient memoirs; therapeutic regimes (including drugs and somatic treatments); psychiatric classification; trauma; mind-body medicine; the neuroscientific identification of brainhood with personhood; and anti-psychiatry, amongst others.

This undergraduate lecture course examines the effects, response to, and legacies of pandemics in the past -- their short term and lasting impacts on government, civil liberties, trust in experts, ethnic and racial tensions, social inequalities, and global and local economies. The course uses insights from these past cases of world-changing pandemics (from the plague through influenza, polio, AIDS, and COVID) to inform our understanding of current social, political, and economic challenges. Analysis of the past is also used to inform policy discussions about planning for the future.