This page serves as a central location for past, current, and future sections of the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization courses offered by CHSS and Fishbein Center Faculty. Sample syllabi will be included within each course’s description.
Please note that the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization courses do not need to be taken in chronological order.
These are not representative of the courses being offered in the current academic year.
HIPS 18301 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization I: Ancient Science and Medicine
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: This undergraduate course represents the first quarter of the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization general education sequence. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required. This quarter will focus on science and medicine in societies across the ancient world. Students will gain an introduction to methods of healing and knowing practiced in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America before 1500. Students will also acquire an understanding of the many questions that historical research raises for our own understanding of contemporary medicine and science, and some of the methods that historians use to bring the past to light. Topics include ancient surgery and pharmacology; the manifold meanings of “disease;” the function and recognition of “the body,” of “mind,” and of perception; how to acquire “good” and “true” knowledge; continuity and discontinuity of beliefs and practices over time and place; and exchange of ideas and materials across cultures, among other subjects.
Not currently being offered
HIPS 18302 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization I: Ancient Science
Instructor: Daniel Kranzelbinder
Description: This undergraduate course represents the first quarter of the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization general education sequence. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required. This quarter will focus on aspects of ancient Greek and Roman intellectual history, their perceived continuities or discontinuities with modern definitions and practices of science, and how they were shaped by the cultures, politics, and aesthetics of their day. Topics surveyed include history-writing and ancient science, the cosmos, medicine and biology, meteorology, ethnography and physiognomics, arithmetic and geometry, mechanics, taxonomy, optics, astronomy, and mechanical computing.
Offered in Autumn 2025
HIPS 18401 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization II: History of Medicine 1500 to 1900
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: This course examines the theory and practice of medicine between 1500 and 1900. Topics include traditional early modern medicine; novel understandings of anatomy, physiology, and disease from the Renaissance on; and new forms of medical practice, training, and knowledge-making that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Offered in Spring 2026
HIPS 18404 – Science, Culture, and Society II – Medieval and Early Modern Science
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: This course considers the global history of science from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, looking at the relationship between science, power, and the state in shaping the making of knowledge about nature in the medieval and early modern world. Topics will include the histories of astronomy, botany, medicine, navigation, alchemy, and mechanics, as well as dynamics of translation, transmission, and circulation and the relationship between science and religion. At the same time, this is also a class about how we think and write about the history of science itself, including what “counts” as science, where science can be said to begin, and whether there was such a thing as a “Scientific Revolution” at all.
HIPS 18500 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: Modern Period
Instructor: Adrian Johns
Description: The course is organized around a series of broad questions about science. These questions are addressed by means of examples drawn from both the past and the present. The historical cases arise in chronological sequence, ranging from the development of experimental methods in the late seventeenth century to the advent of biotechnology in the modern era. They furnish a selective set of materials for a history of scientific practice. Their other purpose here, however, is to highlight the depth and importance of many problems still confronting the world of science today – problems that are cultural as well as scientific, and that demand of us an understanding of what science is and how it works.
NOT OFFERED IN 2025-2026 ACADEMIC YEAR
HIPS 18501 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: History of Medicine 1900-Present
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: This course is an examination of various themes in the history of medicine in Western Europe and America since 1900. Topics include key developments of medical theory (e.g., the circulation of the blood and germ theory), relations between doctors and patients, rivalries between different kinds of healers and therapists, and the development of the hospital and laboratory medicine.
NOT OFFERED IN 2025-2026 ACADEMIC YEAR
HIPS 18502 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: The Environment
Instructor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Description: This course charts the development of modern science and technology with special reference to the environment. Major themes include natural history and empire, political economy in the Enlightenment, the discovery of deep time and evolutionary theory, the dawn of the fossil fuel economy, Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation, the birth of ecology, the Cold War development of climate science, the postwar debates about the limits to growth, and the emergence of modern environmentalism. We will end with the new science of the Anthropocene.
NOT OFFERED IN 2025-2026 ACADEMIC YEAR
HIPS 18504 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: the Computational Life
Instructor: James A. Evans
Description: In SCSIII: The Computational Life, we consider the rise of computation and computers from ancient, analog efforts through state calculations and steampunk computers of the 19th Century to the emergence of digital computers, programming languages, screens and personal devices, artificial intelligence and neural networks, the Internet and the web. Along the way, we explore how the fantasy and reality of computation historically reflected human and organizational capacities, designed as prosthetics to extend calculation and control. We further consider how computers and computational models have come to influence and transform 20th and 21st Century politics, economics, science, and society. Finally, we examine the influence of computers and AI on imagination, structuring the utopias and dystopias through which we view the future. Students will read original texts and commentary, manipulate analog and digital hardware, software, networks and AI, and contribute to Wikipedia on the history and the social and cultural implications of computing.
Offered in Spring 2026
HIPS 18505 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: Histories of the Bomb
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: In the long history of the planet, the years since 1945 have a remarkable and unique geological signature: one left by the creation and testing of atomic weapons, medicine, and energy. This class explores the intellectual, social, economic, and political histories of nuclear research, including topics such as transnational scientific migrations; the Manhattan Project; weapons testing and development; the rise of “Big Science”; postcolonial histories of nuclear development; domestic and international anti-nuclear activism; and ecological and environmental impacts of fallout, waste, and nuclear accidents. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, we will consider how the story we tell about the history of the nuclear age and the rise of science came to be, and how that story has transformed at different points in the twentieth century.
NOT OFFERED IN 2025-2026 ACADEMIC YEAR
HIPS 18506 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: Modern Science
Instructor: Zachary Barr
Description: This course will examine the constitutive relationship between major sociopolitical and scientific events in Western and Central Europe between 1815 and 1945, including the role of the post-Napoleonic “Vienna System” in the consolidation of the statistical style of reasoning in France and the connection between interwar politics and the rise of eugenics. By the end of the course, students should have a better understanding of a critical period in European history and acquired a set of theoretical tools for understanding how sociopolitical and epistemic developments are related.
Offered in Winter 2026
HIPS 18508 – Science, Culture, and Society III – History of Modern Science
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: This introductory lecture course explores the intertwining historical relationships between the making of knowledge about the natural world (what we now call “science”) and the making of global political, economic, and social power from the eighteenth century to the present day. We will be exploring these issues across a wide range of historical periods, geographical regions, and scientific fields—including astronomy and nuclear physics, botany and genetics, ecology and evolutionary biology, and archaeology and palaeoanthropology. When, where, and how did this set of knowledge-making practices first emerge? How has the pursuit of scientific knowledge shaped the expansion and exercise of power in communities, nations, and empires around the world, and how has scientific knowledge been shaped by these forces in turn? Who has historically been able to “do science,” and under what kinds of social, political, and economic circumstances? How might this picture change in the future?
HIPS 18509 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civ III: History of Science and Technology in Russia
Instructor: Alina Shokareva
Description: In “History of Science and Technology in Russia,” students will study the process of entry and formation of Russian science as a part of European and ultimately global science. We will explore how science and scientists fared under different political regimes, ideologies, and social structures. We will also consider the quality of scientific education and the contributions of Russian scientists in the 18th-20th centuries. What has the world given Russian science and what has Russian science brought to the world? What was unique about the constitution of Russian science, and what were the similarities between scientific and educational problems and institutions in Russia (Russian Empire, USSR) and those in Europe and the United States?
Offered in Spring 2026