HIST 201 HS: Advanced Historical Literature: Science, Technology & Medicine. Spring 2016 SYLLABUS

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1 HIST 201 HS: Advanced Historical Literature: Science, Technology & Medicine Spring 2016 SYLLABUS Professor: Elena Aronova Class Location: HSSB 4041 Class Times: Tuesdays, 9:00-11:50AM Office Location: HSSB 4215 Office Hours: Wednesday, 3 to 5 PM or by appointment Course description This seminar will serve as an introduction at graduate level to the discipline of the history of science. The first part of the course focuses on a series of key questions, theoretical lenses, and methodological approaches, which have shaped that discipline since its emergence as a professional academic field in the mid-twentieth century. The second part focuses on recent works that define the state of the field at present. Taking the longer view of recent history of the field, the course aims to introduce different approaches and the core readings in the history of science, and to provide you with the conceptual tools you will need to plan a research project, to frame questions that would guide and focus your research, or to write a research paper. A great deal of recent historiography of science has focused on the significance of tools and instruments in shaping science. We will adopt this model by focusing on a particular kind of tool each week, exploring both the power and the limitations of different conceptual lenses: scientific revolutions, ethnographies of laboratories, power relations instituted in and through science, geographies of knowledge, visual epistemologies, material culture of science, etc. This is meant not only to introduce you to the major approaches in the history of science field, but also to help you build your own toolkit for doing innovative and solidly-grounded historical work. Course requirements Come to class every week, having prepared a synopsis of each reading. The synopsis must be a summary of the argument, not a critique of it; you should explain how the argument is constructed, what kind of empirical evidence it draws upon, and what it argues against. The synopsis is due by to the entire class by 5 pm the day before the class. Since the purpose of the synopsis is to prepare for the discussion, the late submissions can reduce the effectiveness of the discussion, so please be good citizens and submit in time! The weekly responses will be graded in toto at the end of the quarter and will result in 20% of your grade. 1

2 In addition, each student will be required to lead discussion of the readings at least once (20%) and to participate in the discussion every week (20%). Active and constructive participation in class is imperative. Final project: this could be a review essay, a research project proposal, or any creative medium you decide might be appropriate for your topic. In any case, the expectation is that the final project will involve further reading/research beyond the course materials, and will bring this other secondary (or primary) literature into conversation with course materials (40%). The topic of your final project must be approved by the end of WEEK 4. I will arrange one-on-one meetings with each of you to discuss your final project and the course, in general. Course readings Each week s reading will consist of one or two short theoretical or historiographical essays, and a book-length historical account that serves as an example of a historical work that uses this particular conceptual approach. Most of the readings will be available as PDF s on Gaucho Space. Any other readings will be on course reserve and available at the library s circulation desk. SCHEDULE OF READING PART I. THE ORIGINS OF THE FIELD WEKK 1: 3/29/16 Introduction: What s the Field? Peter Dear, What is the History of Science the History Of? Isis 96 (2005): Lorraine Daston, Science Studies and the History of Science, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): It might be helpful to compare in chronological order the justificatory statements from the field: A. Koyré, Galileo Studies (Paris; Hermann, 1939; English translation Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978), pp

3 H. Butterfield, The origins of modern science, (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1957 [1949]), pp. 7-10; J. Golinski, Making natural knowledge: constructivism and the history of science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Naomi Oreskes, Why I Am A Presentist, Science in Context 6/4(2013): WEEK 2: 4/5/16 Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), with a new forward by Ian Hacking; first pub George Reisch, Telegrams and Paradigms: On Cold-War Geopolitics and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in Aronova and Turchetti, eds., Politics and Contexts of Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected (Palgrave Macmillan, in press) Deborah Coen, Rise, Grubenhund: On Provincializing Kuhn, Modern Intellectual History 9 (2012): Elena Aronova and Simone Turchetti, Science Studies in East and West: Incommensurable Paradigms? in Aronova and Turchetti, eds., Politics and Contexts of Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected (Palgrave Macmillan, in press) WEEK 3: 4/12/16 Social Construction of Knowledge Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), or newer edition Steven Shapin, Up for Air: Leviathan and the Air-Pump. A Generation On, the introduction to 2011 edition of Leviathan and the Air-Pump John Zammito, How Kuhn Became a Sociologist, A Nice Derangement of 3

4 Epistemes (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), pp (endnotes). WEEK 4: 4/19/16 Ethnography of a Laboratory and the Practice Turn Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton University Press, 1979). Andrew Pickering. The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), Park Doing, Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise a Discipline: The Past, Present, and Future Politics of Laboratory Studies in STS in Edward Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, Judy Wajcman, eds., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3 rd edition (The MIT Press, 2008), Robert Kohler, Moral economy, material culture, and community in Drosophila genetics, in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), pp PART II: THE FIELD S PRESENT: SELECTED RECENT APPROACHES, CONCEPTS, AND METHODOLOGIES WEEK 5: 4/26/16 Circulation of Knowledge: Post-colonial Perspectives Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) James A. Secord, Knowledge in Transit, Isis 95 (2004): Lorraine Daston, The History of Science as European Self-Portraiture, European Review 14/4 (2006): WEEK 6: 5/3/16 4

5 Co-production: Science in the Cold War Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014) Sheila Jasanoff, States of knowledge: the Co-production of Science and Social Order (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1-6; Hunter Heyck, Leviathan and the ink blot: The politics of the mind and its sciences in Cold War America, SHPBBS 53 (2015): Naomi Oreskes, Science in the Origins of the Cold War, in Naomi Oreskes and John Krige, eds. Science and Technology in the Global Cold War (The MIT Press, 2014), WEEK 7: 5/10/16 Spaces: Geographies of Knowledge Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp (Ch.1 Nature and Space ) Richard White, What is Spatial History? Steven Shapin, The house of experiment in Seventeenth-Century England, Isis 79 (1988), WEEK 8: 5/17/16 Images: Visual Cultures of Science 5

6 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), the introduction, chapters 1, 2, and 3, and the conclusion. Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, ," in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp Bruno Latour, Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands. Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (Greenwich, CN: Jai Press, 1986), pp Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 7-14; Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). WEEK 9: 5/24/16. Things: Material Cultures of Science Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk. Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004), pp. 7-24; (the introduction and ch.8, "News, Papers, Scissors by Anke te Heesen) Michael K. Buckland, Information as Thing, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42 / 5 (1991): John Tresch, Technological World-Pictures: Cosmic Things, Cosmograms," Isis 98 (2007): Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) WEEK 10: 5/31/16 Objectivity: Historicizing Self-Evident 6

7 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), the prologue and chapters 1, 3, and 4. Lorraine Daston, Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective, in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), Ted Porter, Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999),