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 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 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 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 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 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 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 29900 – Bachelor’s Thesis
Instructor: Isabel Gabel
Description: This course is the HIPS major’s senior thesis. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.