Courses

CHSS 30574 - How to Think Sociologically
Instructor: Marco Garrido
Description: To paraphrase Georg Simmel, sociology isn’t just a great pot into which a bunch of topics related to society are dumped. It represents a particular perspective on the world, one that is very different from common-sense and commonly available perspectives rooted in, say, economics, biology, physics, or psychology. Sociologists tend to explain the world using words like social structure, culture, agency, and process rather than self-interest, genetics, evolution, natural laws, or neural wiring. A sociological perspective can be very powerful, casting a new and clarifying light on important social issues and problems, from racial segregation in the United States to democratic backsliding globally (and in the United States). The aim of the course is to get students to think sociologically and deepen their sociological imaginations. To this end, we’ll discuss a set of societally important (and not at all controversial) topics, including epistemology, identity, inequality, race, sexuality, social class, orientalism, and political division. As the course will demonstrate, a sociological approach can help illuminate these topics and shed new light on how to approach them. While the readings will include dense social theory, every effort will be made to make the ideas at stake accessible to a non-specialized audience.

CHSS 31530 - Thinking Anthropologically, Then and Now
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 32000 - Colloquium: Introduction to Science Studies
Instructor: Adrian Johns
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.

CHSS 33500 - Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Kevin Davey
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 36301 - Religion and Medicine
Instructor: Elham Mireshghi
Description: This colloquium course introduces students to the anthropological study of religion and medicine, focusing on how cultural, moral, and spiritual frameworks shape understandings of illness, healing, suffering, and death. We will explore how communities interpret disease as having both physical and spiritual causes, and how healing practices—ranging from ritual and prayer to biomedical interventions—are embedded within social, ethical, and cosmological systems. Dying, brain death, and organ transplantation are examined as ethically and culturally contested domains, alongside experiences at the threshold of life, such as near-death events and terminal lucidity. We will also consider suffering and disability as socially and spiritually meaningful experiences that inform caregiving, moral responsibility, and community obligations. The course is structured to support students across disciplines, including those in medicine, clinical research, and pastoral care, who seek to understand the intersections of religion, culture, and medical practice.

CHSS 47015 - 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.

CHSS 57202 - Modern Nature
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: What does it mean to know the natural world, and how has that knowledge been used to shape, defend, critique, and expand the modern world? This course explores the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of “nature” and “modernity” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brings together literature on the rise of the biological and ecological sciences with the histories of industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and colonialism to consider how nature and the natural been mobilized to diverse political and social ends—and how ideas about nature have shaped social and political outcomes in turn. We will also consider how “nature study” and the natural sciences were mobilized for projects of popularization, mass education, and mass politics and how concepts of nature and biocapital are mobilized in the present day.

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