KNOW courses are offered by the faculty of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at both the graduate and the advanced undergraduate levels. 

For graduate students, we offer a number of cross-listed seminars as well as an annual core sequence in topics in the formation of knowledge (KNOW 401, 402, 403). These seminars are team-taught by faculty from different departments or schools and are open to all graduate students regardless of field of study. Graduate students who enroll in two quarters of this sequence are eligible to apply for the Dissertation Research Fellowships.

For undergraduate students, we offer courses cross-listed in departments and schools across the University, as well as unique courses taught by the Institute's Postdoctoral Scholars. To browse courses, search by department, quarter, academic year, or type in a keyword that interests you. In addition, the Institute launched the Experimental Capstone (XCAP) in 2018-19, team-taught courses for fourth-year undergraduate students interested in building upon their UChicago educational experience by adding practice, impact, and influence as important dimensions of their undergraduate work. 

 

"The IFK was not something I discovered until my fourth year in the College, and I still wish I had engaged with it sooner. The IFK granted me the opportunity to explore social-scientific questions on how new technology impacts what we know, how we know, and the limitations to access to knowledge. The course I took at the IFK gave me the freedom to explore these questions in more depth than has been allowed in other courses I have taken during my undergraduate experience. The courses of study provided by the IFK are unable to be found in any single other major, and brings together students from across disciplines and programs to engage in unique discussion."

-- Undergraduate student, History and Sociology double major, Fourth Year

"Explorations of Mars provided me the rare opportunity to engage with students of different majors and with Mars-related pieces published across a wide range of disciplines. In our seminars and assignments, Professor Bimm challenged us to think through complex societal questions whose answers benefitted from each student's unique perspective. We were also empowered to equally utilize critical thinking, creativity, and imagination as analytical tools and to steer the discussion towards our own emerging concerns. Overall, this class provided an intellectual environment I've encountered nowhere else at UChicago: one that valued each student's voice, that immersed us in contemporary space issues, and that thrived on the multidisciplinary approaches central to IFK's mission."

MENTORING: "I have brought undergraduate and graduate students into my research projects. They learn about sociological research methods and have the opportunity to contribute to ongoing studies that investigate the politics of biomedical knowledge production. In the College Summer Institute (2023) I trained three undergraduate students in sociological methods, and they contributed to data collection and analysis for two projects. All three of these students stayed on to work as Quad Scholars in the 23-24 year." Dr. Melanie Jeske, 2022-24 IFK Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor

Environmental Justice In Chicago

  • Course Level: Undergraduate
  • Department: Environmental and Urban Studies, Chicago Studies, American Studies, Public Policy Studies - Harris School, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Religious Studies
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • T Th 11:00am-12:20pm
  • KNOW 25704 / RLST 25704 / AMER 25704 / CHST 25704 / CRES 25704 / ENST 25704 / PBPL 25704
  • Sarah E. Fredericks

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

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, Law, Letters, and Society, History, History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • T 2:00pm-4:50pm
  • KNOW 25415/35415 / HIST 25415/35415 / CHSS 35415 / HIPS 25415 / LLSO 23501
  • Adrian D S Johns

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

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • T Th 2:00pm-3:20pm
  • KNOW 20035/30035 / NEHC 20035
  • Seth Richardson

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

  • Course Level: Undergraduate
  • Department: History, Classical Studies, Religious Studies, Italian, Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, Medieval Studies
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • M W 1:30pm-2:50pm
  • HIST 12203 / KNOW 12203 / CLCV 22216 / FNDL 22204 / ITAL 16000 / MDVL 12203 / RLST 22203 / SIGN 26034
  • Ada Palmer

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

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: MA Program in the Humanities, Big Problems, Comparative Literature
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • Wed 10:30 am – 1:20 pm
  • KNOW 29943, CMLT 29943, CHST 29943, BPRO 29943, REES 29950, CRES 29943, MAPH 39943
  • Olga Solovieva and Bożena Shallcross

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

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Health and Society
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • T Th: 2-3:20 pm
  • KNOW 37017 / HLTH 27017
  • Brian Callender & MK Czerwiec

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

  • Course Level: Undergraduate
  • Department: Russian and Eastern European Studies, Comparative Literature, Big Problems
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • Wed: 10:30 AM-01:20 PM
  • KNOW 29943 / CMLT 29943 / CHST 29943 / BPRO 29943 / REES 29950 / MAPH 39943
  • Olga Solovieva and Bozena Shallcross

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

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Sociology
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • Tue Thu: 02:00-03:20 PM
  • KNOW 30103 / SOCI 20103/30103
  • Ross Stolzenberg

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

  • Course Level: Graduate
  • Department: Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, Art History, Visual Arts, MAPSS
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • T 3:30-6:20pm
  • KNOW 40310/1, ARTH 40311, ARTV 40310, CHSS 40410
  • Anastasia Klimchynskaya

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

  • Course Level:
  • Department: Graham School
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Spring
  • T 10:00am - 12:30pm 3/29/22 - 5/17/22
  • KNOW 11001
  • Tal Arbel

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.