Courses | Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine

Please see University of Chicago Class Search for specific class schedule information.

Current Courses:

Autumn 2023

HIPS 15005 – Engineered Environments in East Asia
Instructor: Yuting Dong
Description: Environments in East Asia have drastically changed in the twentieth century. Seawalls and cities rose in coastal areas that were previously untouched along Japan’s coast; cement-dams replaced dirt dikes that divided the Han river in the Korean Peninsula; and railroads expanded into far-off regions in China, redefining both cities and hinterlands. These are three archetypal examples of technically complex projects that this course will explore. These industrial and technological projects of a national, regional, or global scale connect past to present and pose questions to our future about climate change, public health crises, and energy anxieties. This class asks what engineered environments are and how they shape our everyday life.

We will visit three types of archetypal megaprojects—the railway system, the transformation of ocean space, and the building of dams––in China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped and continue to shape the environments of East Asia, an economically vibrant, politically challenging, and ecologically diverse region, with a deep history and vibrant technological innovations even today. We will discuss the politics and science behind the building of each megaproject, the interconnected history among them, and more importantly, how each project generated its environment, shaped the relationship between human societies and nature, and influences our current understanding of the region.

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 20003 – Reading Race
Instructor: Russell H. Tuttle
Description: Before and since Anthropology became a discrete scientific field of study, questions about the biological reality, potential utility and misuse of the concept of race in Homo sapiens have been debated. We will read and discuss a sample of writings by 18th, 19th, and 20th century and contemporary authors who attempted to define human races and those who have promoted or debunked the utility of the concept of race with special attention to it role in retarding social progress, and the extermination and exploitation of some populations and individuals

HIPS 20700 – Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Paskalina Bourbon
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 22204 – Science, Governance, and the Crisis of 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 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). In addition to exploring the complex historical relationship between science and liberalism in the modern era, this course will critically assess how the history of science and the history of political thought have theorized truth and governance. We will examine what models of “coproduction” and “social construction” – nearly ubiquitous in the historiography of modern science – fail to capture about the histories of science and state power. We will also think about how political and intellectual historians’ theories of truth and mendacity in politics might be enriched by more attention to scientific knowledge in both its technical and epistemological forms. This course focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Europe and the United States in global perspective, and readings will draw from political theory, history, economic thought, the natural and human sciences, and critical theory.

HIPS 22701 – Abortion: Morality, Politics, Philosophy
Instructor: Jason Bridges, Dan Brudney
Description: Abortion is a complex and fraught topic. Morally, a very wide range of individual, familial, and social concerns converge upon it. Politically, longstanding controversies have been given new salience and urgency by the Dobbs decision and the ongoing moves by state legislatures to restrict access to abortion. In terms of moral philosophy, deep issues in ethics merge with equally deep questions about the nature of life, action, and the body. In terms of political philosophy, basic questions are raised about the relationship of religious and moral beliefs to the criminal law of a liberal state. We will seek to understand the topic in all of this complexity. Our approach will be thoroughly intra- and inter-disciplinary, drawing not only on our separate areas of philosophical expertise but on the contributions of a series of guest instructors in law, history, and medicine.

HIPS 22709 – Introduction to Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
Instructor: Thomas Pashby
Description: In this class we examine some of the conceptual problems associated with quantum mechanics. We will critically discuss some common interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation and Bohmian mechanics. We will also examine some implications of results in the foundations of quantum theory concerning non-locality, contextuality and realism.

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 25104 – History and Philosophy of Biology
Instructor: Robert J. Richards
Description: This lecture-discussion course will consider the main figures in the history of biology, from the Hippocratics and Aristotle to Darwin and Mendel. The philosophic issues will be the kinds of explanations appropriate to biology versus the other physical sciences, the status of teleological considerations, and the moral consequences for human beings.

HIPS 25316 – Global Science
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: Is all science global, and if so, how did it get that way? Are some sciences more global than others? What has been at stake historically in describing scientific activity as variously local, transnational, international, or global, and how have these constructions influenced the historiography of the field? In this graduate colloquium, we will explore different approaches to writing and examining scientific knowledge production as a global phenomenon, as well as considering different historiographic attempts at grappling with science’s simultaneously local and global qualities, poly-vocal nature, and historical coproduction with global political and economic power.

HIPS 25505 – The Scientific Image
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: on problems of formalism, abstraction, and realism. What makes a “good” scientific image? What kind of work do scientific images do? What philosophical, ideological, and political constraints underwrite attempts to render the complexity of events and entities in the world in stylized visual vocabularies? And how might we approach the work of aesthetics and style in image-making? We will examine these questions through a survey of several contemporary scholarly frameworks used for thinking about problems of representation in scientific practice, and will attend to such image-making practices as graphing, diagramming, modeling, doodling, illustrating, sculpting, and photographing, among other methods.

HIPS 25605 – Life and A Life
Instructor: Arnold Brooks
Description: This course is about the aims of human life. We address the question through two contrasting conceptions of life: 1) life in the sense of an ongoing activity—and its associated values of pleasure, enlightenment, and happiness, and 2) life in the sense of a biographical story—and its associated values of achievement, glory, meaning, and purpose. We will attempt to understand how these two conceptions of life are compatible, and if one or the other is prior. Readings include: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, and Jonathan Lear.

HIPS 26080 – Technologies of the Body
Instructor: Melanie Jeske
Description: From models and measures to imaging technologies and genomic sequencing, technologies have profoundly shaped how we know and understand human bodies, health, and disease. Drawing on foundational and contemporary science and technology studies scholarship, this class will interrogate technologies of the body: how they are made, the ways in which they have changed understandings of the human condition, their impact on individual and collective identities, and the interests and values built into their very design. Course readings will examine how technologies render bodies knowable and also construct them in particular ways. We will also focus on how technologies incorporate, and reinforce, ideas about human difference. Students will conduct an independent, quarter-long research project analyzing a biomedical technology of their choice. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and explain the social, political and economic factors that shape the design and production of biomedical technologies, as well as the impact of these technologies on biomedicine and the social world more broadly. This course provides students with an opportunity to conduct a quarter-long research project, using a biomedical technology as a case study. Students will be introduced to foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in science and technology studies, and will use this scholarship to conduct their independent research.

HIPS 26311 – Aspirations of Justice
Instructor: Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Description: This class thinks through questions of what justice means, what justice promises, what justice betrays, and what possibilities for politics are opened by aspirations of justice at moments of radical rupture. It does so through a focus on critical conceptual terms that also become the frameworks for praxis and institutionalization after war/violence/trauma/revolution/colonialism/slavery/casteism: terms such as transition, transformation, restoration, reconstruction, and repair. The readings will be comparative but grounded out of South Africa’s experience of transition from apartheid, a process that remains frictioned, fractured and far from finished. At the core of the class are two concerns. First: how does one think about non-retributive forms of justice, and what aporias of forgiveness lie at their core? Second, how do these imaginaries and forms of justice get constituted and instituted, out of different histories of foundational violence, different transitional processes, at different moments in time? How, in the process, do histories themselves get rewritten through a process of rewriting wrongs?

HIPS 26313 – Judaism, Medicine, and the Body
Instructor: Ranana Dine
Description: For centuries the “Jewish doctor” has existed as an archetype, but is there such a thing as Jewish medicine? Does Judaism teach a distinct approach to the body, illness, and healing? And more significantly, why should religion have anything to do with one’s health today? In this course we will grapple with our assumptions regarding modern Western medicine by discussing topics in Jewish medical thought and ethics. We will study how Judaism – its texts, history, laws, and traditions – intersect with issues of science, medicine, and the body. In particular we will think about how a Jewish approach to medicine, and more broadly a religious approach, might complicate contemporary assumptions about the body and healing. We will also consider how Jewish bodies have been imagined and stereotyped, and think about how that might affect Jewish approaches to disease and medical ethics. This course will thus offer students a way to think about alternatives to assumptions about medicine, the body, and ethics in the secular West, which will be explored both in class materials and in personal projects. No prior work in Jewish studies, medical ethics, or religious studies necessary.

HIPS 27010 – Counterhistories of Mathematics and Astronomy
Instructor: Prashant Kumar
Description: Mathematics and astronomy are often taught as packaged universal truths, independent of time and context. Their history is assumed to be one of revelations and discoveries, beginning with the Greeks and reaching final maturity in modern Europe. This narrative has been roundly critiqued for decades, but the work of rewriting these histories has only just begun. This course is designed to familiarize students with a growing literature on the history of mathematics and astronomy in regions which now make up the global south. It is structured as a loosely chronological patchwork of counterexamples to colonial histories of mathematics and astronomy. Thematic questions include: How were mathematical and astronomical knowledge conjoined? How were they embedded in political contexts, cultural practices, and forms of labor? How did European scientific modernity compose itself out of the knowledges of others? Where necessary, we will engage with older historiographies of mathematics and astronomy, but for the most part we will move beyond them. No mathematics more advanced than high school geometry and algebra will be assumed. However, those with more mathematical preparation may find the course especially useful.

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 28307 – Global Environmental Humanities
Instructor: Isabel Gabel
Description: This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, which calls on us to study the global environment, and the threats posed by globalization and climate change, using the tools of history, cultural studies, philosophy, and literature. Reading texts from these and other disciplines, we will attend to the ways that “environment” registers in political, aesthetic, and social life across the globe. Sample authors: Fernand Braudel, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula Heise, Joseph Masco, Jed Purdy, Anna Tsing.

HIPS 29637 – Tutorial: Evolution Beyond Darwin
Instructor: Emma L. Kitchen
Description: One of the most identifiable images associated with evolution is the visage of Charles Darwin. Historical narratives of evolution center on Darwin’s work, and scientific publications today still note whether or not Darwin pre-empted their ideas. This course aims to build a narrative of evolution that brings the story up to today, asking why so many see Darwin as a shorthand for evolution and what consequences that might have for the development and communication of the science. In addition, it will interrogate other “iconic” images and narratives in evolution, like the tree of life. We will ask where our ideas about evolution have come from, how they are perpetuated, and what consequence that might have for the discipline of evolutionary biology. The course has three aims: 1) to provide a historical understanding of evolution after Darwin; 2) to reflect on how evolution is communicated between scientists and to the broader public, and to ask how “icons” or Darwin himself suggest implicit meanings counter to the work of the scientists; and 3) to more broadly examine what is a science—a process or a body of knowledge?

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: Robert J. Richards and 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: Emma L. Kitchen
Description: Thesis writing workshop for HIPS seniors.

Winter 2024

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 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 20567 – Introduction to Computational Sociology
Instructor: Austin Kozlowski
Description: Advances in machine learning, high performance computing, and big data are opening exciting new ways of doing social science. This course introduces students to the burgeoning field of computational sociology, emphasizing both conceptual understanding and hands-on training. The course does not require any prior experience with coding, computer science, or statistics. The only requirement is that students have fluency in high-school mathematics (pre-calculus) and an interest in acquiring computational skills. Students will learn the basics of R and Python, and will gain practical experience with simulation modeling, computational text analysis, and neural networks. This course will pair a practical training in computational methods with a critical examination of how these technologies are being deployed in the real world and their roles in reproducing systems of power and inequality. This class is recommended for students who want a basic introduction to “data science” and who are seeking the conceptual knowledge necessary to participate in current debates over information technology in contemporary society.

HIPS 20700 – Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Molly Brown, Ryan Simonelli
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 21406 – Britain 1760-1880: The Origins of Fossil Capitalism
Instructor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Description: Britain rose to global dominance after 1760 by pioneering the first fossil-fuel economy. This course explores the profound impact of coal and steam on every aspect of British society, from politics and religion to industrial capitalism and the pursuit of empire. Such historical investigation also serves a second purpose by helping us see our own fossil-fuel economy with fresh eyes through direct comparison with Victorian energy use. How much does the modern world owe to the fossil capitalism of the Victorians? Assignments include short essays that introduces students to primary sources (texts, artifacts, and images) and a longer paper that examines in greater depth a specific aspect of the age of steam.

HIPS 22000 – Introduction to Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Thomas Pashby
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 22001 – Colloquium: 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 22100 – Space and Time
Instructor: Kevin Davey
Description: This course is an introduction to some traditional philosophical problems about space and time. The course will begin with a discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes. We will then look at the debate between Newton and Leibniz concerning the ontological status of space and time, and will examine reactions to this debate by thinkers such as Mach and Poincare. Finally, we will discuss the question of what sense is to be made of the claim that space is curved, looking at the writings of Poincare, Eddington, Einstein, Grunbaum, and others. Students will be introduced to the basics of the special and general theories of relativity, at a qualitative level.

HIPS 22277 – The Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn
Instructor: James Conant
Description: Thomas Kuhn was both an historian and a philosopher of science, with broader interests in philosophical issues pertaining to the nature of language, truth and knowledge — and, in particular, pertaining to questions concerning the possibility of communicability, commensurability, and inter-translatability across radically divergent conceptual schemes, theoretical frameworks, or grammatical/ linguistic structures. This course will be devoted to a close examination of the treatment of these topics in Kuhn’s work. For purposes of orientation, we will begin with several class meetings in which we read his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, along with some the central texts which figured in the controversies that book ignited in connection with the aforementioned topics. We will then examine some of the second thoughts Kuhn himself expressed concerning that work in scattered essays written between 1969 and 1977 (some of which are collected in The Essential Tension). The second half of the course will be on Kuhn’s work from 1978 until his death in 1996, starting with the essays collected in The Road Since “Structure”, and further developed in The Presence of Science Past (his 1987 Shearman Lectures) and The Plurality of Worlds (his final unfinished magnum opus).

HIPS 24002 – Mind, Brain, and Mental Health
Instructor: Virginia Rangos
Description: This course will approach the medicalization of mental healthcare, through an intersectional lens, with particular attention to how diagnosis and treatment are gendered and racialized. Topics will include: the construction of diagnostic categories and the process of medicalization and de-medicalization (e.g. of addiction, sexual behavior and identity, etc.); stigma and disability activism; and experiencing and conceptualizing an injured or ill brain/mind. Course material will focus on the United States, with international case comparisons.

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 24810 – Atmospherics
Instructor: Joseph Masco
Description: In a world of changing climate, how do we change the political? What affective chemistry is needed to recognize and mobilize on behalf of shifting air currents? This seminar explores the conceptual and material chemistries of atmosphere. The course will investigate key texts on climate change, embodiment, and affect, as well as recent ethnographic explorations of environmental sensibilities across air, ice, ocean, and land.

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 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 26043 – The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence
Instructor: Andre Uhl
Description: With the emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney, the production of computer-generated content has been made accessible to a wide range of users and use cases. Knowledge institutions are especially challenged to find adequate responses to changing notions of authorship as the mainstreaming of ‘artificial’ texts, audio-visual artifacts, and code is transforming our paradigms of communication in real-time. This course offers an in-depth study of emerging human/AI co-creation practices across text, image, and sound. We will survey recent developments and advanced approaches in critical digital studies from new media theory, science and technology studies, and AI ethics to investigate the impact of AI, machine learning, and big data on cultural production, representation, and consumption. In addition to theoretical discussions, we will conduct research creation experiments aimed at documenting and evaluating emerging methods of AI augmented content creation to speculate on new discursive practices that rethink and redraw the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the algorithmic age. Prospective students should demonstrate a substantial interest in media arts and design and its connections to digital humanities, critical theory, and pedagogy. Experience with artistic and/or engineering practice is a plus.

HIPS 26054 – Formation of Knowledge MAPSS Core: Ways of Knowing
Instructor: Tal Arbel & Shadi Bartsch
Description:This seminar introduces students to the conditions and processes of knowledge formation that shape our understanding of truth, our theories of social life, and our projections of possible futures. It examines how claims to knowledge emerge out of disciplinary, historical, and political contexts, as well as local cultural factors, both explicit and unspoken: how do institutions, technologies, and other normative structures produce, stabilize, or disrupt knowledge? How do scientists and artists examine and represent the world differently? What makes expertise and why do we trust certain ways of knowing over others? Building upon methods and perspectives in the social sciences and humanistic social sciences, this seminar introduces problems, concepts, and analytical tools that will enable students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to examine how we know what we know.

“Ways of Knowing” is a required seminar for all students wishing to undertake the Formation of Knowledge MAPSS track https://sifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/. It also counts towards a required MAPSS Methods seminar.

HIPS 27011 – Histories of Women in Science
Instructor: Kristine Palmieri
Description: In the mid-1980s, only two female students drew women when asked what a scientist looked like and none of the male students in the study did. Only 8% of STEM workers in 1970 were women; in 2019 that number was still only 27%. This would seem to suggest that the history of women in science is a recent one. Yet historians of science have foregrounded women’s involvement in fields ranging from early modern medicine to twentieth century astrophysics. This class introduces students to these histories, investigates how and why science came to be a gendered as male, and asks to what extent gendered values continue to inform modern conceptions scientific achievement or value. In so doing, this course also introduces students to feminist science studies and challenges students to reflect upon their own (gendered) experiences of science. Students are strongly encouraged to develop final research projects that draw upon their own interests, scientific expertise, and linguistic competencies.

No prior experience with history is required for this course, although an enthusiasm for history is advised.

HIPS 29648 – TUTORIAL: Science in Horror
Instructor: Emma L. Kitchen
Description: Does science dispel fear or enhance it? What can horror and film teach us about the visceral experiences, hopes and fears, and societal narratives around science? In this course we’ll explore historical narratives of science as both a tool to remedy fear and a means to stoke or facilitate it. The course will cover texts from the genre of horror, including films and literature, in addition to academic pieces on the relation of film and science, science and myth, and knowledge and fear. Themes for our weekly discussions include science as an observational or intervening enterprise; nature and humans; science and the occult; and changing societal villains across history. Students will cultivate a facility with historical and philosophical approaches to science as well as literary and film criticism through the genre of horror.

HIPS 29810 – Bachelor’s Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Emma L. Kitchen
Description: Thesis writing workshop for HIPS seniors.

Spring 2024

HIPS 17522 – Energy in World Civilizations II
Instructor: Julia Mead
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 18505 – Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization III: Histories of the Bomb
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: In the long history of the planet, the years since 1945 have a remarkable and unique geological signature: one left by the creation and testing of atomic weapons, medicine, and energy. This class explores the intellectual, social, economic, and political histories of nuclear research, including topics such as transnational scientific migrations; the Manhattan Project; weapons testing and development; the rise of “Big Science”; postcolonial histories of nuclear development; domestic and international anti-nuclear activism; and ecological and environmental impacts of fallout, waste, and nuclear accidents. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, we will consider how the story we tell about the history of the nuclear age and the rise of science came to be, and how that story has transformed at different points in the twentieth century.

HIPS 18800 – Philosophical Problems in Cosmology
Instructor: Daniel Hooper
Description: In this course, we will undertake a comparison of the philosophical underpinnings of the Aristotelian and Copernican cosmologies, including a comparison of mechanistic and teleological approaches to the natural world. The epistemological foundations of the scientific method, in particular as applied to cosmology (from Galileo to the modern context) will be examined, as will positivist vs. realistic outlooks on cosmology. (For example, what does science say—or not say—about the inside of a black hole or the space beyond the Hubble horizon?) We will ponder questions such as: Do the epistemological foundations of science require us to be able to repeat relevant experiments? If so, does this disqualify cosmology as a science? If not, why? Might our universe be part of a computer simulation? What information could possibly convince us that this is true or false?

HIPS 20107 – Nature and Technology in the Capitalist Mode of Production
Instructor: Ashima Mital
Description: The crisis of nature and technology is at the heart of the 21st century mode of production as unprecedented planetary scale ecological destruction, climate change, and exhaustion of fossil fuels undercut the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. At the same time, novel techno-natural fixes are being designed to contain the crises immanent to the life process of capital. However, these movements are far from seamless; new tensions, contradictions, and horizons of struggles emerge making a critical inquiry of these concepts urgent to Anthropological thinking. In this course, the students will be introduced to foundational approaches to these problems.

The first half of the course will intensively engage with dialectical materialist frameworks to understand the interrelationship between nature, technology, and consciousness in the capitalist mode of production. From this engagement, we will derive critical concepts that will be used to engage with the pertinent questions of planetary scale appropriation of human, non-human and more-than-human life in emergent anthropological theory and ethnographic literature. In doing so, our goal is to reflect on a series of questions: What is the place of nature and technology in the capitalist mode of production? How and if they embody limits to the workings of capital? How does anthropology allow us to develop new political and theoretical horizons that emerge in the wake of these developments?

HIPS 20223 – Magic, Miracles, and Medicine: Healthcare in the Bible and the Ancient World
Instructor: Richard Zaleski
Description: This course examines the complex issues surrounding the body, disability, and medical care in antiquity. It will be guided by a variety of questions, such as what was the root cause of bodily infirmity and disease in antiquity? How did cultural views of sex, gender, and race influence perceptions of the body and what it meant to be able bodied? Such questions are significant when considering what kind of access to healthcare marginalized groups had. In order to explore these questions, we will examine ancient Mediterranean views of medical care through material remains (e.g., magical amulets and healing shrines) and textual evidence (e.g., Galen and Hippocrates). After considering this wider cultural context, we will examine treatments in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and early Christianity. We will also explore how Christian concepts of medical care evolved in light of accounts of Jesus as a divine healer. In addition to this ancient evidence, we will engage with modern disability studies and sociological analyses to better orient our readings. At the end of the course, students will be better acquainted with the complex relationship between religion and medicine and how that affects modern healthcare decisions.

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: Candace Vogler
Description: In this course, we will read, write, think, and talk about moral philosophy, focusing on Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and work by John Stuart Mill. We will work through our texts with care. Neo-Kantianism is a prominent contemporary form of moral theory. We will use Kant to develop a critique of neo-Kantianism as we go along. We will look at influential criticisms of utilitarianism in the concluding weeks of the term, and we will need to ask ourselves whether either of them applies to the version of utilitarianism developed by John Stuart Mill.

HIPS 21302 – Radicals in Early Modern Britain
Instructor: Adrian Johns
Description: Throughout the 1640s and 1650s it seemed to many in England that the world they had grown up in—a world characterized by patriarchy and hierarchy, by inequality and privilege, by an established church and a monarchical state—was being turned upside down. Against a backdrop of conflict between Parliament and Crown, a power vacuum had opened, and in this vacuum both organized radical groups and individual visionaries saw the opportunity to make a revolution. The goals of these radicals were diverse, and often in contradiction. Some wanted the creation of a strict republic, even a democracy; some sought the elimination of private property; others the abolition of marriage; still others the creation of a millenarian Fifth Monarchy led by King Jesus himself. What they shared was a common desire to remake England into a fundamentally different society, and a failure to achieve their goals. Or was it a failure? Today the voices of these radicals have disappeared from most histories of modern political thought. And yet this forgotten corpus of writing reveals a very different early modern world, with strains of communism, proto-feminism, and dissent that fed the imaginations of radicals for centuries, including many well beyond England. This seminar introduces students directly to the ideas of the seventeenth-century English radicals. They will engage with the history and historiography of the English Revolution, read a variety of primary sources, and complete a research paper.

HIPS 21428 – Apes and Human Evolution
Instructor: Russell Tuttle
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.

Prerequisites: BIOS 10130 or BIOS 10140. NO BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES MAJORS OR NON-BIOLOGY PRE-MED STUDENTS, except by petition. Preference to 3rd and 4th year Anthropology Majors.

HIPS 24001 – Sexual and Reproductive Health and Gender
Instructor: Christopher Kindell
Description: This course will cover topics related to medicine, gender, and sexuality, including: the medicalization of sexual desire and performance; medical, sociocultural, and public health responses to sexually transmitted infections; caring for and criminalizing pregnant (and potentially) pregnant bodies; commodification of reproduction and markets in reproductive materials; and the medicalization of gender and the history and sociology of gender confirming treatment. We will primarily focus on medical cultures in the United States, but will draw on counter-examples from other countries. The readings will approach the material through an intersectional lens.

HIPS 24100 – Is It Ethical to Have Children in the Climate Crisis?
Instructor: Kristina Del Vecchio
Description: Climate change is not just an urgent environmental crisis for scientists, engineers, and policy makers: it is a moral problem that also informs individual and intimate aspects of human life, including choices about reproduction and parenting. For example, a 2018 survey published in the New York Times found that young adults in the U.S. are having fewer children than they would otherwise prefer, in part due to concerns about climate change and overpopulation. In this course, we examine the moral dimensions of having and raising children in an era shaped by climate change, looking closely at two main questions: 1) Is it ethical to have children in light of the world that the next generation will inherit, which may include more extreme weather events, unvoluntary human migrations, diminished access to resources, and heightened insecurity? 2) Is it ethical to have children in the context of the affluent West, where consumptive human populations disproportionately contribute to the effects of climate change that impact the world’s most vulnerable? We will examine various points of view on these questions, engaging material from the disciplines of environmental studies and ethics, science and technology studies, and religious and philosophical ethics. Responses from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black, and religiously diverse authors (and intersections therein) will shape our course readings and discussions.

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 25219 – Science, Culture, and Society in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 1867-1934
Instructor: Zachary Barr
Description: Fin de siècle Vienna is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto Wagner, among other pioneering modernist artists, but it was also home to several of the most important philosophers and scientists of the early twentieth century, including Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Indeed, the city’s artists drew considerable inspiration from its philosophers and scientists and vice versa. The purpose of this course is to examine these cultural entanglements in more detail, and to analyze why Vienna was integral to the development of so many of the aesthetic and intellectual trends that scholars now associate with “modernity.”

Additional Note: This course does not satisfy the Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization Core Requirement.

HIPS 26021 – Sense & Sensibility & Science @UChicago: Scientific Thinking in a Democracy
Instructors: Reid Hastie; Jordan Kemp; Eamon Duede
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 and in a democracy. 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 2024, with an opportunity for students from all three courses to participate remotely in the same deliberative polling capstone experience. UChicago’s spring 2024 course premiere builds on a decade of experience developing and teaching the popular course at Berkeley and Harvard’s adoption of its own version in 2021.

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 27302 – Culture, Mental Health, and Psychiatry
Instructor: Eugene Raikhel
Description: While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as “brain disease,” there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients’ experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?

HIPS 27901 – Religion, Science, Naturalism: Is There a Problem?
Instructor: Daniel 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 29647 – Tutorial: Mathematical Knowledge: Race, Politics and Materiality
Instructor: Abigail Taylor-Roth
Description: Mathematical knowledge is commonly and treated as objective and neutral, even though it is produced through specific societal contexts and in turn impacts those same contexts. In this course we will take a thematic approach to studying different ways that mathematical and quantitative knowledge are both produced and used. We will consider multiple angles for approaching the study of mathematics by connecting mathematical knowledge to topics such as labor, racial sciences, pedagogy, materials, nation-building, and bodies. In particular, this course will encourage students to think creatively about other possibilities for how we could justly and effectively use mathematics in our lives. There are no mathematical pre-requisites; students with a variety of experience with mathematics will be able to participate fully in this course.

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