Please see University of Chicago Class Search for specific class schedule information.
Please note that the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization courses do not need to be taken in chronological order.
Current Courses:
Autumn 2025
HIPS 11800 – Introduction to the Field of Science Communication
Instructor: Jordan Bimm
Description: Communicating accurately and effectively about science to non-expert audiences is quickly becoming an essential skill for scientists and non-scientists alike. This course provides a foundation in science communication theory and practice that prepares students to communicate about their own research, or someone else’s across a wide range of media formats and situations. Broadly scoped, this course covers the history of science communication, different approaches to engaging public audiences about science, theories of communication and science education, as well as practical training in science journalism and science writing. Each week we will focus our learning by investigating and analyzing a different historical case study from the perspective of science communication including breakthroughs, emergencies, debates, innovations, controversies, and everyday applications of research. Concepts and skills we will cover include the deficit model of science communication, communicating uncertainty and risk, engaging diverse stakeholders, addressing misconceptions, fact checking to ensure scientific accuracy, and communicating about major discoveries and everyday practice. No prior knowledge of science communication is required.
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.
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 20700 – Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Virginia Schultheis
Description: An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.
HIPS 21530 – Reading ethnographically, thinking anthropologically
Instructor: Damien Bright
Description: How do anthropologists use ethnographic writing to puzzle over the human condition? What assumptions and choices do they make to turn diverse beliefs, practices, and struggles into shareable texts and other media? Why are perennial contrasts between self and other, here and there, author and audience integral to anthropology’s vast intellectual appetites? This course explores the twin arts of ethnographic reading and anthropological thinking. It is structured along two axes: 1) an intellectual history of anthropological thought from its institutionalization at the turn of the twentieth century to the present; 2) an exploration of different dimensions of human experience that anthropologists turn to and return to (e.g., myth & ritual, meaning & language, time & space, belonging & relationality, magic & science, violence & authority). Students will learn to identify the conventions of ethnographic writing, to distinguish dominant anthropological “schools of thought,” and to unpack taboos and controversies central to the discipline’s development. This course involves staggered assessment that culminates in a final comparative project. It is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students by consent and fulfills the MAPSS methods requirement.
HIPS 22107 – Queer Reproduction
Instructor: Paula J. Martin
Description: What makes reproduction queer, and how do queers reproduce? In some senses, more people than ever before have access to reproductive technologies and to family building resources. People of all genders and sexualities utilize tools to combat infertility such as in vitro fertilization, gamete donation, surrogacy, and adoption, sometimes reproducing the normative family form and other times expanding it. Kinship categories, from “diblings” (donor siblings) to house mothers, can be artifacts both of culture and of science, and reflect ways of understanding what constitutes a family and what relationships become considered family. This course asks after the many mechanisms which can be taken to foster or hinder queer reproduction, thinking through the tools for managing social and biological infertility alongside cultural anxieties about queer reproduction more broadly, as enacted through bans on queer representation in classrooms and other policies. We will consider how specific technologies emerge and are utilized among groups who identity as queer and those who do not, ask after the legacy of queerness and its association with non-procreative forms of intimacy, and map the ways that the figure of the child is always bound up with some vision of the future (of the family, the nation, or humanity itself).
HIPS 22204 – Science and Liberalism
Instructor: Isabel Gabel
Description: In the era of “post-truth” it has become common to link a crisis of scientific authority with a crisis of liberalism. Democracies around the world are under threat, this reasoning goes, in part because of an attack on institutional scientific truth. But what does liberalism – as political culture and as a form of governance – need (or want) from science? Depending where you look, the answer might appear to be facts, truth, a model ‘public sphere,’ an ethic of objectivity, tactics for managing risk and uncertainty, or technologies of population management (to name a few). This course turns to the historical relationship between science and liberalism in modern Europe to explore how science and political culture have together produced our current ideal of truth and asks what historians in particular can contribute to these fraught contemporary debates.
HIPS 24921 – Darwinism And Literature
Instructor: Dario Maestripieri
Description: In this course we will explore the notion that literary fiction can contribute to the generation of new knowledge of the human mind, human behavior, and human societies. Some novelists in the late 19th and early 20th century provided fictional portrayals of human nature that were grounded into Darwinian theory. These novelists operated within the conceptual framework of the complementarity of science and literature advanced by Goethe and the other romantics. At a time when novels became highly introspective and psychological, these writers used their literary craftsmanship to explore and illustrate universals aspects of human nature. In this course we read the work of several novelists such as George Eliot, HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Yuvgeny Zamyatin, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Italo Svevo, and Elias Canetti, and discuss how these authors anticipated the discoveries made decades later by cognitive, social, and evolutionary psychology.
HIPS 25421 – History of Censorship from the Inquisition to the Internet
Instructor: Ada Palmer
Description: Censorship over time and space, with a focus on the history of books and information technologies. The class will meet in Special Collections, and students will work with rare books and archival materials. Half the course will focus on censorship in early modern Europe, Latin America and Iberian Asia, including the Inquisition, the printing press, and clandestine literature in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Special focus on the effects of censorship on classical literature, both newly rediscovered works like Lucretius and lost books of Plato, and authors like Pliny the Elder and Seneca who had been available in the Middle Ages but became newly controversial in the Renaissance. The other half of the course will look at modern and contemporary issues, from wartime censorship, to comic books, to digital-rights management, to free speech on our own campus.
HIPS 26314 – Judaism and Science
Instructor: Yehuda Halper
Description: We shall examine how Jewish thinkers examined the interplay between science and the Jewish intellectual tradition, with particular focus on the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This course will explore questions such as: Is the study of science opposed to the study of Jewish texts? Should one study science differently from the way of studying traditional Jewish texts? Are different logical syllogisms appropriate for science and for religious texts? Additionally, we shall examine the materials and formal structures that Jewish thinkers had to study science. We shall begin with the introduction of translations in the 12th-13th centuries among Hebrew readers who had no access to Universities and continue through to the opening of (some) Universities to Jewish students in the 15th and 16th centuries. Readings include Maimonides, Jacob Anatoli, Gersonides, Albo, Judah Messer Leon, Alemanno, Isaac Abravanel, and Obadiah Sforno.
HIPS 28140 – Golems, Angels, and AI
Instructor(s): James T. Robinson and Russell Johnson
Description: What makes us human? Is it our bodies or our souls? Our propensity to reason or our capacity for love? Or is it our ability to select all squares containing bicycles? In this interdisciplinary course, we consider what it means to be human by contrasting the human with the non-human. We think with sci-fi authors about how humans are different from androids and aliens. We think with scientists about how humans are different from animals and algorithms. We think with religious traditions about how humans are different from angels and abominations. Topics to be discussed include what we owe to our creators and our creations, what dehumanization is and why we do it, how people throughout history have tried to transcend their physical forms, and what monsters have to tell us about the good life.
HIPS 29003 – Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts
Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
Description: This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.
HIPS 29653 – Tutorial – Genetics in Society
Instructor: Megan MacGregor
Description: What is the human genome, and what can it tell us about humanity? What constitutes the appropriate construction and use of genetic claims? While efforts to fully map the human genome peaked in the 1990s, the stakes of these questions long preceded the genomic era, and have long structured social worlds. This course will take a critical approach to the history and anthropology of genetics and genomics, focusing on the social and ethical implications in historical and contemporary iterations of genetics. We will consider how, over the course of the twentieth century, the genome came to represent a source of authority with regards to human nature, occupying a central place in defining individual and group identities, history, policy, and reconciliation efforts. We will begin by considering the cultural and epistemic authority of the genome concept and the power dynamics in which it arose. We will then examine the relationships between genetic concepts and a number of scientific and social themes, including heredity and eugenics, diversity and human variation, identity, racialization, nationalism, disability, big data, and medical risk and promise. We will conclude with the contemporary ‘postgenomic’ era, in which many stakeholders are grappling with the question of what the human genome, and all the information gleaned from its sequencing, actually means.
HIPS 29700 – Readings and Research in History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine
Instructor: STAFF
Description: Reading and Research for HIPS seniors working on their senior thesis. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.
HIPS 29800 – Junior Seminar: My Favorite Readings in the History and Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: This course introduces some of the most important and influential accounts of science to have been produced in modern times. It provides an opportunity to discover how philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have grappled with the scientific enterprise, and to assess critically how successful their efforts have been. Authors likely include Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Merton, Steven Shapin, and Bruno Latour.
HIPS 29810 – Bachelor’s Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Iris Clever
Description: Thesis writing workshop for HIPS seniors.
Winter 2026
Please note that the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization courses do not need to be taken in chronological order.
HIPS 11300 – Science Communication: Crafting a Science Think Piece
Instructor: Jordan Bimm
Description: Science think pieces are an important genre of public writing. Think pieces are longform journalism typically ranging between 2,000 and 5,000 words that appear in print and online publications. Readers of all kinds turn to science think pieces to understand critical issues in STEM fields and get a big picture perspective. Science think pieces provide deep context, informed perspective, and expert synthesis of the most recent data and findings. They have the power to shape public opinion and influence science policy. This course guides students through the process of conceiving, developing, pitching, writing, and potentially publishing an engaging and persuasive science think piece. Through reading-inspired group discussions and instructor-led writing projects, the course introduces students to current theories and best practices of science communication as well as everyday processes in science journalism and public-facing science writing. Students will finish the course with a polished science think piece ready for submission to potential venues for publication. No prior knowledge of science communication is required.
HIPS 12103 – Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory
Instructor: Paula Martin
Description: Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like “material bodies” and “objective science”. Primary course questions include: (1) How is “trans-” conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? (2) What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans-medicine identifies and treats? How is “trans-” understood and operationalized through medical practices? (3) What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them?
HIPS 17521 – Energy in World Civilizations I
Instructor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Description: This two-quarter course explores the historical roots of climate change and other global environmental problems with a special attention to how energy use shapes human societies over time. Part I covers energy systems across the world from prehistory to the end of the nineteenth century.
HIPS 17522 – Energy in World Civilizations II
Instructor: Ryan Jobson
Description: This two-quarter course explores the historical roots of climate change and other global environmental problems with a special attention to how energy use shapes human societies over time. Part II covers energy systems across the world from the early twentieth century to the present, examining themes such as the uneven globalization of energy-intensive lifestyles, the changing geopolitics of energy, and possible futures beyond fossil-fuel dependence.
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.
HIPS 20506 – Cities, Space, Power: Introduction to Urban Social Science
Instructor: Neil Brenner
Description: This lecture course provides a broad, multidisciplinary introduction to the study of urbanization in the social sciences. The course surveys a broad range of research traditions from across the social sciences, as well as the work of urban planners, architects, and environmental scientists. Topics include: theoretical conceptualizations of the city and urbanization; methods of urban studies; the politics of urban knowledges; the historical geographies of capitalist urbanization; political strategies to shape and reshape the built and unbuilt environment; cities and planetary ecological transformation; post-1970s patterns and pathways of urban restructuring; and struggles for the right to the city.
HIPS 21000 – Introduction to Ethics
Instructor: Candace Vogler
Description: An exploration of some of the central questions in metaethics, moral theory, and applied ethics. These questions include the following: are there objective moral truths, as there are (as it seems) objective scientific truths? If so, how can we come to know these truths? Should we make the world as good as we can, or are there moral constraints on what we can do that are not a function of the consequences of our actions? Is the best life a maximally moral life? What distribution of goods in a society satisfies the demands of justice? Can beliefs and desires be immoral, or only actions? What is “moral luck”? What is courage?
HIPS 21609 – Topics in Medical Ethics
Instructor: Daniel Brudney
Description: Decisions about medical treatment and medical policy often have profound and complex moral implications. This course will examine such issues as paternalism, autonomy, informed consent, assisted suicide, abortion, organ markets, genetic testing, and the definition of death. The primary teacher is a philosopher, but there will be guest lectures by physicians and medical lawyers. The goal is to have state of the art, interdisciplinary conversations.
HIPS 22210 – Disease, Health, and the Environment in Global Context
Instructor: Christopher Kindell
Description: Recent concerns about infectious diseases and the environmental determinants of health have attracted renewed attention to previous accounts of disease, many of which have significantly shaped human political, social, economic, and environmental history. Former examples include: respiratory diseases and sexually transmitted infections among Indigenous communities during the age of European exploration and colonial settlement; nutritional deficiencies resulting from the forced relocation and labor of enslaved Africans throughout the Atlantic World; “filth” diseases and urban sanitary reform during the Bacteriological Revolution; zoonotic diseases and pest control campaigns during imperial expansion projects across the Caribbean; and cancers borne of industrial pollutants in the modern era. Through readings, in-class discussions, and written assignments that culminate in a final project, students in this course will explore how natural and human-induced environmental changes have altered our past experiences with disease and future prospects for health. First, we will examine how early writers understood the relationship between geography, environment, hereditary constitution, race, gender, and human health. We will then analyze the symbiotic relationship among pathogens, human hosts, and their physical environments. Finally, we will explore how social factors and human interventions have influenced the distribution of infectious diseases and environmental health risks.
HIPS 22401 – Darwinian Health
Instructor: Jill Mateo
Description: This course will use an evolutionary, rather than clinical, approach to understanding why we get sick. In particular, we will consider how health issues such as menstruation, senescence, pregnancy sickness, menopause, and diseases can be considered adaptations rather than pathologies. We will also discuss how our rapidly changing environments can reduce the benefits of these adaptations.
HIPS 23107 – Biodiversity: Past and Present
Instructor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Description: Biodiversity is the foundation of all life, essential to human flourishing and economic growth. This course offers a historical approach to biodiversity, including environmental, economic, and intellectual perspectives. How has biodiversity shaped societies over time? How have humans learned to value or ignore biodiversity? Why is a sixth mass extinction increasingly likely?
HIPS 24003 – Death & Dying
Instructor: Alexandra Tate
Description: Death happens to everyone. However, dying is as much a social process as an individual one. The factors that impact how, when and where people die, and how societies handle death and dying, are shaped by the structural and cultural forces in our world. These range from economic, geographic, and religious forces to the institutional politics of health care systems. The sociology of death and dying is the systematic study of the structure of the human response to death, dying, and bereavement in their socio-cultural, interpersonal, and individual contexts. Often conceptualized as a discrete event, death is a process that is shaped over the life course. In this course, we will analyze the socio-demographic patterns of death, the factors that shape the process of dying, the economics of dying, and the ways that individuals and groups respond to death. We will also consider the social factors that shape a “good death” and discuss current policies and debates surrounding end-of-life care and aid-in-dying.
HIPS 24103 – Bioethics
Instructor: Katrina Myers
Description: This is a lecture and discussion class that will explore how a variety of philosophic and religious thinkers approach the issues and problems of modern dilemmas in medicine and science in a field called bioethics. We will consider a general argument for your consideration: that the arguments and the practices from faith traditions and from philosophy offer significant contributions that underlie policies and practices in bioethics.
We will use a case-based method to study how different traditions describe and defend differences in moral choices in contemporary bioethics. This class is based on the understanding that case narratives serve as another core text for the discipline of bioethics and that complex ethical issues are best considered by a careful examination of the competing theories as work themselves out in specific cases. We will examine both classic cases that have shaped our understanding of the field of bioethics and cases that are newly emerging, including the case of research done at our University. Through these cases, we will ask how religious traditions both collide and cohere over such topics as embryo research, health care reform, terminal illness, issues in epidemics and public health, and our central research question, synthetic biology research.
This class will also explore how the discipline of bioethics has emerged to reflect upon such dilemmas, with particular attention to the role that theology and philosophy have played in such reflection.
HIPS 25270 – Infrastructure Histories
Instructor: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Description: Dams, sewers, container ships, water pipes, power lines, air conditioning, and garbage dumps: the critical infrastructures that enable modern life are so often invisible, except when they fail. This course explores the historical role of infrastructure as a set of planet-spanning systems of resource extraction and crucial conduits of social and political power. Looking at cases from apartheid South Africa and the Suez Canal to Mumbai and Chicago itself, we will consider the relationship of infrastructure with capitalism, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development. We will see how forms of citizenship and exclusion have been shaped and negotiated via wires, leaky pipes, and improvised repairs, and we will consider perhaps the biggest question of all: In this age of ecological crisis, do energy-guzzling infrastructural systems have a strange form of more-than-human agency all of their own?
HIPS 25405 – Feminist Political Philosophy
Instructor: Tyler Zimmer
Description: This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader.
HIPS 25417 – Biology, Technology, and Politics in 20th Century Europe
Instructor: Isabel Gabel
Description: This course examines the intersection between science and politics in modern Europe. In addition to surveying the history of modern Europe through themes such as colonialism and racism, gender and sexuality, the history of labor, and the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, this course exposes students to multiple methodological approaches to the study of history, including the history of science, cultural history, and intellectual history.
HIPS 25707 – Contested Concepts: “Indigeneity” and Ecological Thought
Instructor: Colin Weaver
Description: The figure of “The Ecological Indian” has been critiqued on anti-colonial grounds as a racist inheritance of the conquest era and also affirmed and mobilized by Indigenous scholars and activists as capturing something true about pre- and post-colonial Indigenous forms of life. Despite these tensions, “indigeneity” and the idea that Indigenous peoples are uniquely attuned to nonhuman reality persist as givens in much environmental thought. In this class we will examine and evaluate this persistence, asking, Why are Western environmentalists so attracted to the idea of indigeneity and what do they mean by it? Where does the idea of “the Ecological Indian” come from? In what ways does this idea track reality and how might it obfuscate or distort distinctive Indigenous perspectives? How do different Indigenous people understand and take up this concept? In pursuit of these and related questions, our readings will span Renaissance utopias, theories of colonialism, studies of the religious roots of environmentalism, historical and contemporary environmental writing, and various Indigenous perspectives on empire, the environmental movement, and the other-than-human.
HIPS 26000 – History of Philosophy II: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
Instructor: Thomas Pendlebury
Description: A study of conceptions of the relation of the human intellect to reality in medieval and early modern Europe. Figures studied include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Elisabeth of the Palatinate, Conway, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.
HIPS 27301 – Intro to Medical Anthropology
Instructor: Lorna Hadlock
Description: This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology, the study of the social construction of illness and healing. Our primary focus will be Western biomedicine and the cultural and historical forces that shape both its institutions and the people and bodies interacting with those institutions. Throughout the course, we will attend to tensions and connections between peoples’ lived experience and the structural conditions and systems of authoritative knowledge they face. We will begin with a puzzle – several cases illustrating what can go wrong when the perspective of the patient clashes with the perspective of the medical practitioner. Then, we will contextualize those cases by delving into the political, economic, linguistic, and social processes shaping local and global biomedical cultures – from the lab to the clinic – and how individuals and communities make sense of illness and healing.
HIPS 27515 – Scientific and Humanistic Contributions to Knowledge Formation
Instructor: Dario Maestripieri
Description: In this course, we will explore whether the sciences and the humanities can make complementary contributions to the formation of knowledge, thus leading to the integration and unification of human knowledge. In the first part of the course we will take a historical approach to the issue; we will discuss how art and science were considered complementary for much of the 18th and 19th century (for example, in the views and work of Wolfgang Goethe), how they became separate (‘the two cultures’) in the middle of the 20th century with the compartmentalization of academic disciplines, and how some attempts have recently been made at a reunification under the concept of ‘consilience’.
In the second part of the course, we will focus on conceptual issues such as the cognitive value of literature, the role of ideas in knowledge formation in science and literature, the role of creativity in scientific and literary production, and how scientific and philosophical ideas have been incorporated into literary fiction in the
genre known as ‘the novel of ideas’. As an example of the latter, we will read the novel ‘One, No One, and 100,000’ (1926) by Luigi Pirandello and discuss how this author elaborated and articulated a view of the human persona (including issues of identity and personality) from French philosophers and psychologists such as Henri Bergson and Alfred Binet.
HIPS 27804 – Living our Bodies with Technology
Instructor(s): D. Foerster, E. Mireshghi
Description: We live with and in our bodies, and we cannot experience the world without them. Yet, most of the time, we remain unaware of our bodies and how they are shaped by the technological infrastructures we inhabit. This course explores the complex ways in which technologies—broadly understood—mediate and shape our experience of the body. We will engage with philosophical and anthropological perspectives on the various conditions of the human body and examine how these conditions are influenced by technology and the modern configurations of our lived environments. We will explore questions such as: How do brain scans and real-time ultrasounds shape our experience of our inner selves? Is ADHD a timeless condition, or is it a product of new ways of being and knowing the world? How are organ transplants reshaping our understanding of what makes a person whole? How do artists use virtual reality to tell stories of living with such conditions? How do fitness trackers alter our understanding of well-being? Through critical reflection on different modes of knowing our bodies and communicating lived experiences, we will examine how technologies both reinforce and challenge traditional conceptions of the body, as well as create entirely new ways of living within them. Readings will be drawn from medical anthropology, phenomenology, media theory, and the philosophy of science.
HIPS 27901 – Religion, Science, Naturalism: Is There a Problem?
Instructor: Daniel A. Arnold
Description: The idea that “religion” and “science” are basically at odds with one another — that they involve, indeed, essentially different kinds of rationality — is surely foremost among the ideas that arguably distinguish modernity. This class will consider some of the various ways in which that conclusion has been resisted by some twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers, drawing on a range of philosophical and religious perspectives — those, for example, of the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who would complicate our understanding of what it means to “believe” anything); the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (whose method precisely distinguished existential questions from scientific ones); and the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (who thinks it imperative that the limits of scientific understanding be acknowledged in light of a Buddhist critique). Particular attention will be given to early writings from American pragmatist philosopher-scientists (William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey), who argued that it is a mistake in the first place to think religion necessarily concerns anything “supernatural”; religion, for these thinkers, can therefore be understood as wholly consistent with naturalism.
HIPS 29654 – Tutorial: Elemental Environmental Histories: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water
Instructors: Zi Yun Huang and Sachaet Pandey-Geeta
Description: In various regions of the world, historical human beings have identified Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, and, sometimes, Aether, as the fundamental stuff that makes up the universe. Cultivating intimate relationships with these elements over time, human societies have transformed them, and have been transformed in turn. In the times closest to us, scientists in the new field of Earth Systems Science have expressed their concerns about the human activities that are destabilizing the planet, urging societies across the world to think carefully about how they are transforming the Earth and its elements with their activity.
This course engages with how “elemental thinking” has been essential to human understandings of the natural world, and the different ways humans have intervened in natural processes such as wildfires, earthquakes, the carbon and monsoon cycles. Readings will engage with a wide range of topics from across time and space, from landscape burning in Madagascar to fertilizers mined from the accumulated excreta of bats in Peru, and will deal with objects of varying size, from large dams that trigger earthquakes, to the allergens that cause asthma.
HIPS 29700 – Readings and Research in History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine
Instructor: STAFF
Description: Reading and Research for HIPS seniors working on their senior thesis. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.
HIPS 29810 – Bachelor’s Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Iris Clever
Description: Thesis writing workshop for HIPS seniors.
Spring 2026
Please note that the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization courses do not need to be taken in chronological order.
HIPS 15006 – 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.
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.
HIPS 18504 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: Computation, Culture & Society
Instructor: James Evans
Description: In SCSIII: Computation, Culture & Society, 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.
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?
HIPS 22245 – New Testament Readings: Disability, Healing, and Ancient Medicine
Instructor: Erin Walsh
Description: Within New Testament literature, one encounters numerous narratives of healing and embodied difference. How do these narratives inform our understanding of ancient discourses around the body? What interpretative insights do we gain from reading these texts alongside Greco-Roman discourses of medicine and healing? How have the insights of Disability Studies enriched our understanding of these texts? This Greek exegesis course will introduce students to modern historical, textual, and rhetorical-critical approaches in conversation with the history of interpretation. Students will engage in close readings of the Greek text of representative examples drawn from the canonical gospels. We will examine each passage’s composition, structure, and theology. Through lectures and assignments, students will gain familiarity with the major interpretative trajectories of these narratives within the history of Christian thought. At the beginning of the quarter every student will choose an interpreter or interpretative approach – ancient, medieval, modern, or post-modern – to represent in class discussions.
HIPS 22500 – Death
Instructor: Marielle Harrison
Description: “We die. That may be the meaning of life.” – Toni Morrison
This course is an exploration of death as understood by various religious traditions as depicted in popular culture. Through an exploration of primary and secondary materials, we will explore and discuss topics such as heaven, hell, ghosts, personifications of death and death rituals–comparing contemporary American rituals and narratives about dying with those from ancient China, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, South Africa, Viking-era Northern Europe, and ancient Egypt. Along the way, we will consider questions like whether it would be preferable to live forever and what role death plays in giving life meaning.
HIPS 23830 – Power and Medicine
Instructor: Caine Jordan
Description: The marvel of modern medicine has been lauded as a great leveler of the human condition. From sanitary regimes, to the discovery of antibiotics, to anaesthesia and the development of successful surgery and lifestyle intervention, medicine has improved the lives of all humankind. However, research shows that this improvement is not uniform – that some benefit more from medicine than others. This disparity, which public health scientists and medical researchers have followed for decades, is borne of a complex set of societal factors – including socioeconomic status, race, genetic background, environment, and lifestyle. These studies show us a key feature of medicine: it does not exist in a vacuum, and one’s lifespan and quality of life are as tethered to social factors as they are to scientific innovation.
This class will explore the effects of uneven power systems on health and human medicine in modern history. We will explore how different peoples – of diverse racial, socioeconomic and historical backgrounds – experienced medical and sanitary regimes, and how they navigated disparities in access. Every week we will examine a particular theme in the history of medicine and explore its effects first on a regional scale in the U.S., and the following meeting in the global context. The goal in this structure is to demonstrate the diversity of experience and the complex systems that influence medical regimes.
HIPS 25706 – Climate Justice
Instructor: Sarah Fredericks
Description: Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of various theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.
HIPS 29655 – Tutorial – Technē, Technology and Technologies
Instructor: Daniel Kranzelbinder
Description: Has technology become an autonomous force? Is AI best understood as a form of productive understanding or as a kind of knowledge? Should we leave moral deliberation to humans; and can we be friends with robots? What role might technē play in our world, and does it remain a meaningful form for humans to make a difference to reality? In addressing these questions, this course takes as its anchor point Aristotle’s account of technē (productive understanding, sometimes also translated as “art” or “craft”). Our goal is to understand the ethical, political, and philosophical dimensions of technē, technology, and the technologies that shape life. We examine how Aristotle’s ideas about production, understanding, purpose, and human flourishing contribute to questions about technology’s role in society. Readings pair Aristotle’s texts with contemporary work in the philosophy of technology, AI policy, and epistemology. The course also features visits from academics, creatives, and policymakers working on or with AI (tbc). Finally, a word on method: Aristotle’s views offer an original contribution to these debates. However, this is a case where a distinctive standpoint arises through close engagement with a historical author’s writings in light of their own context and aims, rather than by imposing an external theoretical framework upon them. Accordingly, the course will involve close textual and interpretive analysis.
HIPS 29900 – Bachelor’s Thesis
Instructor: Iris Clever
Description: This course is the HIPS major’s senior thesis. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.