Autumn
The History of Capitalism in India
This discussion-based, seminar-style course explores the trajectory of capitalism in India from the late colonial period to the present. How should we understand colonial India’s place in the global history of capitalism? What was the relationship between postcolonial economic planning and changing class politics in the decades after independence in 1947? Finally, has India begun to converge upon a global paradigm of neoliberalism since the 1980s? As part of this course, we will read classic texts of Indian political economy, analyzing how both the theory and practice of capitalism in the region challenge Western-centered histories. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Christianity and Slavery in America, 1619-1865
This seminar will examine the relationship between Christian thought and the practice of slavery as they evolved historically, especially in the context of European enslavement of peoples of African descent in the colonies of British North America and in the antebellum South. Emphasis will be placed on the ways in which Christianity functioned as an ideological justification of the institution of slavery and an amelioration of practices deemed abusive within slave societies. The following questions will be addressed in some form: Why did some Christians oppose slavery at a specific time and in a particular historical context? In other words, why did slavery become a moral problem for an influential though minority segment of the United States by the early 19th century? What was the process by which and why did white evangelical Christians, especially in the South, become the most prominent defenders of slavery as it was increasingly confined to the South? What were some of the consequences of debates about slavery in regard to efforts to engage broader social reform? What role did race play in the historical development of slavery? How did people of African descent shape and practice Christianity in British North America and the Southern States of the United States? Although our focus is on what became the United States of America, we also linger on discussions about the broader international dimensions of slavery and slavery's importance in the development of the Americas. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Riding about the South Side
This course is based on bicycling through the South Side neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago. There will be some readings, but the primary input will be from riding-from seeing things at street level and speaking with people who are committed to living in places that often have been abandoned by others. We can read and theorize about the community surrounding us, but the premise in this class is that our work should begin with experience in that world, with direct contact and in conversation. My approach in this class is less to teach than to lead you to where things are waiting to be learned and to people who can teach you about their world better than I. Some of the themes we will cover include land rights and exploitation, architecture, town planning, placemaking, urban farming and ecology, sustainability, grass roots organization, labor rights and exploitation, immigration, social work, and street art. Each ride is organized around a set of key concerns and includes a conversation with a local insider who can help us better understand them.
Law and Citizenship in Latin America
This course will examine law and citizenship in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will explore the development of Latin American legal systems in both theory and practice, examine the ways in which the operation of these systems has shaped the nature of citizenship in the region, discuss the relationship between legal and other inequalities, and analyze some of the ways in which legal documents and practices have been studied by scholars in order to gain insight into questions of culture, nationalism, family, violence, gender, and race. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Classical Theories of Religion
This course will survey the development of theoretical perspectives on religion and religions in the 19th and 20th centuries and the institutional and historical contexts within which they developed. Thinkers to be studied include Kant, Hume, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Marx, Muller, Tiele, Tylor, Robertson Smith, Frazer, Durkheim, Weber, Freud, James, Otto, van der Leeuw, Wach, and Eliade. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
God of Manga: Osamu Tezuka’s “Phoenix,” Buddhism, and Post-WWII Manga and Anime
How can the Buddhist axiom "All Life is Sacred" describe a universe that contains the atrocities of WWII? Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and father of modern Japanese animation, wrestled with this problem over decades in his science fiction epic Phoenix (Hi no Tori), celebrated as the philosophical masterpiece of modern manga. Through a close reading of Phoenix and related texts, this course explores the challenges genocide and other atrocities pose to traditional forms of ethics, and how we understand the human species and our role in nature. The course will also examine the flowering of manga after WWII, how manga authors bypassed censorship to help people understand the war and its causes, and the role manga and anime have played in Japan's global contributions to politics, science, medicine, technology, techno-utopianism, environmentalism, ethics, theories of war and peace, global popular culture, and contemporary Buddhism. Readings will be mainly manga, and the final paper will have a creative option including the possibility of creating graphic work.
Technologies of Race Making
This course considers the intersections between technology, science, and race. It explores how technologies have been developed and used to assign racial meaning to people's identities and bodies and how this has impacted economic, political, and social power structures. We will read studies relating to historical and present-day technologies and discuss topics such as racial science, phrenology, biometry, surveillance and policing, artificial intelligence and automation, and data production and reuse. A major theme that runs through the course is the practice of race-making, how biological race is enacted and made relevant in specific technological practices. Which assumptions and expectations about human variation are built into the technologies? What are the effects of its use in practice? How does race making configure into more durable forms, such as standards, databanks, and protocols? This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Explorations of Mars
Mars is more than a physical object located millions of miles from Earth. Through centuries of knowledge-making people have made the “Red Planet” into a place that looms large in cultural and scientific imagination. Mars is now the primary target for human exploration and colonization in the Solar System. How did this happen? What does this mean? What do we know about Mars, and what’s at stake when we make knowledge about it? Combining perspectives from the social sciences and humanities, this course investigates how knowledge about Mars is created and communicated in not only science and technology fields but across public culture. A major focus will be learning how Mars has been embedded within diverse social and political projects here on Earth. Through reading-inspired group discussions and instructor-led experiential research projects, the course will move from the earliest visual observations of Mars to recent robotic missions on the planet’s surface. In doing so, this seminar will critically grapple with evolving human efforts to make Mars usable. No prior knowledge of Mars is required. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/
The End of Certainty? Chaos, Complexity, and Human Life
What is uncertainty? Is it a temporary state of affairs, a situation to be resolved with more data, or is it permanent feature of our world? This course examines how uncertainty, once understood as the absence of knowledge, has become an object of knowledge in its own right. We will pay particular attention to the fields of chaos theory and complexity science, which emerged in the late twentieth century from physics and mathematics but have since become widely applied sciences, making their way into fields as diverse as molecular biology and economic theory. Together we will follow the path of ‘complexity’ in its many forms, reading texts by geneticists, physicists, climate scientists, philosophers, economists and many others. By the end of the course we will have developed a shared archive of uncertainty, and gained a better understanding of how uncertainty underpins what we do, in fact, know. This course is collaborative, interdisciplinary and historical, and welcomes all interested students, including those with backgrounds in history, philosophy, biological sciences, environmental studies, mathematics, and economics.
Human Bodies in History
How have we come to know and experience our bodies? This undergraduate seminar develops humanities research skills necessary to study the body in history. Spanning early modern cultural practices to modern medicine, science, and technology, this course explores how ideas and practices concerning the body have changed over time and how the body itself is shaped by culture and society. A major focus will be learning how to conduct different forms of historical research to produce cutting-edge humanities scholarship about the human body. Readings will introduce key themes and recent scholarship including work on disability, reproduction, race, gender, ethics, extreme environments, and identity. This dynamic research group will grapple with issues at the heart of our corporeal existence by combining perspectives from the history of science, medicine, and technology, cultural history, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS).
Winter
When Cultures Collide: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies
Coming to terms with diversity in an increasingly multicultural world has become one of the most pressing public policy projects for liberal democracies in the early 21st century. One way to come to terms with diversity is to try to understand the scope and limits of toleration for variety at different national sites where immigration from foreign lands has complicated the cultural landscape. This seminar examines a series of legal and moral questions about the proper response to norm conflict between mainstream populations and cultural minority groups (including old and new immigrants), with special reference to court cases that have arisen in the recent history of the United States.
Philosophy of History: Narrative & Explanation
This lecture-discussion course will focus on the nature of historical explanation and the role of narrative in providing an understanding of historical events. Among the figures considered are Gibbon, Kant, Humboldt, Ranke, Collingwood, Acton, Fraudel, Furet, Hempel, Danto. (B) (III)
Religion, Medicine, and the Experience of Illness
This course introduces students to both the dynamic relationship between religion and medicine and the role of religion as it relates to the experience of illness. Through a survey of a broad selection of religious traditions, textual genres, and case studies, students will evaluate how religion offers a pliable explanatory system (through myths, symbols, rituals, etc.) to address questions of causation, coping, and curing vis-à-vis illness. The historical relationship between religions and medical systems has been fascinatingly complex. We will encounter examples where religion and medicine work in tandem as complementary explanatory systems, e.g., with devotion to holy figures such as Saint Jude. We will also discuss what happens when religion usurps the explanatory role of medicine, e.g., when the activity of spirits becomes the diagnostic explanation for a medical condition such as epilepsy. Drawing upon literature from art history, medical anthropology, sociology, history, and theology, this course surveys the impressive variety of responses to illness both across religious traditions and within those traditions. Prior knowledge of religious studies and/or medical history is not required for the course.
Coming of Age: Youth Cultures in Postcolonial India
In this course, we will gain a deeper understanding of how certain key moments in postcolonial India-from student protests to an economic transition to globalization, from rise of Bollywood to the omnipresence of social media-have shaped the youth of the country and how young people in turn have been at the forefront of some of the major events and have created history on their own terms. We will ask-if youth is a construct like gender and caste then how was it constructed over the last seventy years? We will keep two guiding questions in mind-who all are considered to be the youth in postcolonial India? And-what are the lived experiences of young people during this time? The ever changing, seemingly arbitrary, and conflicting definitions of youth in government reports, commercial advertisements, or popular culture demands a thorough analysis of this category inside out. We will take an inter-disciplinary approach and examine how the identity of being young intersects with other identities such as class, ethnicity, linguistic abilities and so on. By identifying the constitutive elements of being part of the young generation in a young nation such as India, we will challenge any homogeneous perception of "the youth" and read young people's experiences in their own contexts. Focusing on youth culture in South Asia will help us think critically about youth culture studies where the Global South remains underrepresented.
The Role of Science in U.S. Education Reform
How should science inform the improvement of education? Can education be studied scientifically? These questions have haunted American education research since its 19th century beginnings. In this course, Lagemann’s history of U.S. education research, An Elusive Science, will serve as a central orienting text, and students will read primary sources by the figures it describes: Dewey, James, Thorndike, Coleman, Tyler, and more. The course will end with a consideration of contemporary topics such as research-practice partnerships and design research. In taking on the case of American education research, students will confront and discuss the entanglements of epistemology and history, measurement and social organization, knowledge and authority.
The Scientist in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination
The nineteenth century saw both the professionalization of science and the specialization of its practitioners. In this age of “human empire” produced by industrialization, new technologies offered humanity unprecedented dominion over the natural world, and the “scientist,” a term coined in 1834, marked the advent of the idea of a vocation dedicated to that mastery. Moreover, by the end of the century, the natural philosophers and polymaths of earlier ages had given way to chemists, physicists, biologists, and statisticians, whose scope of study was necessarily both deeper and narrower. These developments produced a new social and political positioning for the scientist – an expert, an authority, a wielder of power. This class explores how nineteenth-century fiction writers, from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, engaged with these emerging and transforming conceptualizations of the scientist figure. We will pair our literary explorations with non-fiction readings texts by thinkers and scientists such as Humphry Davy, Karl Pearson, Claude Bernard, William Whewell, and Max Weber (“Science as Vocation”) about what the scientist should be and science should do. Additionally, we’ll consider how this literary genealogy influences both our fictional portrayal of science to this day as well as our perceptions of it – from our contemporary distrust of expertise to our fear of the scientist playing god. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Morality
Morality is essential for societal functioning and central to human flourishing. People across all cultures seem to have the same sense about morality. They simply know what morality is, often without being able to concretely define what exactly it means to label something as a moral kind. But when one tries to more precisely and scientifically define what morality is, things become less clear and more complex. As we’ll see in the class, the field of morality is incredibly dynamic, and characterized more by competing theories and perspectives than by scientific consensus. Some research has worked deductively, starting with a theoretical definition (like the moral foundation theory) to generate hypotheses. Other research has taken a more inductive approach, starting with lay people’s perception of morality.
The past decades have seen an explosion of theoretical empirical research in the study of morality. Amongst the most exciting and novel findings and theories, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have shown that morality has evolved to facilitate cooperation and social interactions. Developmental psychologists came up with ingenious paradigms, demonstrating that some elements underpinning morality are in place much earlier than we thought in preverbal infants. Social psychologists and behavioral economists examine the relative roles of emotion and reasoning, as well as how social situations affect moral or amoral behavior. Social neuroscientists are mapping brain mechanisms implicated in moral decision-making. The lesson from all this new knowledge is clear: human moral cognition and behavior cannot be separated from biology, its development, culture and social context. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Britain in the Age of Steam, 1783–1914
In the Victorian era, Britain rose to global dominance by pioneering a new fossil-fuel economy. This course explores the profound impact of coal and steam on every aspect of Victorian 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. Assignments include short essays based on energy "field work" and explorations in past and present material culture. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Scientific and Humanistic Contributions to Knowledge Formation
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. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Sociology of urban planning: cities, territories, environments
This course provides a high-intensity introduction to the sociology of urban planning under modern capitalism. Building upon an interdisciplinary literature drawn from urban sociology, planning theory and history as well as urban social science and environmental studies, we explore the emergence, development and continual transformation of urban planning in relation to changing configurations of capitalist urbanization, modern state power, sociopolitical insurgency and environmental crisis. Following an initial exploration of divergent conceptualizations of “planning,” the “city” and “urbanization,” we investigate (a) the changing sites and targets of planning intervention; (b) the evolution of political and institutional struggles regarding the instruments, goals and constituencies of planning; (c) the contradictory connections between planning and diverse configurations of inequality, power and domination in modern society (including class, race, gender and sexuality); and (d) the question of whether and how planning strategies might help produce alternative (more socially just and environmentally sane) forms of urbanization in the future. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
Art and Technology Since World War I
This seminar tracks the entanglements of visual art and "technology," a term which took on an increasingly expanded set of meanings beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period between World War I and the present, we examine these expanded meanings and ask how the work of art fundamentally shifted with, extended, tested, or acted upon "technology." We consider cases from the art historical avant gardes, the impact of cybernetics and systems thinking on architecture and visual perception, midcentury collectives that sought to institutionalize collaborations between artists and engineers, as well as more subtle exchanges between art and technology brewing since the Cold War. Course readings drawn from art history and the histories of science and technology, as well as site visits to art collections on campus, will inform our investigation. Students will gain historical insights into the relation between visual art and technology; develop analytical tools for critically engaging with the present-day interface of art, science, and engineering; and consider the implications for the futures we imagine. Students will have the option to propose alternative final projects that incorporate or extend practices across visual art and the sciences on campus.
Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment.
Normal People
We often worry about what’s normal and what’s not. Is my IQ above average? What about my BMI? Should I be feeling this way? Is there a pill for that? People seem to have always been concerned with fitting in, but the way of describing the general run of practices and conditions as “normal” is a rather recent phenomenon; testament to the vast influence modern science have had on how we understand ourselves. Charting a wide-ranging history of the ways that human traits and behaviors came to be classified and measured, this research seminar will introduce students to the theories and techniques used to distinguish the normal from the pathological and the deviant for the past 200 years. We will read Cesare Lombroso on born criminals and Richard von Krafft-Ebing on sexual perversion; learn about psychological tests and developmental milestones; and consider the kinds of people these scientific and medical efforts brought into being. In addition to lecture and class discussions, the course includes close engagement with a diverse historical archive: scientific and medical treatises, clinical case studies, diagnostic tools, and patient narratives. Students will also explore how the University of Chicago contributed to the definition and establishment of normality through a project at the university’s archival collections.
Knowing Animals
“What is an animal, and are we them?” In “Knowing Animals,” we will approach this deceptively simple question from multiple angles, exploring the diverse ways that humans come to know and differentiate themselves from other animals and the implications of that labor. How can we understand and write about the lived experience of a bat, an octopus, or a hawk? Who decides which species are essential to experimental science, and which are simply edible? Why do we buy canine pharmaceuticals or construct tiger preserves in Oklahoma? The course will explore how hunting, eating, petkeeping, labor, experimentation, and cohabitation with animals contribute to the formation of knowledge. We will draw on scholarship in history, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and critical theory, as well as novels and films in order to do so. The course is meant to serve in part as an introduction to the topics and methods of animal history and animal studies, so we will read foundational texts as well as recent scholarship on the intersections of animality, capital, disability, gender, and race. Students will leave with core competencies in the field as well as—hopefully—a deeper sense of what it means to be human. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.
IFK MAPSS Core: Ways of Knowing
This seminar introduces students to the processes of knowledge formation that shape our understandings of nature, our theories of social life, and our projections of possible futures. “Ways of Knowing” 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 we decide what we know and don’t know? How have societies produced, stabilized, or disrupted knowledge? How do techniques of inscription, observation and mediation—like seismographs, experiments, and simulations—allow us to see what we know and to know what we see? The course will take an expansive approach to knowledge formation by considering the interface of epistemology, social theory, technology, and governance.
"Ways of Knowing" is a required seminar for all students wishing to undertake the Formation of Knowledge MAPSS track. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/. This course counts towards the MAPSS graduate methods requirement.
KNOW 20035/30035: Babylonian Knowledge: The Mesopotamian Way of Thought
This course has two goals. The first is an interior goal, to introduce students to the major categories of knowledge created and employed in ancient Assyria and Babylonia, as the Mesopotamian "core curriculum." This was the corpus of material that had to be mastered by scribes of the Neo-Sumerian and Neo-Assyrian periods, including proverbs, lists, omens, geographies, medicine, magic, law, mathematics, history, royal wisdom, and accounting. The second goal is "exterior": to examine the epistemological precepts on which knowledge was constructed. What was held to be knowable? What methods and techniques were used to identify and justify knowledge as valid or authentic? What roles did copying, editing, authorship, and literacy play in the production of knowledge texts? How the organization and preservation of texts create canons and curricula? No prior knowledge of Mesopotamian history or literature is required. Students are asked to think with the primary texts, not to demonstrate mastery of them.
KNOW 18400: Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization II: Renaissance to Enlightenment
This lecture-discussion course examines the development science and scientific philosophy from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The considerations begin with the recovery of an ancient knowledge in the works of Leonardo, Vesalius, Harvey, and Copernicus. Thereafter the course will focus on Enlightenment science, as represented by Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Hume. The course will culminate with the work of Darwin, who utilized traditional concepts to inaugurate modern science. For each class, the instructor will provide a short introductory lecture on the texts, and then open discussion to pursue with students the unexpected accomplishments of the authors under scrutiny.
KNOW 26000: BIG: Monumental Buildings and Sculptures in the Past and Present
Why are so many societies - including our own - obsessed with building monumental things like pyramids and palaces? What do we learn about cultures past and present from the monuments they built? This course explores famous monuments from around the world to answer these questions through the lens of archaeology, architecture, and art history.
KNOW 25804: Feminists Read the Greeks
Since the 1970s, thinkers writing on gender, sex, and sexuality have staged a series of generative, critical, and sometimes controversial encounters with ancient Greek thought, politics, and culture. As one classicist puts it, feminist theory has "gone a long way… toward inscribing classical Greek philosophy at the origins of some of the most tenacious assumptions about sexual difference in the Western tradition." This course explores the ways that the texts and practices of ancient Greece, if not the idea of "the Greeks," have provided theoretical and symbolic resources for feminists and others to think critically about gender (and sexuality) as a conceptual and political category. What sorts of interpretive and historical assumptions govern these engagements? To what extent might the trajectories of gender studies, feminism, and classics be intertwined? Was there a concept of "gender" in ancient Greece? Of sexuality? Is it fair to say, as many have, that classical Greek ideas about gender and the sexed body are wholly opposed to those of the moderns? What other oppositions could this habit of thought be working to keep in place? Sample reading list: Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Republic, Foucault's The Use of Pleasure, Ann Carson's Oresteia, Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim.
Spring
Normal People: History of the Human Sciences
We often worry about what’s normal and what’s not. Is my IQ above average? What about my BMI? Should I be feeling this way? Is there a pill for that? People seem to have always been concerned with fitting in, but the way of describing the general run of practices and conditions as “normal” is a rather recent phenomenon; testament to the vast influence modern science have had on how we understand ourselves. Charting a wide-ranging history of the ways that human traits and behaviors came to be classified and measured, this research seminar will introduce students to the theories and techniques used to distinguish the normal from the pathological and the deviant for the past 200 years. We will read Cesare Lombroso on born criminals and Richard von Krafft-Ebing on sexual perversion; learn about psychological tests and developmental milestones; and consider the kinds of people these scientific and medical efforts brought into being. In addition to lecture and class discussions, the course includes close engagement with a diverse historical archive: scientific and medical treatises, clinical case studies, diagnostic tools, and patient narratives. Students will also explore how the University of Chicago contributed to the definition and establishment of normality through a project at the university’s archival collections.
Race, Gender, and the Production of Knowledge
To what extent does "what we know" have to do with who we are? This advanced undergraduate seminar explores the field of "social epistemology" with a special emphasis on gender and race. We will examine classical models of knowledge in contrast to contemporary models of epistemic interdependence, focusing on how the production of knowledge is impacted by group social structures and what social practices must be in place to ensure that voices of the marginalized are heard and believed. Looking at examples from literature and our ordinary lives, we will investigate how race and gender intersect with these issues, especially on the topics of testimony, White ignorance, and epistemic injustice. Finally we will explore the possibility of an ethical epistemic future, asking how we can redress wrongdoing and construct communities of epistemic resistance and epistemic justice.
Third-year and above philosophy or fundamentals majors.
Medical Knowledge in Early Modern Japan and China: History/Literature
This experimental seminar examines how medical knowledge is constituted and disseminated in texts, images, and performances in early modern Japan and China (roughly 1600-1850). This period saw an explosion in the number of doctors, print and visual materials, and a new centrality of medical, pharmacological, and bodily knowledge and practices. Looking beyond established national, cultural, and political boundaries, we will study how shared medical traditions converge and diverge over time and space. How did literary genre shape and constrain the forms medical knowledge took and vice-versa? Who has access to and who has control over technologies of health and sickness, including learned medicine, vernacular healing, and self-care? How was efficacy understood, contested, and proven in a medical and legal context? Primary sources to be read include medical and crime cases, forensic reports, plays, novels, biographies, imperial encyclopedias, almanacs for daily life, illustrated pharmacopeia, religious tracts, printed advertisements, and shops signs. Film and tv episodes will be screened to explore contemporary narratives of early modern medical knowledge in the very different political and media economies of post-war China and Japan.
XCAP: The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities
Any class is an intentional community of sorts: people gathered together with a sense of collective purpose. But often the hopes of students are not met by the content or the methods in the classroom. Can we do better by making the process more intentional—clarifying and developing a collective sense of purpose at the outset? We will start by forming a collective plan on topics to be explored—anything from iconic American communities and Russian communes to memoir studies and economics. Possible projects include creating an intentional community in an off-campus location, designing a communal space, rewriting manifestos, or creating a new communal charter. We can cover anything from economics, space, and gender to the problem of leadership and secular belief systems. We may also want to utilize alternative modes of learning, besides reading and discussing texts, such as roleplaying. A few students in the class have some experience in intentional communities, and we will welcome their input and suggestions. XCAP courses are designed to challenge students to build upon their UChicago educational experience by adding practice, impact, and influence as important dimensions for undergraduate education.
Environmental Justice In Chicago
This course will examine the development of environmental justice theory and practice through social scientific and ethical literature about the subject as well as primary source accounts of environmental injustices. We will focus on environmental justice issues in Chicago including, but not limited to waste disposal, toxic air and water, the Chicago heat wave, and climate change. Particular attention will be paid to environmental racism and the often understudied role of religion in environmental justice theory and practice. Throughout the course we will explore how normative commitments are expressed in different types of literature as well as the basis for normative judgments and the types of authorities authors utilize and claim as they consider environmental justice.
History Of Information
Everybody knows that ours in an information age. No previous generation ever enjoyed access to the mass of material made available by Google, iTunes, Amazon, and the like. At the same time, however, no previous generation ever had its reading, listening, and traveling so thoroughly tracked, recorded, data-mined, and commercialized. Information thus shapes our culture for both good and ill, and it is up to us to understand how. This course provides students with the materials to do that. It ranges across centuries to trace how information has been created, circulated, and controlled. In short, it tells us how our information age came into being, and why it has generated the issues with which it now confronts us.
Babylonian Knowledge: The Mesopotamian Way Of Thought
This course has two goals. The first is an interior goal, to introduce students to the major categories of knowledge created and employed in ancient Assyria and Babylonia, as the Mesopotamian "core curriculum." This was the corpus of material that had to be mastered by scribes of the Neo-Sumerian and Neo-Assyrian periods, including proverbs, lists, omens, geographies, medicine, magic, law, mathematics, history, royal wisdom, and accounting. The second goal is "exterior": to examine the epistemological precepts on which knowledge was constructed. What was held to be knowable? What methods and techniques were used to identify and justify knowledge as valid or authentic? What roles did copying, editing, authorship, and literacy play in the production of knowledge texts? How the organization and preservation of texts create canons and curricula? No prior knowledge of Mesopotamian history or literature is required. Students are asked to think with the primary texts, not to demonstrate mastery of them.
Italian Renaissance: Petrarch, Machiavelli, And The Wars Of Popes And Kings
Florence, Rome, and the Italian city-states in the age of plagues and cathedrals, Petrarch and Machiavelli, Medici and Borgia (1250-1600), with a focus on literature, philosophy, primary sources, the revival of antiquity, and the papacy's entanglement with pan-European politics. We will examine humanism, patronage, politics, corruption, assassination, feuds, art, music, magic, censorship, education, science, heresy, and the roots of the Reformation. Writing assignments focus on higher level writing skills, with a creative writing component linked to our in-class role-played reenactment of a Renaissance papal election (LARP). This is a History Department Gateway course. First-year students and non-History majors welcome.
Diasporic Narratives and Memories: Designing a New Concept for a Multi-Ethnic Museum of Belarusian Emigration
Of the many emigrant communities in Chicago, Belarusians are the only group that does not yet have its own museum. Our course takes this lack as an opportunity to train the students to create a grassroots community-driven initiative to empirically develop a conceptual foundation for a new type of multi-ethnic museum of emigration, informed by the experiences of community members themselves. This course will allow students to actively participate in a museum creation project which takes as its point of departure not a nation-state narrative but the everyday life of a multi-ethnic community with the goal of informing research, policy, and public discourse about emigration. The course participants will collaborate with the Chicago Studies Program, the NGO Belarusians in Chicago, Chicago History Museum to conduct the oral histories from the Belarusian community members to preserve, collect, and interpret knowledge about Belarusian emigration in order to present the full breadth of the multi-ethnic and inclusive Belarusian community. The students will conduct the field work about multi-ethnic Belarusian emigration to include experiences of Belarusian Jews, Belarusian Russians, Belarusian Lithuanians, Belarusian Tatars, and other groups from Belarus. Collected from people of different generations, these multi-ethnic collective narratives will be analyzed by the participants and become a catalyst, prompting a better understanding of the challenges of emigration and of maintaining cultural identity in the context of diaspora, and for reimagining what the future museum of this community should look like from the point of view of the members of multi-ethnic Belarusian community itself. XCAP courses are designed to challenge students to build upon their UChicago educational experience by adding practice, impact, and influence as important dimensions for undergraduate education.
[Re]Framing Graphic Medicine: Comics and the History of Medicine
What does the medium of comics contribute to our knowledge and understanding of illness, disability, caregiving, and disease? What can the history of comics teach us about the history of medicine? How can making comics help us understand these histories while forming individual knowledge about our bodies and health? [Re]Framing Graphic Medicine: Comics and the History of Medicine is a course designed to introduce students to the history and the basic concepts and practices of the field of graphic medicine. Throughout the quarter, we will visit the Special
Collections to view rare and historical materials to learn about the history of comics and medicine. Through critical analysis and discussion of both historical and contemporary works, students will also be exposed to a variety of styles, genres, and applications that capture the breadth and diversity of graphic medicine. An important component of the class will be exercises through which students will create their own graphic medicine works as a way to explore knowledge formation about health, illness, and one’s body through comics-making. Taught by a nurse cartoonist (and a founding figure in graphic medicine) and a physician, the course provides a perspective of the field from within the practice of medicine. No prior knowledge or experience of graphic novels, comics, drawing, or medicine required.
XCAP: Diasporic Narratives and Memories: Designing a New Concept for a Multi-Ethnic Museum of Belarusian Emigration
This course project takes the instability of Belarusian identity as an advantage for creating a new model of multi-ethnic, open emigrant community with a potential of cooperative democratic integration into a larger multi-ethnic landscape of Chicago. This project’s relevance goes beyond the Chicago community, offering a model of multi-ethnic integration for building a civil society in the Belarusian homeland. The course will involve theoretical readings in the studies of diaspora, training in oral histories gathering provided by the Chicago History Museum, and weekly field trips to the diasporic museums in Chicago. We will analyze these museums’ curatorial and narrative concepts in order to build upon their strengths and to avoid their weaknesses.
Social Stratification
Social stratification is the unequal distribution of the goods that members of a society value -- earnings, income, authority, political power, status, prestige, etc. This course introduces various sociological perspectives about stratification. We will look at major patterns of inequality throughout human history, how they vary across countries, how they are formed and maintained, how they come to be seen as legitimate and desirable, and how they affect the lives of individuals within a society. The readings incorporate classical theoretical statements, contemporary debates, and recent empirical evidence. The information and ideas discussed in this course are critical for students who will go on in sociology and extremely useful for students who want to be informed about current social, economic, and political issues.
Technology and Aesthetics
New technologies regularly enable new mediums, styles, genres, and narrative forms as they offer us new ways to record the world, express ourselves, and tell stories. But the advent of each new artistic and literary form raises anew fundamental theoretical questions: what is the difference between an objective record of the world and an artistic rendition of it? Is what makes something art the creator’s intent or the viewer’s perception of it as art? That is, can something be experienced as art if it is not intended as such? What, even, is a narrative, given our minds’ tendency to resolve any random pattern into a coherent series of cause and effect? And, finally, as new technologies offer endless new creative possibilities, how can we continuously recalibrate how we define art and engage with it?
Normality: A History
Worrying about what’s normal and what’s not is an endemic feature of our culture. Is my IQ above average? What about my height? Should I be feeling this way? Is there a pill for that? People seem to have always been concerned with fitting in, but the way of describing the general run of practices and conditions as “normal” is a rather recent phenomenon; testament to the influence that modern science has had on how we understand and organize ourselves as a society. Offering a broad historical overview of the ways that physical traits, intellectual ability, and social behavior came to be scientifically delimited and measured, this course will introduce students to the theories, techniques, and tools that were used to distinguish the normal from the pathological and the deviant for the past 200 years. We will read Lombroso on born criminals and Krafft-Ebing on sexual perversion; learn about intelligence tests and developmental milestones; and consider the kinds of people these efforts brought into being. In addition to lecture and class discussions, the course includes close engagement with a diverse historical archive: scientific and medical writing, clinical case studies, diagnostic instruments, and patient narratives.
Gaming History
How do games reflect, theorize, and alter history? This interdisciplinary research seminar will explore the history, design, and function of games, drawing on strategies from history, media and game studies, and cultural anthropology in order to understand the place of games in the history of knowledge and our knowledge of history. How have historical simulations, such as Civilization, represented scientific, social, and cultural progress? How do games, such as Settlers of Catan, invite players to perform and inhabit historically specific subjectivities? What is the role of popular titles, such as Call of Duty: Cold War, in the pedagogy of public history? By representing alternate and future histories, games articulate theories of historical change. They even change the future by suggesting and popularizing modes of political, economic, and social agency. In this course, we will play games about history, including video games, tabletop games, and other analog game formats, to consider how they represent the structure of time, causality, and choice. Through class discussions, example games, and theoretical readings, we will learn about methods, theories, and case studies for gaming history and historicizing games. Students will practice original archival, ethnographic, and media archaeological research into the history of games, and gain experience writing about and critically analyzing media objects. The seminar will emphasize practice-based research alongside traditional humanistic research, including critical game play and game design. The course will culminate in a solo or collaborative game design project that intervenes in gaming culture and its histories.