Please see University of Chicago Class Search for specific class schedule information.
Current Courses:
Autumn 2024
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 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 22200 – Introduction To The Philosophy Of Science
Instructor: Kevin Davey
Description: We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This will involve a discussion of inductivism, Popper’s deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including underdetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature.
HIPS 22820 – Reading Darwin’s Origin Of Species
Instructor: Robert J. Richards
Description: In this course, we will read carefully each chapter of Darwin’s Origin and discuss it in detail—especially the logic and rhetoric of his arguments and special features. Each student will takes us through a chapter of the 1st edition, noting any changes introduced in subsequent editions, and, then, a general discussion will ensue guided by the instructor.
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 25001 – Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason
Instructor: Thomas Pendlebury
Description: This will be a careful reading of what is widely regarded as the greatest work of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Our principal aims will be to understand the problems Kant seeks to address and the significance of his famous doctrine of “transcendental idealism”. Topics will include: the role of mind in the constitution of experience; the nature of space and time; the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of objects; how causal claims can be justified by experience; whether free will is possible; the relation between appearance and reality; the possibility of metaphysics.
HIPS 26304 – Religion And Abortion In American Culture
Instructor: Emily Crews
Description: In American public discourse, it is common to hear abortion referred to as a “religious issue.” But is abortion a religious issue? If so, in what ways, to whom, and why?
In this course we will answer these questions by tracing the relationship between religion and abortion in American history. We will examine the kinds of claims religious groups have made about abortion; how religion has shaped the development of medical, legal, economic, and cultural perspectives on the topic; how debates over abortion have led to the rise of a certain kind of religious politics in the United States; and how issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the body are implicated in this conversation. Although the course will cover a range of time periods, religious traditions, and types of data (abortion records from Puritan New England, enslaved people’s use of herbal medicine to induce miscarriage, and Jewish considerations of the personhood of the fetus, among others), we will give particular attention to the significance of Christianity in legal and political debates about abortion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
There are no prerequisites for this course and no background in Religious Studies is required. However, this course may be particularly well-suited to students interested in thinking about how certain themes or areas of study—medicine and medical sciences, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, political science—converge with religion and Religious Studies.
HIPS 29650 – Tutorial – Pig History: East Meats West
Instructor: Niu Teo
Description: If we are what we eat, we’re mostly Chinese pigs. Pigs make up the largest part of the global meat market pound for pound, and China produces and consumes about half of the world’s pigs, most of which are produced with methods and technology owned by US/UK based agribusinesses. Not only does the Chinese appetite for pigs sustain the global pork industry, it also curated most of the genetic material from which today’s industrial pig is formed. Pigs in China were penned as early as six to seven thousand years ago, becoming temperamentally and biologically adjusted to living in captivity, unlike their half-wild European brethren, who were loosely kept under inverse conditions of relative land abundance and labor scarcity. Crossing lean, large, and fast-growing European pigs with fat, docile, and early maturing Chinese ones enabled pigs to make it onto industrializing meat markets in the 19th century. The rest, as they say, is history.
Beginning with prehistoric pigs and their multiple sites of domestication, tracing their role in industrializing Britain, colonizing the Americas, feeding soldiers and export markets, and the rise of global agribusiness, this class invites an exploration of modernity from a pig perspective.
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: Isabel Gabel
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: Isabel Gabel
Description: Thesis writing workshop for HIPS seniors.
Winter 2025
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 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.
HIPS 18402 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization II: The Scientific Revolution
Instructor: Zachary Barr
Description: This course focuses on one of the most radical transformations in the history of Western thought: the so-called “Scientific Revolution.” In addition to analyzing the origin and development of Copernicanism, Galilean mechanics, and Paracelsian alchemy—among other revolutionary ideas—we will examine several institutional and methodological innovations that profoundly altered how early modern Europeans investigated the natural world, including the advent of the experimental philosophy and the creation of scientific academies.
HIPS 18900 – Mapping the Heavens: Early Astronomical Surveys
Instructor: Richard G. Kron
Description: The science of astronomy has been characterized as establishing “our place in the Universe.” The stars we see in the night sky seem to extend indefinitely. Are they organized in some kind of structure? How far out do they go? What lies beyond the stars? Questions like these motivated much of the work at observatories in the years from 1890 to 1920. Thanks to technological advances in telescopes and photography during this period, significant progress was made in constructing maps that located the Solar System with respect to the surrounding “system of the stars.” In this class we will explore the historical development of understanding the arrangement of things in space using resources that were available to the practitioners at the time: original photographic glass plates (mostly digitized files); star catalogs and maps; and scientific publications. To the extent possible, we will try to understand how the science looked from the perspective of astronomers a hundred years ago. Along the way we will study aspects that confounded astronomers then, most importantly the nature of the “spiral nebulae” (spiral galaxies), and how the “nebular system” (large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution) related to the “sidereal system” (the Milky Way).
HIPS 20205 – Race in African History
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
Description: This course examines the category of race in African history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. It references the legacies of earlier identity constructions in the creation of these categories, as well as analyzing its transnational and trans-imperial dimensions.
The class combines intellectual, cultural, and social history to illuminate the actors, encounters, and debates animating this dynamic field of study—moving beyond assumptions of African societies as spaces of ethnic—and not racialized—identities to examine the construction of difference through transnational history of science, gender and sexuality studies, histories of slavery, Middle Eastern colonial projects, as well as the invention of the category of “native” in European colonial discourse. Are categories of differences primarily due to European colonialism, as many claim? Or are they embedded in a more complex configuration coming from settler colonial projects, national liberation struggles, and postcolonial nativist discourses?
Students examine case studies from across the continent—from Ghana to Sudan to South Africa—paying close attention to experiences of Asian, Arab, and mixed-race peoples navigating colonial and postcolonial African states; while keeping an eye on how debates about difference, diaspora, and nationalism in North America and Europe inform discussions of race in Africa, and how Africans shape discourses of race in colonial metropoles and the United States.
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 20574 – How to Think Sociologically
Instructor: Marco Garrido
Description: This course tackles the “big problem” of low sociological literacy. When faced with the problems of the world, people usually resort to economic, biological, or ideological explanations. They cite self-interest, genetically encoded drives, or some pre-given understanding of how the world works. The price of such simple frameworks is an impoverished view of the world, a lack of understanding and empathy, and a predisposition to orthodoxy or ideology. In this sense, low sociological literacy is a big problem in the world today. This course was developed in the belief that the capacity to think sociologically—that is, to understand people as socially embedded, or shaped by the situations in which they find themselves—can enrich our understanding of the world immeasurably. It can give us analytical purchase on a number of social problems, including poverty; social inequality; racial, class, and gender discrimination; urban segregation; populism and political polarization; and organizational wrongdoing (we’ll discuss each of these topics in class). A sociological perspective can also transform how we engage with the world, promoting an ethics of understanding and empathy–as opposed to the ethics apparently prevalent today: judging people and insisting they change.
HIPS 20700 – Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Jacob McDowell
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 21700 – Science Communication: Explorations of Mars
Instructor: Jordan Bimm
Description: Mars seems to be on everyone’s mind. Is there life there? Will humans ever set foot on the surface? Should we try to establish a settlement? How did we become obsessed with the Red Planet in the first place? This course will prepare you to communicate effectively about space science and join conversations about Mars happening across society. Through readings, activities, and discussions focused on history, science, and culture we will build an understanding of important figures, events, ideas, and trends required to communicate about Mars. A major focus will be learning how Mars has factored into different social and cultural movements here on Earth, including theological debates, military conquest, scientific exploration, and commercial settlement. We combine this foundation with theories and practices from science communication, including how to engage non-expert audiences, explain complex terms and concepts, convey uncertainty and ambiguity, and counter misinformation and conspiracy theories. The course moves from the earliest visual observations of Mars to present-day robotic missions on the planet’s surface, and also considers plans for future human exploration and habitation. Students can expect a deepened understanding of our important cosmic neighbor and how to think, write, and speak about it. No prior knowledge of Mars is required.
HIPS 22001 – Introduction to Science Studies
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: This course explores the interdisciplinary study of science as an enterprise. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists all raised interesting and consequential questions about the sciences. Taken together their various approaches came to constitute a field, “science studies.” The course provides an introduction to this field. Students will not only investigate how the field coalesced and why, but will also apply science-studies perspectives in a fieldwork project focused on a science or science-policy setting. Among the topics we may examine are the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications, actor-network theories of science, constructivism and the history of science, images of normal and revolutionary science, accounts of research in the commercial university, and the examined links between science and policy.
HIPS 22210 – Disease, Health, and the Environment in Global Context
Instructor: Christopher Kindell
Description: Recent concerns about monkeypox, COVID-19, Zika virus, and Ebola have attracted renewed attention to previous disease outbreaks that have significantly shaped human political, social, economic, and environmental history. Such diseases include: smallpox during the 16th-century Columbian exchange; syphilis during the 18th-century exploration and settlement of the Pacific; bubonic plague in the late-19th-century colonization and urbanization of South and East Asia; and yellow fever during America’s 20th-century imperial projects across the Caribbean. Through readings, discussions, library visits, 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 environments. Finally, we will explore how social factors (e.g. migration, gendered divisions of labor, poverty, and segregation) and human interventions (e.g. epidemiology, medical technology, and sanitary engineering) have influenced the distribution of infectious diseases and environmental 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.
PQ: Instructor Consent Only.
HIPS 24003 – Death & Dying
Instructor: Alex 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 24215 – The History of the Book in East Asia: From Bamboo to Webtoon
Instructor: Graeme Reynolds
Description: This seminar offers an overview of the development and history of the “book” and its physical forms, broadly conceived, in East Asia from ancient times to the present. Drawing on recent scholarship, selected primary sources, and rare books housed within the library system, this course familiarizes students with the evolution of the book and methods of book production in China, Korea, and Japan, the principles and practices of material bibliography and the application of such to physical and digital objects, and selected topics salient to the social and cultural meanings of books: authorship, the book trade, reading, censorship, and more. Assignments include a short paper, a short presentation, and a longer final paper. All readings in English, but knowledge of East Asian history or languages helpful.
HIPS 24812 – East Asian Science and Technology: Ways of Knowing
Instructor: Yuting Dong
Description: This course is the first half of the East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine series. The second part of the course will be offered in the spring quarter by Professor Jacob Eyferth. In this series, we will read major works on the history of STM in East Asia and constantly are in conversation with studies of this history in the globe.
HIPS 26000 – History of Philosophy II: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
Instructor: Thomas Pendlebury
Description: A survey of the thought of some of the most important figures of the period from the fall of Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment. The course will begin with an examination of the medieval hylomorphism of Aquinas and Ockham and then consider its rejection and transformation in the early modern period. Three distinct early modern approaches to philosophy will be discussed in relation to their medieval antecedents: the method of doubt, the principle of sufficient reason, and empiricism. Figures covered may include Ockham, Aquinas, Descartes, Avicenna, Princess Elizabeth, Émilie du Châtelet, Spinoza, Leibniz, Abelard, Berkeley, Hume, and al-Ghazali.
HIPS 26815 – History of Science and Technology in South Asia
Instructor: Prashant Kumar
Description: This course is an introduction to a growing literature on the production of scientific knowledge in and about South Asia. Moving away from an earlier historiography, which treated science as a black-boxed, essentially European kind of knowledge that was diffused to the rest of the world, we will pay special attention to the role indigenous and vernacular forms of knowledge played in making modern science. We will range from the early modern period to the contemporary, and deal with a range of topics such as agriculture, industry, communications, biomedicine, water, religion, and capitalism.
HIPS 27301 – Medical Anthropology
Instructor: Eugene Raikhel
Description: This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology. Drawing on a number of classic and contemporary texts, we will consider both the specificity of local medical cultures and the processes that increasingly link these systems of knowledge and practice. We will study the social and political economic shaping of illness and suffering, and will examine medical and healing systems—including biomedicine—as social institutions and as sources of epistemological authority. Topics covered will include the problem of belief, local theories of disease causation and healing efficacy, the placebo effect and contextual healing, theories of embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, modernity and the distribution of risk, the meanings and effects of new medical technologies, and global health.
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 28309 – Natural Science in Aristotle and His Predecessors
Instructor: Daniel Kranzelbinder
Description: ‘Unlike art, science destroys its past,’ is how Thomas Kuhn (1969) once partly distinguished the sciences from the arts. The scientific heroes of old get removed by progress and new breakthroughs. In this class, we examine Aristotle’s relationship to his predecessors in the first book of his foundational treatise on natural science, the Physics. We ask how Aristotle takes himself to make progress over his predecessors and how the answer to that question shapes our understanding of Aristotle’s project in ‘physics.’ To answer these questions, we will develop a rich and complex understanding of Aristotle’s conception of natural scientific inquiry and of the epistemological and methodological assumptions that drive his engagement with his predecessors. In doing so, we will be taking a critical look at the long-standing assumption by readers of Aristotle that his engagement with his predecessors in Physics I uniformly belongs to the dialectical stage of inquiry.
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 2025
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 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 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 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 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 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.
HIPS 18504 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: Computation, Culture & Society
Instructor: James 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.
HIPS 20576 – Social Theory for the Digital Age
Instructor: Karin Knorr Cetina
Description: Society rearranges itself, though we don’t always know where it is heading. When the postmodern moment had arrived in the 1980s it perplexed social theorists, hence its characterization as simply a “post”-stage of modernity. Digitization is one answer to the question of direction of change in the last decades. In this class, we take the ongoing transformations that we attribute to digital media as a starting point to ask what challenges they provide to social theory that may force us to reconsider some of our most basic concepts and premises. We will understand the term digital age broadly to refer to the rise of algorithms, sensors, (big) data, machine learning, and computational methods, all developments that swirl in and around the Artificial Intelligence scene and intersect with and replace purely human relations. The class gives particular attention to concepts such as action and interaction, embodiment, social situations, subjectivity and autonomy, as wells as society as communication.
HIPS 21000 – Introduction to Ethics
Instructor: Benjamin Callard
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 21428 – Apes and Human Evolution
Instructor: Larissa Smith
Description: This course is a critical examination of the ways in which data on the behavior, morphology, and genetics of apes have been used to elucidate human evolution. We emphasize bipedalism, hunting, meat eating, tool behavior, food sharing, cognitive ability, language, self-awareness, and sociability. Visits to local zoos and museums, film screenings, and demonstrations with casts of fossils and skeletons required.
HIPS 22211 – Magic in Early Modern Europe
Instructor: Adrian Johns
Description: Magic was a constant element in early modern European culture. Almost all people in this period, from peasant to prince, accepted it as a real and powerful presence in their lives. They respected its credibility and practices in general, even if they might question particular claims. In this course we address why it was so ubiquitous, what it involved, and why, in the end, it seemed to decline. The course will introduce students to the major arguments that historians in this field have advanced, and provide critical perspectives on the interpretation of the range of practices falling under the term “magic,” from witchcraft and necromancy to alchemy. Among the topics likely to be discussed are demonology, natural magic, astrology, the witch craze, the roles of memory, orality, and literacy in sustaining and qualifying magical cultures, and the relationships between magic, medicine, and science.
HIPS 22305 – Who deserves what? Analyzing inequalities in institutional decision-making
Instructor: Anna Prior
Description: A key element of societal structuring is producing and reproducing ways to identify ourselves and categorize each other. Ways of differentiating often carry with them implicit or explicit moral assessments – is this difference good or bad, valuable or not? Government institutions and other systems of social organization make decisions and allocate resources based on markers of difference. Therefore, inequalities based on morally loaded categories become embedded in systems that decide who is deserving of earning a diagnosis, health care, a legal status or other resources.
This course looks at the ways people become labeled (desirably or not), how these labels impact institutional or systemic decision-making, and how moral assessments are present in justifications of such decisions. Over the quarter we will introduce and apply the analytic of deservingness and investigate decision-making processes (e.g., diagnosis, legal claims, insurance coverage) in various geographic locations and settings with a focus on medical, legal, and bureaucratic institutions. We will explore themes of objectivity, evaluation, expert intervention, inequality, systemic violence and moral justification. Primary course questions include: How do institutions and governments make decisions? How are their decisions justified? What role do experts and expert knowledge play in decision-making? As an analytic tool, what does deservingness make visible about decision-making processes and their impacts?
HIPS 22408 – Climate (Long) Before Climate Change: The Environment According to Medieval Muslims and Christians
Instructor: Alexa Herlands
Description: Few issues are currently considered more significant than “climate change.” Like us, medieval people were concerned about climate. Unlike us, they understood a “climate” as a fixed, unchanging thing. Working between 1250 and 1500, this class examines climate as it was known between Latin and Arabic sources. In both Christian and Muslim scholarly communities, climate had its precedents in Ancient Greek works, so we’ll linger in Iberia, an important conduit through which Latin Christians gained access to Greek ideas, largely by translating Arabic books. In these books, “climate” (which might differ from “environment”) included familiar things: animals and plants, sunlight and rainfall, mineral resources and weather. Yet it also encompassed stranger ideas: magic, astrology/astronomy, and even some ideas we might now call “religious” or “racist.” In our class, we consider how climate has long been a site of “scientific” inquiry and “religious” devotion, cultural confidence and fear of the unknown.
HIPS 23570 – Power and Responsibility in the Anthropocene
Instructor: Colin Weaver
Description: Humanity’s immense impact on Earth’s systems has led some scientists to claim that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Humans’ influence on Earth’s landscape, climate system, and biodiversity inspires many to ask, in turn, What should be done about humankind’s planetary powers? Some scholars and religious leaders claim that people should take responsibility and influence Earth’s systems for good ends, while others argue that we should radically scale down such power. Still others suggest that the Anthropocene requires us to entirely revise our ideas of power and responsibility and even develop new religious sensibilities. Through discussions and focused writing assignments, students in this class will explore and evaluate these and additional responses to the Anthropocene, paying specific attention to how Anthropocene ethical thought wrestles with the place of religion on a changing planet. The course culminates in an extended examination of how Anthropocene discourse conceals racial antagonisms and contemporary decolonial struggles.
HIPS 23810 – Big Data and AI: Global Histories, Ethics, and Justice
Instructor: Iris Clever
Description: Algorithms, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence have become deeply ingrained in our daily lives, shaping how we interact with the world—from ChatGPT to Spotify’s Smart Shuffle. These computational, statistical, and data-driven technologies have enabled remarkable breakthroughs in science and medicine and have fueled visions of an optimized, data-driven future. But alongside these advances come significant challenges. These technologies often reflect and amplify societal biases embedded in the vast datasets they are trained on, resulting in phenomena such as algorithmic bias, cognitive bias, exclusion bias, and sample bias. Moreover, are these technologies truly revolutionary? If they are built upon historical systems of thought and prejudice, how “new” are the modes of computation and data science they claim to represent? This course critically examines our current algorithmic and AI moment through the lenses of history, ethics, and justice. We will explore the global historical roots of data technologies, their ethical implications, and their impact on equity and social justice. No prior knowledge of AI, big data, or history is required. The class is discussion-based, and students are encouraged to share their own experiences with data technologies to enrich our conversations.
HIPS 23820 – Reading William James’s Principles of Psychology
Instructor: Robert J. Richards
Description: In this course we will read carefully the chapters of the Principles and discuss the various features of each chapter, especially the logic and rhetoric of James’s arguments.
HIPS 24240 – Buddhism and Science: A Critical Introduction
Instructor: Jesse Berger
Description: “Buddhism is the only religion able to cope with modern scientific needs.” This quotation, often erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein, prompts the question: Why are such statements about Buddhism so easily taken nowadays as credible and plausible? Currently, it seems no other religion is held as compatible with science as Buddhism: From the recent ‘mindfulness’ craze in psychology and medicine, to the ‘Emptiness’ of quantum physics, Buddhism is uniquely hailed as a ‘rational religion’ whose insights anticipated modern science by millennia. Some even suggest it is not a ‘religion’ at all, but rather a sort of ‘mind-science.’ This course functions as both an introduction to Buddhism and a critical survey of its modern scientific reception. As we explore Buddhism’s relationship to contemporary scientific theories in psychology and physics, we will be guided by questions such as: What methodological principles distinguish the practices of religion and science? What are the different ways they can be brought into relation? Why is Buddhism, in particular, singled out as uniquely scientific? What modern historical factors, like colonialism and secularization, contribute to this contemporary meme? Why does it matter whether Buddhism is compatible with science or not? What, exactly, is at stake in this relationship? And for whom? No prior study of Buddhism or the philosophy of science is expected.
HIPS 24299 – Troubling Adolescence
Instructor: Paula Martin
Description: Many theories of “adolescence” have often emphasized it as a development period of rapid change, risk taking, and experimentation. This course will take on some of key health-related concerns of adolescence, such as mental health (eg. depression, anxiety) and risk behaviors (eg. substance use, sexuality) asking after the phenomenological experience of such concerns as well as exploring their cultural specify. Furthermore, this course will review key historical and development frameworks for understanding “adolescence,” reading them alongside anthropological and queer theories of temporality. Ultimately, the course asks, how do the troubles of adolescence play out in different contexts? And what happens if we trouble the concept of adolescence itself?
HIPS 24615 – History of Energy in East Asia
Instructor: Yuting Dong
Description: This course discusses the history of major energy sources in East Asia with a focus on coal, hydropower, and nuclear power plant. We pay close attention to both the technological side of the history of energy and how different energy sources interact with the social and political environment in Japan, China, and Koreas.
HIPS 24813 – East Asian Science and Technology: Ways of Making
Instructor: Jacob Eyferth
Description: This is the second part of the East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine series. In this series, we will read major works on the history of STM in East Asia and constantly are in conversation with studies of this history in the globe.
HIPS 25207 – Mindfulness: Experience and Media
Instructor: Margot Browning
Description: How do we experience media (of all kinds) with (or without) awareness? Methods of mindfulness offer principles and practices of awareness focusing on mind, body, and embodied mind. Mindfulness (a flexible, moment-to-moment, non-judging awareness) is an individual experience and at the same time, practices of mindfulness can be a mode of public health intervention. Mindfulness involves social epistemologies of how we know (or don’t know) collectively, as we interact with immediate sensory experience as well as with mediated communication technologies generating various sorts of virtual realities (from books to VR). In addition to readings and discussions, this course teaches embodied practices of attention and awareness through the curriculum of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
HIPS 25222 – Philosophies of Life Before and After DNA
Instructor: Isabel Gabel
Description: What is life? Most of us learn in high-school biology that life is some combination of growth, reproduction, and animation, and that it always contains DNA. Yet upon reflection, this definition is unsatisfying. This quarter we will explore some of the philosophical implications of modern biology by reading some of the best twentieth-century thinkers on the subject. The authors we will read have distinct theories about the nature of life, but they share the belief that understanding organic life, not simply spiritual or intellectual life, but the material basis of existence, is a fundamental task for thought. What makes these texts so exciting is that they were written during a time when biology itself was undergoing a series of profound revolutions, most notably (for us), the molecular turn and the discovery of the structure of DNA. As a result of these discoveries, ultimately some thinkers came to wonder, does life exist at all?
After taking this course you will have a grounding in the core philosophical problems that are raised by modern biology about the concept of life. You will gain an understanding of the ways that science, far from simply providing answers, continually furnishes us with new questions about the nature of existence, many of which may be outside the scope of science itself. This course emphasizes close reading and careful analysis of texts. You will be asked “think with” the text before you begin to critique it.
HIPS 26021 – Sense & Sensibility & Science @UChicago
Instructor: Reid Hastie
Description: In Sense & Sensibility & Science, you will learn how to better incorporate into your thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques of science at its best. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for solving problems in your own day-to-day life. Yet, as individuals, as groups, as whole societies we fail to take full advantage of these methods. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.
The undergraduate course will be simultaneously taught at UC Berkeley, Harvard and UChicago in spring 2025. UChicago’s spring 2024 course premiere built on a decade of experience developing and teaching the popular course at Berkeley and Harvard’s adoption of its own version in 2021.
HIPS 26207 – History Colloquium: Epidemics, Public Health, and Cities
Instructor: Susan Burns
Description: The ongoing COVID-19 epidemic has brought a new awareness of the devastating impact of epidemic disease, particularly in cities where population density and other factors contribute to high rates of infection. This undergraduate colloquium aims to guide students through the research and writing of an original research paper that explores public health response to epidemic disease in cities around the world. Topics to be examined include defining an appropriate research question, identifying relevant secondary literature, finding primary sources, and constructing a compelling narrative.
HIPS 26306 – Religion, Medicine, and Human Flourishing on the South Side of Chicago
Instructors: John Yoon, MD and Michael Le Chevallier, PhD
Description: Modern medicine historically promotes health as central to the good life. The contemporary turn in the medical and social sciences to the more capacious concept of human flourishing, however, presses these disciplines into conversation with longer traditions of inquiry on the nature of the good life for individuals and within community. How might philosophical, cultural, and religious traditions reveal the powers and limits of contemporary views of human flourishing? How does the on-the-ground experience of those pushing to advance human flourishing on the south side of Chicago challenge these categories?
Sponsored by the Program on Medicine and Religion, the Hyde Park Institute, and the Chicago Collective on Faith & Flourishing, this course is an innovative experiential course open to undergraduates in the College. This course seeks to expose students to traditional and contemporary perspectives of health and human flourishing, while offering opportunities to engage local faith-based non-profit organizations that seek to promote human flourishing among underserved communities in the South Side of Chicago.
Note: Instructor’s prior consent required for course enrollment to ensure students fully appreciate the dimensions of field education and experiential learning expected from this course.
HIPS 27107 – Frankenstein: Making Monsters in Science and Religion
Instructor: Alex Matthews
Description: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” writes Mary Shelley of Frankenstein. In framing her 1818 novel as itself a monster with agency, she raises questions about why and how we continue to create and regard our creations as monstrous. Why has the creation of artificial life fascinated us from ancient times to modern A.I.? How do we recognize and identify monsters, and what role do we have in their creation? Are creators responsible for their creations, or alienated from them? This class combines close reading of Frankenstein with religious and scientific texts on monsters, the creation of artificial life, and our moral responsibilities to our creations. We will discuss what narratives about the monstrous tell us about our values, how the “human” is contrasted with its opposites, and why the story of Frankenstein—as well as its predecessors and imitators—remains so hauntingly compelling.
HIPS 27250 – Psychological Anthropology
Instructor: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
Description: This course traces the development of the field of psychological anthropology and critically reviews the various paradigms adopted by psychological anthropologists. In our discussions, we will draw examples from different cultural contexts to critically examine the relationship between culture and psychological functioning. By the end of the quarter, you will develop an insightful understanding of the cultural sources of the self, mind, behavior, and mental health as well as a substantial knowledge of the field of psychological anthropology.
HIPS 29651 – Tutorial – Feminist Science and Technology Studies
Instructor: Abigail Taylor-Roth
Description: Feminist science and technology studies (STS) is a rich body of literature that grapples with essential questions about the gendered and political nature of scientific knowledge. This course engages deeply with a range of literature that explores different possibilities for studying the co-construction of race and gender in and through science. We will discuss, among other topics, feminist epistemologies of science, racializing technologies, uses of DNA science, analyses of reproduction, various approaches to new materialisms, and speculative thinking about how science can be practiced differently. In this course, we take an expansive view of the field of feminist STS to consider what does, or does not, cohere about feminist STS as a field of study. We will read work from a wide range of scholars, from foundational scholars such as Donna Haraway and Londa Schiebinger to critiques of the field from Katherine McKittrick and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and others in between.
HIPS 29652 – Tutorial: Colonial Technoscience and Environmental Know-How
Instructor: Hadeel Badarni
Description: The modern interface of technoscience and environment has often been captured by and within violently disrupted surrounds on massive scales. If WWI unveiled the ‘Noösphere’” as the cosmic sphere of the planet (Vernadskii 1945), radioactive traces of the nuclear age rendered interspecies relations surveyable and ecology “a more exact science” (E. Odum 1944). But what is at stake when the entire colony functions as an experimental reservoir for technoscientific efforts to remodel what ‘world ecology’ is and can be? What sorts and modes of know-how arise in geographies whose mediums of apprehension are colonial by reason and design? And how far can they travel? We will read and work together to interrogate some of the historical conditions, motivating concerns, and imaginaries that seek to entangle “colony-making” and “world making” with a planetary urge. By engaging ethnography, history, critical social theory, alongside films and media, we will explore environmental motifs, epistemic desires, and impasses that colonial know-how might entail; what to make of its prototypical candidates? what drives its practical and conceptual reach? and what would anti-colonial responses say or do?
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.