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.

CHSS 30506 - Cities, Space, Power: Introduction to urban social science
Instructor: Neil Brenner
Description: This lecture course provides a broad, multidisciplinary introduction to the study of urbanization in the social sciences. The course surveys a broad range of research traditions from across the social sciences, as well as the work of urban planners, architects, and environmental scientists. Topics include: theoretical conceptualizations of the city and urbanization; methods of urban studies; the politics of urban knowledges; the historical geographies of capitalist urbanization; political strategies to shape and reshape the built and unbuilt environment; cities and planetary ecological transformation; post-1970s patterns and pathways of urban restructuring; and struggles for the right to the city.

CHSS 33501 - Historical Highlights in Astronomy from Hipparcos to Hubble
Instructor: Edward Kolb
Description: This course will focus on important developments in our understanding of the universe from ancient Greeks to modern Geeks, taught from the perspective of a scientist. Even more interesting than the advances were the missteps and false assumptions that impeded progress. The course grade will be based on a 45-minute presentation about a relevant person or historical discovery.

CHSS 35270 - Infrastructure Histories
Instructor: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Description: Dams, sewers, container ships, water pipes, power lines, air conditioning, and garbage dumps: the critical infrastructures that enable modern life are so often invisible, except when they fail. This course explores the historical role of infrastructure as a set of planet-spanning systems of resource extraction and crucial conduits of social and political power. Looking at cases from apartheid South Africa and the Suez Canal to Mumbai and Chicago itself, we will consider the relationship of infrastructure with capitalism, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development. We will see how forms of citizenship and exclusion have been shaped and negotiated via wires, leaky pipes, and improvised repairs, and we will consider perhaps the biggest question of all: In this age of ecological crisis, do energy-guzzling infrastructural systems have a strange form of more-than-human agency all of their own?

CHSS 43006 - The Nervous System
Instructor: Joseph Masco
Description: How do states of emergency come to be shared and felt? What are the circuits of perception, attention, and sensory experience that produce a collective anxiety and fear? How is the biological nervous system in part a psychosocial mechanism, linking the individual to the collective via feelings, affects, anticipations? This seminar explores writers (across critical theory, ethnography, and history) that directly engage public agitation about collective conditions. It will explore how mass mediation and the ongoing revolution in information technologies extend and amplify older systems of psychosocial mobilization and recruitment, creating new circuits of attentional capture.

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 57300 - Colloquium: Environmental History
Instructor: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Description: This graduate colloquium provides an advanced introduction to the vibrant field of environmental history, and is particularly designed for PhD students seeking training in the field’s increasingly diverse approaches. Alongside classic texts, we will discuss recent examples of methodologically innovative research. Some of these works contribute to emerging subfields like animal history, evolutionary history, climate history, ocean history, and Anthropocene history; others find novel uses for more established historical approaches, like commodity history, labor history, and urban history. Some rely on traditional archival sources, while others draw on oral history, archaeological and linguistic evidence, and insights borrowed from the natural sciences. Through close reading, we will examine how environmental historians have addressed new analytical and aesthetic challenges: negotiating relationships with science and scientists, incorporating non-human agency, and writing history at the unfamiliar scales of deep time, the pathogen, and the planetary. A happy side effect is that we will be reading some of the most vivid and eloquent historical work being penned today. Many (though far from all) environmental historians aim to reach broader audiences by experimenting with style and narrative. While encountering the conceptual and empirical range of environmental history as a discipline, we will also pay attention to the craft of writing history.

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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