History & Sociology of Science (HSSC)
HSSC 5007 The University
This course is an on-ramp for the emerging field of “critical university studies.” It takes a deep historical approach and begins in the medieval period for one crucial reason: the core function of the university, instruction at a high or expert level, has remained unchanged for almost a millennium. The course additionally presents a broad survey of key scholarship on early modern, on the nineteenth-century German university and on other institutions of higher learning. The second half of the course focuses on the twentieth-century university with a special focus on American institutions and on the natural sciences.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5008 Current Issues in Science & Technology Studies
A graduate-level reading seminar in STS, this course will survey major themes and readings as well as recent work in STS.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5050 Seminar in the History and Sociology of Science
Seminar for first-year graduate students, undergraduate majors, and advanced undergraduates. Reading will introduce the student to current work concerning the effect of social context on science, technology, and medicine.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5083 Readings in Science, Technology, and Medicine
This graduate reading seminar engages major themes and debates in Science & Technology Studies. Bringing together scholarship in anthropology, history, history of science and information studies, the course will combine theoretical material with empirically oriented studies. It focuses on how practices, ideas, objects and tools within science, technology and medicine have been shaped by the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they emerged. Students will read texts on a set of wide-ranging topics and themes—techno-politics, actor-network theory, postcolonial technology and feminist STS among others— with the goal of engaging both the methodological and conceptual questions they raise.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5203 Periodization and Science
Who invented the Scientific Revolution? Does the term "modern science" tell us about the subject under discussion, how we should evaluate that subject, or something else? How are historical periodization and the historiography of science related? This course will explore the concept of historical epochs, or periods, and the role of science and technology in defining historical epochs (and vice-versa). Readings will be taken from philosophy of history, history and philosophy of science, STS, classical studies, and history of art.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5207 Readings in Race & Science
What accounts for the persistence and resilience of racial conceptions in science? In this course we will look for answers to this and other questions by examining the historiography of race, colonialism, and science. The standard historiography has focused on the rise and fall of racial typologies in the north Atlantic and their contributions to troublesome political projects such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow policies, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust. More recent histories have taken inspiration from postcolonial studies, standpoint theories, and indigenous studies to insist on a more global reckoning of race and science. If we focus on the southern hemisphere, for instance, we can see scientific racial conceptions enrolled for a different though not necessarily less innocent set of projects: the dispossession of indigenous lands and effacement of indigenous peoples, the glorification of race-mixing as a tool of nation building, and the cultivation of whiteness as a means to modernity. By examining classic and recent approaches to race and science we will grapple with the following questions: Is 'race' a product of 18th century French and English science? Or can we find earlier iterations in the idioms of conquest of Spanish America during the early modern period? Do the standard narratives concerning the history of racial conceptions in science change when looked at from the frame of the global south? Does race get 'buried alive' after WWII? And do recent developments in human genomics bring "race" back from the dead, albeit in an anti-racist form?
Fall
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5310 Body Histories
Early scholarship on the history of the body emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, largely spearheaded by gender and discourse theorists who saw the human body as a useful way to think about culture, language, and performativity. Soon thereafter, historians insisted on the need for a more material approach to the subject. Since both human and non-human bodies occupy a central place in the history of science, technology, medicine, this course will delve into works that seek to tell the history of these fields through body history. In recent years, the most cutting-edge scholarship in body history can be found in race, gender, and disability studies, which will be a focus of this seminar.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5400 Reading Seminar in History of Science
Survey of major themes and figures in the history of western science, technology, and medicine since the Renaissance, through reading and discussion of selected primary and secondary sources. Topics include: Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newtonainism, Pasteur, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of German science, etc. Concurrent attendance at STSC 1 lectures is recommended.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5431 Visualizing Science
How was scientific knowledge visualized in manuscripts and early printed books? What is a diagram and what does it do? This seminar explores these questions and related topics with examples drawn from Penn’s extensive collection of manuscripts and early printed books. It is open to graduate students, and to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructors.
Also Offered As: ARTH 5431
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5437 Remembering Epidemics
This seminar challenges students to encounter and interpret the city around them in unconventional ways. During a deadly pandemic that has profoundly disrupted all aspects of society, just as the question of public commemoration has vigorously and sometimes violently re-entered our country's public discourse, one question has remained surprisingly neglected: How do we remember epidemics? This course confronts this question through an analysis of traumatic epidemics in Philadelphia's history, and of the broader landscape of public memory. We devote special attention to the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, but we also consider the 1918-1919 influenza, AIDS, and COVID-19, among others. Students conduct archival, documentary, site-based, and other kinds of research in the process of analyzing the origins, course, and consequences of epidemics, as well as the nature of public commemoration
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: HSOC 4437
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5588 Disability: History and Theory
Disability is the "next academic frontier," argues historian Douglas Baynton, "an analytic category with the transformative potential of race, class, sexuality, and gender." The purpose of this course will be explore recent literature on the history and theory of disability, focusing primarily on the history of physical disability. Throughout the semester, we will approach this literature with an eye to how disability studies relates to the fields of the history of science, medicine, and technology. Topics will include: the sociology of deviance, the medical vs. social model of disability, chronic illness and disease, genetics and disability, the role of disability in health care policy, as well as the politics of design and assistive technologies.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5640 History and Philosophy of Technology
In this course we read influential classic and recent works in the history and the philosophy of technology, looking at how these two fields are analytically structured and related to each other. We start with Karl Marx, arguably the most influential historian and philosopher of technology of the modern era, and discuss him in relation to what has been one of the most visible debates in the historiography of technology – the question of technological determinism. From there, we engage key periods and methodological issues in roughly chronological order, visiting the Middle Ages and historical theoreticians of the Annales School, the early modern period, and processes of industrialization along with the questions that it raises about “what’s modern about modern technology.” Mid-way through the class, we discuss classic and recent works in the philosophy of technology, which grapple with the question about the relationship between industrialization, technology, philosophy, and modernity. Engaging the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, we explore applications of the social constructivism debate to the history of technology, which will bring us back to our earlier debate about technological determinism, and we end the class with exploring periodicals and monographs within the history of technology at large. Throughout the class, we ask about narratives of modernity, about how the field of the history and the philosophy of technology have evolved, their relationship to the history of science and the history of medicine, funny episodes in their lifetimes, and examples of “really good work.”
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5757 Industrial and Post Industrial Ages
In this course we are concerned with phenomena surrounding industrialization and de-industrialization, and with post-industrial types of technologies and labor. We start with recent reconceptualizations of the archetypal British "Industrial Revolution" and its close relations to Indian industry and economy, move to the US American South as an example of a global agricultural economy in the industrial age, take North American and Western Europe as lenses for transitions from industrial to post-industrial eras, and discuss the nuclear and computer age of the Cold War from a number of perspectives: the Global South and cybernetics, medicine and isotopes, the recent climate debate and underlying computing, an anthropology of post-industrial labor, and gene-patenting and biological manufacturing in the twenty-first century.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5789 Science in the Non-West
This course will introduce graduate students to global, postcolonial, and non-Western histories of modern science and technology. Topics include imperial histories of science and technology, the role of local knowledges in the development of modern science and technology, non-Western scientific traditions and methods, the “globalization” of scientific and technological projects, postcolonial studies of science, and debates about decolonizing technology.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 5800 Environmental History
A survey of recent and influential works in environmental history, including works from both within and outside the American environmental history canon. The focus is on situating emerging historiographical trends within the long-term development of the field and in relation to other closely allied fields, including the history of science, technology, and medicine, social and cultural history, urban history, agricultural history, world history, historical ecology, environmental anthropology, and ecocriticism.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6077 Science and Muslim Empires
This course is an overview of the histories of science and knowledge in Muslim Empires. Starting with the Abbasid Caliphate and extending to the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, the readings provide an overview of key scholars, arguments and narratives. Students will get the opportunity to acquaint themselves with some of the chief intellectual characters, long-term dynamics and geographical differences and, to interrogate key notions such as “Islamic science,” “Westernization," and “Golden Age.” We will also walk through some key issues, such as the relationship between religion and science, philosophy and science, science and scholarship and, occult practices and science. The course also adopts a maximalist approach to Muslim geographies, extending from the strait of Gibraltar to the Indian subcontinent, with a brief foray into the Southeast Asian kingdoms. The goal of the course is to help students produce a research paper, which, depending on their linguistic skills, can be historical or historiographical. As part of the course, the students will also get the chance to look at the wealth of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts and early printed material in the Schonberg Collection.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6089 The Politics of Knowledge
The present moment is one in which many long-accepted assumptions about the relationship between knowledge and collective life, including the idea of a mutually supportive relationship between modern science and liberal democracy, are coming under fire both within and beyond academia. The aims of this course are to (1) introduce students to scholarship on the relationship between science and politics, broadly construed, with a focus on work in the fields of science and technology studies and the history of science, (2) support students in developing their own research projects on the subject.
0.5 Course Units
HSSC 6097 Queer and Feminist STS
This graduate course takes as its focus major themes, methods, and debates in queer and feminist science and technology studies (STS). It will introduce participants to foundational texts on the roles of gender and sexuality in scientific knowledge production. We will also consider more recent work that has critiqued and built upon these foundations, attending particularly to ongoing conversations about race, coloniality, disability, and queerness/transness. Throughout, we will ask—and probably fail to answer, in interesting ways—the question of what constitutes queer and feminist STS, and bring course insights to bear on our own knowledge-producing enterprise. Those enrolled will develop and write a substantive paper on a related theoretical and/or historiographical topic of their choosing.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6100 Research Seminar in History of Human Sciences
This concentrated research seminar provides graduate students with time, support, and space to hone their writing skills. Thematically, the seminar closely examines historiographic trends within the history of human sciences - namely the stylistic, methodological, and investigative strategies adopted by prize-winning articles in the field. By carefully dissecting the architecture of these articles, our aim is to identify models that we can use in our own scholarly endeavors and to draft an article with these in mind. Accordingly, a significant portion of the course is devoted to examining archival and primary source resources in the region, to discussing research strategies, and to workshopping our work-in-progress. Students can use the course to significantly revise an already written paper or to draft a new paper. The course's overarching purpose is to create the scaffolding necessary for students to produce a substantial research paper in the history of human sciences (broadly conceived) that is potentially publishable as a journal article.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6188 Cold War Science
In this research seminar we will work through some of the literature on the history of science, technology and medicine in the Cold War and explore together relevant archival collections in the Philadelphia region, and digital collections online (particularly oral histories but other sources as well). All history begins with the availability of sources though we want to think creatively about what counts as a source (for example buildings, landscapes, artifacts, museum displays, film, other visual sources).
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6199 Other Reasons
Postcolonial Theories, building largely on Frankfurt School theorists, have critiqued the totalizing aspirations of what it calls 'Enlightenment Rationality'. Such critiques have also fed a range of critiques of Science. At the heart of such critiques is a rather restricted and plastic idea of Science as a singular, homogenous body of knowledge that has steadily promoted the disenchantment of the world. In this course we seek to destablize this monolithic vision of science by revisiting its plural, heterogeneous histories. The course is particularly interested in exploring the historical entanglements between the sciences and the enchanted world of intangible entities such as spirits, ghosts and gods. The course will be divided into three broad sections. The first will deal with the theoretical critiques of 'Enlightenment Rationality' and 'Science' in postcolonial theory. The second will undertake a detailed and loosely chronological examination of the multifaceted entanglements of science and technology with the paranormal in the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, the last section will explore the performative aspects of scientific rationality in colonial and postcolonial contexts in a bid to understand the background that led to the postcolonial theorization.
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6200 Archives and Ethnography: Research Methods in History and Anthropology of Science
This seminar introduces graduate students working on topics in the history and anthropology of science, medicine, technology, and related areas to core research methods in the field. These include locating, accessing, and working with archival documents from diverse historical periods; engaging and analyzing historical and contemporary material texts and objects; historical and ethnographic interviewing; ethnographic research and participant observation. Drawing from current readings in the history and anthropology of science, we will examine how researchers design and describe their methodological practice, make use of evidence to support their claims, and navigate practical, epistemological, and ethical challenges in historical and ethnographic research. Additionally, the course will support students in identifying funding sources and writing fellowship proposals with particular attention to articulating research questions, designing a research plan, and justifying methodological choices. The course is oriented towards graduate students in History and Sociology of Science and is open to students from other fields interested in historical, ethnographic, or social analysis of science, technology, and medicine.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6247 Experience and Experiment
This course will examine the role of sensory knowledge relative to the creation of scientific knowledge, and to the creation of "scientific knowledge" as a category of knowledge. We will consider the entangled histories of proof, trial, and observation in conjunction with histories of particular and accumulated experience. How can singular phenomena be understood as illustrative of a universal law? How do experience and experiment fit into hierarchies or taxonomies of knowledge at different times, and in different cosmologies? Whose experience or experimentation is authoritative, and what makes it so? Readings will include theoretical and historical perspectives, as well as such topics as medieval and early modern optics and astral science, artisanal knowledge, and exploration.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6288 Capitalism: Theorizing economy in sci & med
What are the relationships between capitalism and the practice and experience and experience of medicine? How have historians and anthropologists theorized capitalism and political economy in accounts of health and medicine? What do such theories account for and what is foreclosed? This research seminar examines theories of capitaliem as they are taken up in historical and ethnographic accounts of science, health, healing, and medicine. Exploring how contemporary and classic accounts have sought to analyze and unpack the relationship between economy and health, we will examine how political economic approaches to health and medicine have informed historical and ethnographic accounts of health and illness -- asking, for instance, how theories of neoliberalism have been used to explain health inequalities (and vice versa) -- and will analyze how scholars have linked practices of financialization, speculation, and investment to changing dynamics of health, medicine, healing, and the generation of medical knowledge. Course time will also be devoted to independent research through which students will develop and write up a research paper on an area of interest related to the course theme.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6299 Genetics and Genomics
This course is called "Genetics and Genomics," but we are defining those terms broadly to potentially encompass historical studies of biomedicine, evolution, race theory, biological anthropology, reproduction, agriculture, animal breeding, psychiatry, social sciences, and so on. We are thinking about knowledges of embodiment and what they teach us about social and technical order--about systems, institutions, technologies, hierarchies, theories, practices, networks, and so on. The goal of the semester will be for each student to produce a first draft of a publishable research paper. Many of our readings are calibrated to complement the available archival collections at the American Philosophical Library, the University of Pennsylvania archives, the Academy of Natural History collections, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Wagner Free Institute of Science, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Hagley Museum and Library, and collections held in striking distance of Philadelphia, in New York, Princeton, Baltimore, and Washington DC. While APS will be a special of focus of attention, given the remarkable collections there, students should make a special effort to become familiar with the many other resources that are available in the region, some of which have not been the focus of significant historical attention.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6500 Research Seminar in the History of Medicine
This course is focused on comparing and contrasting ethnographic and historical approaches to health and medicine. We will engage ethnographic and historical approaches to health and medicine to explore the methodological, empirical, and theoretical stakes of thinking medicine, disease, and the body across and within disciplines. Taking a methodological and comparative approach, the course will explore ethnographic and historical approaches to such themes as the body, disease, pharmaceuticals, and biomedical knowledge-production in global and historical context. We aim to develop skills and knowledge for critically reading anthropological, historical, and sociological literatures on medicine, the body, and disease. As such, students will develop a research project, which may be in either the history or anthropology of medicine and/or science, or a project, which combines such approaches, utilizing the comparative and methodological frameworks of the course to develop an original analysis on a topic of their choosing.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6517 The Lazaretto, the City, and the World: Public Health, Immigration, and Urban Growth, 18th-21st C.
Philadelphia's Lazaretto quarantine station was built in 1799 to protect the city after a series of catastrophic yellow fever epidemics. In its time, the Lazaretto was a gateway through which goods and people from many regions of the world passed before entering Philadelphia (sometimes after temporary detention). This course uses the Lazaretto as a gateway to the history of American public health, immigration, and urban growth. Our exploration of those histories is not limited to events that happened at the Lazaretto, nor to the period of its quarantine operations (1801-1895), nor even to Philadelphia, but rather uses the very local and very human stories of this unusual site as a point of entry into larger American and global stories. Coursework includes site visits to the Lazaretto and to a variety of local partner institutions, including the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Mutter Museum, Puentes de Salud, and Sayre Health Center. Students undertake extensive research projects covering some combination of the course's themes, including discussions of how historical interpretation can facilitate and enhance public engagement and activism.
Spring
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6600 Research Seminar: History of Technology
This is a research seminar for beginning and mid-level graduate students. Emphasis will be on research and writing, and there will also be some broad reading and classroom discussion. A great deal of time is allotted for students to become familiar with the archival resources in the region, for individual meetings, peer review, and writing. The goal of the semester will be for each student to produce a first draft of a publishable research paper (7500-9000 words) in the history of technology broadly conceived.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HSSC 6700 Research Seminar in History of Technology
This graduate seminar provides a structured environment in which each student executes an independent research project. Early class meetings focus on the craft of researching and writing scholarly articles. Later meetings are devoted to discussion of students progress on their research projects. Each student defines their own research topic in the history of technology, subject to the Professor's approval.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HSSC 9900 Master's Thesis
Master's thesis research and writing under adviser supervision.
Fall or Spring
3 Course Units
HSSC 9950 Dissertation
Dissertation research and writing under adviser supervision.
Fall or Spring
3 Course Units
HSSC 9999 Graduate Independent Study
Available to doctoral students only.
Fall or Spring
1-4 Course Units