Courses

CHSS 31530 - Reading ethnographically, thinking anthropologically
Instructor: Damien Bright
Description: How do anthropologists use ethnographic writing to puzzle over the human condition? What assumptions and choices do they make to turn diverse beliefs, practices, and struggles into shareable texts and other media? Why are perennial contrasts between self and other, here and there, author and audience integral to anthropology’s vast intellectual appetites? This course explores the twin arts of ethnographic reading and anthropological thinking. It is structured along two axes: 1) an intellectual history of anthropological thought from its institutionalization at the turn of the twentieth century to the present; 2) an exploration of different dimensions of human experience that anthropologists turn to and return to (e.g., myth & ritual, meaning & language, time & space, belonging & relationality, magic & science, violence & authority). Students will learn to identify the conventions of ethnographic writing, to distinguish dominant anthropological “schools of thought,” and to unpack taboos and controversies central to the discipline’s development. This course involves staggered assessment that culminates in a final comparative project. It is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students by consent and fulfills the MAPSS methods requirement.

CHSS 32504 - Science and Liberalism
Instructor: Isabel Gabel
Description:  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 institutional 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). This course turns to the historical relationship between science and liberalism in modern Europe to explore how science and political culture have together produced our current ideal of truth and asks what historians in particular can contribute to these fraught contemporary debates.

CHSS 33500 - Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Virgina Schultheis
Description: An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.

CHSS 34921 - 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.

CHSS 35421- History of Censorship from the Inquisition to the Internet
Instructor: Ada Palmer
Description: Censorship over time and space, with a focus on the history of books and information technologies. The class will meet in Special Collections, and students will work with rare books and archival materials. Half the course will focus on censorship in early modern Europe, Latin America and Iberian Asia, including the Inquisition, the printing press, and clandestine literature in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Special focus on the effects of censorship on classical literature, both newly rediscovered works like Lucretius and lost books of Plato, and authors like Pliny the Elder and Seneca who had been available in the Middle Ages but became newly controversial in the Renaissance. The other half of the course will look at modern and contemporary issues, from wartime censorship, to comic books, to digital-rights management, to free speech on our own campus.

CHSS 50003 - Sociology of the State
Instructor: E. Clemens
Description:Through taxation, regulation, redistribution, and the provision of services, modern states profoundly shape social life and constitute a principal form of political power. This seminar will survey major theories of the state, engaging with both comparative-historical questions (pre-modern state forms, the rise of nation-states, the development of welfare states and economic policy regimes) and contemporary challenges of governance. The course provides an overview of selected current research and an opportunity for those interested in political, historical, or macro-comparative sociology to develop empirical projects with the state as an important dimension of analysis.

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CHSS 33830 - Power and Medicine
Instructor: Caine Jordan
Description: The marvel of modern medicine has been lauded as a great leveler of the human condition. From sanitary regimes, to the discovery of antibiotics, to anaesthesia and the development of successful surgery and lifestyle intervention, medicine has improved the lives of all humankind. However, research shows that this improvement is not uniform - that some benefit more from medicine than others. This disparity, which public health scientists and medical researchers have followed for decades, is borne of a complex set of societal factors - including socioeconomic status, race, genetic background, environment, and lifestyle. These studies show us a key feature of medicine: it does not exist in a vacuum, and one’s lifespan and quality of life are as tethered to social factors as they are to scientific innovation.

This class will explore the effects of uneven power systems on health and human medicine in modern history. We will explore how different peoples – of diverse racial, socioeconomic and historical backgrounds - experienced medical and sanitary regimes, and how they navigated disparities in access. Every week we will examine a particular theme in the history of medicine and explore its effects first on a regional scale in the U.S., and the following meeting in the global context. The goal in this structure is to demonstrate the diversity of experience and the complex systems that influence medical regimes.

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