If you are interested in an Undergraduate Major or Minor in the History of Science, Technology & Medicine, please see the History Department’s website on HOS Undergraduate Studies.
If you are interested in the History of Science Graduate Certificate or the PhD Program, you can find out more about these programs of study and guidelines here.
Current Courses
HIS/ENV 394 - Undergraduate Lecture: THINKING WITH NATURE: Histories of Ecology and Environmentalism - Spring 2025
From a scientific perspective, ecologists study the interactions between and among organisms and their environments. From an activist perspective, ecology is synonymous with the environmental movement, green politics, and conservation. This course explores this dynamic tension between science and political activism, between professional identity and personal conviction, as a historical phenomena that developed over the course of the twentieth century.
HOS/HIS 595 - Graduate Seminar: INTRODUCTION to the HISTORIOGRAPHY of SCIENCE - Spring 2025
An introduction for beginning graduate students to the central problems and principal literature of the history of science from the Scientific Revolution through the 20th century. The course is organized around several different methodological approaches, and readings include important works by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by Historians of Science.
Past Courses
FRS 154 - Seminar: CELLULOID SCIENCE - Fall 2024 Syllabus
To modern audiences, science is a way of knowing often depicted on film, and film itself is a medium of communication enabled by scientific research and used within scientific communities as a tool of knowledge production. Throughout their histories, science and film have been woven together. This class explores the history of Celluloid Science 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 keep three major themes in mind: the development of new forms of perception, the politics of representation, and the power of science and film means of communications. Weekly assignments for the course include engaging with both textual and filmic sources.
FRS 161 - Seminar: HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE - Fall 2016 Syllabus
What if history is not a neutral construction through which time unfolds? In this seminar we explore the ways in which the texture of history itself has changed covered the twentieth century, from the perspective of the history of science.
HIS 390 - Undergraduate Class: HSTM - METHODS & IDEAS - Spring 2023 Syllabus
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.
HIS 392 - Undergraduate Class: HISTORY OF EVOLUTION - Spring 2017 Syllabus
Interweaving intellectual and cultural history, this course covers the history of evolutionary theory from Charles Darwin, and the scholars on whom he drew, to the late 20th century. Throughout this century and a half we explore how biologists invested in evolutionary theory the capacity to explain the diversity of life on this planet, our all too human nature, and perhaps, therefore, to help us solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. We will also discuss how and why critics have attacked evolution as amoral and socially dangerous, seeking to remove it from public schools and the lives of their children. In doing so, we investigate how scientists have negotiated the dynamic (and sometimes fraught) relationship between professional and public science.
HIS/ENV 394 - Undergraduate Class: HISTORY OF ECOLOGY & ENVIRONMENTALISM, co-taught with Jack Klempay - Spring 2022 Syllabus
From a scientific perspective, ecologists study the interactions between and among organisms and their environments. From an activist perspective, ecology is synonymous with the environmental movement, green politics, and conservation. This course explores this dynamic tension between science and political activism, between professional identity and personal conviction, as a historical phenomena that developed over the course of the twentieth century. Check out the SENSORY MAP OF CAMPUS we created with StoryMap. If you are in town, consider a long stroll through and around campus, exploring some of our favorite spots to sit and reflect, or small unexpected sights that caught our attention.
HIS 500 - INTRODUCTION TO THE PROFESSIONAL STUDY OF HISTORY
A colloquium to introduce the beginning graduate student to the great traditions in historical writing, a variety of techniques and analytical tools recently developed by historians, and the nature of history as a profession.
Fall 2021 Syllabus, co-taught with Professor Peter Wirzbicki
Fall 2020 Syllabus, co-taught with Professor Federico Marcon
HIS/HOS/GSS 519 - Graduate Seminar: GENDER & SCIENCE - Fall 2017 Syllabus
The field of feminist science studies has expanded dramatically in recent decades. This seminar is designed to introduce a set of questions and analytical tools employed by historians interested in science and gender. As historians, we sometimes look to the past as a means of explaining the present. (In this case, everyone agrees on how to characterize the present—science as a social enterprise is fundamentally gendered, and gender, sex, and sexuality are concepts that have been profoundly shaped by science.) How did this come to be?
HOS/HIS 599/599A - Graduate Seminar: RECKONING WITH BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM - Fall 2018 Syllabus
This seminar explores the changing intellectual grounds on which debates about biological determinism were waged, from the 18th century to the present day. The readings alternate between weeks that focus on humans and weeks that focus on non-human actors to illustrate the variety and flexibility of biological narratives in the service of naturalizing some individual, social, and political behaviors (and casting others as “unnatural”). These readings will also allow us to interrogate questions of causality in historical writings about nature(s), including mosquito empires, global populations, and epigenetic landscapes.
HOS/HIS 599A - Graduate Seminar: Special Topics in the History of Science, Technology, & Medicine
ENVIRONMENTALISMS, Spring 2021 Syllabus
COLLECTING NATURES, Fall 2022 Syllabus
This seminar explores the changing intellectual grounds on which ideas about natural environments were forged, from the 18th century to the present day. The readings interweave accounts of how some places were deemed “natural” and came to be objects of scientific study and political concern together with attention to landscapes as places of refuge and a basis for social transformation. The aim of the seminar is to introduce a series of conceptual tools for analyzing these meanings, across a range of times and places—after all, the meanings cultures invest in ideas like natural, global, or “environmentalism” are far from stable or singular.
Check out the fantastic PODCASTS students produced as optional final projects in 2021.