Coursetexts is an open library of advanced course readings.
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This interdisciplinary course will explore the physical interactions that underpin life: the interactions of molecules, macromolecular structures, and cells in warm, wet, squishy environments. Topics will include Brownian motion, diffusion in a potential field, continuum mechanics of polymers, rods, and membranes, low Reynolds number flow, interfacial forces, electrostatics in solution. The course will also cover recently developed biophysical tools, including laser tweezers, superresolution microscopies, and optogenetics. Numerical simulations in Matlab will be used extensively.
Adam Cohen | Fall 2022 | Harvard University
This upper-level undergraduate course examines the intersection of international politics and international economics. It covers an analysis of the historical background to and contemporary reality of the political economy of international trade, finance, and investment; problems of economic development; and globalization. This class does not have a specific economics or political science prerequisite, but it does assume a general understanding of historical and contemporary political and economic events. As a 3000-level course, this class would not be an appropriate choice for students who have not already taken introductory courses in political science, such as in international relations or comparative politics. This course would be appropriate for economics-political science joint majors
Jeffry Frieden | Fall 2024 | Columbia University
The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts, and methodologies in the history of science (and neighboring fields). We explore past and recent developments, including: the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge; Actor-Network Theory; the study of practice, experimentation, and quantification; the concept of the paradigm; gender, race, sexuality, and the body; environmentalism; and the role of labor and industry in the changing patterns of global technoscience (in addition to other relevant topics).
Erika Lorraine Milam | Spring 2025 | Princeton University
Twenty-first century societies are faced with both threats and opportunities that combine sophisticated computation with politics and international relations in critical ways. Examples include online disinformation campaigns, the tension between online privacy and lawful surveillance, AI regulation and transparency, net neutrality, and digital copyright. CPSC 310 examines some of the political challenges wrought by massive increases in the power of information and communication technologies and the potential for citizens and governments to harness those technologies to solve problems
Joan Feigenbaum, Artur Pericles Lima Monteiro | Spring 2025 | Yale University
In this seminar, we will explore the uses of experience and reason in exploring nature in the early modern period, roughly from the late sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Some, like the debates over the vacuum, or scientific method, will be familiar, but some like the existence of ghosts and witches, or the history of the earth, may be less so. In each case we will be particularly interested in understanding the different ways in which experience and rational arguments are used to arrive at conclusions about the way the world is.
Daniel Garber | Spring 2025 | Princeton University
Today, visualization is seen as a crucial tool for understanding, navigating, and acting upon the vast amounts of data produced in contemporary society. Everything from government statistics and environmental monitoring to cell-phone tracking and online shopping are made comprehensible by becoming visual. But most data designers—and most data consumers— engage little if at all with the broader assumptions, meaning, and politics of these graphics, and the history of visualization is usually reduced to a simplistic story of cumulative progress. This seminar will instead approach visualization from a critical historical perspective. We will ask how visualization encourages certain kinds of visibility but not others, how various theories of visual communication support or undermine different forms of politics, how visualization is—or should be—embedded in specific cultures, and how the identity or the methods of the person doing the visualizing can—or should—matter.
The course is structured as a hybrid between a readings based discussion seminar and a hands-on workshop. We will engage with scholarship about data, graphics, and visual argument since the eighteenth century, but I will also give in-class demonstrations of software and graphic-design techniques and we will use class time to present and discuss student work in a studio-like atmosphere. The reading load is less than in other humanities seminars so that students can spend significant time outside of class becoming proficient in their choice of software.
William Rankin | Spring 2025 | Yale University
Our modern territorial assumptions influence nearly every part of our life. They justify statesponsored war and restrictions on immigration, and they determine an individual’s chances for receiving reliable health care or attending quality schools. They even shape our own identities, from feelings of neighborhood pride to nationality and race. This course uses cartography – especially scientific cartography and its competitors – as a lens for analyzing modern territory and sovereignty. Maps help focus our attention on a number of related problems. How is territory claimed? Why do we trust maps, and should we ever regard them as “objective”? Are nations the cause or the result of the modern nation state? How do idea about measuring and representing geographic space influence encounters between different cultures?
We will begin by thinking about how maps can be understood as instruments of power. The bulk of the course then explores how questions of territory and identity have aligned with new ways of producing, using, or challenging maps. The first half of the course looks at the relationship between maps and territorial states: the creation of boundaries, the invention of nationalism, and the tensions of internationalism and globalization. In the second half of the course we will then turn to other types of territories, other traditions of mapping, and the various ways that the scientific map has been contested.
William Rankin | Fall 2024 | Yale University
Climate change. Overfishing. The hole in the ozone layer. Mass Extinction. Nuclear winter. For over two hundred years, the earth and environmental sciences have played a central role in cultural and political debates about potential threats to the planet and the influence of humanity on the earth’s natural systems. At the same time, they have also been crucial in exploring, harnessing, understanding, and safeguarding our home. This course explores this longstanding tension between control and catastrophe.
We will focus on four major questions cutting across several scientific disciplines: the history and future of the earth, the exploitation and conservation of natural resources, predicting and influencing the weather, and the earth as home. In each of these units, we will look at several decades of discovery and debate. We will ask how evidence about the earth’s past, present, or future is presented, what kinds of predictive tools are seen as trustworthy, and the nature of scientific (and cultural) consensus.
William Rankin | Spring 2022 | Yale University
This seminar is an introduction to recent work in the history of science. We’ll be reading books and articles published within the last five years that cover science in Europe and the United States since the medieval era. We’ll confront several key historical questions: What is science? What is “modern” science? Where is the boundary between science and philosophy, technology, or politics? How does science intersect with government, gender, class, business, or law? But just as important, we’ll also be asking questions about how the history of science is written: What topics are interesting? What questions are worth asking? What kinds of evidence are convincing? What makes a book “important”?
No previous background in history of science is required. I’m happy to recommend sources for general overviews as needed, along with other supplementary material.
William Rankin | Spring 2013 | Yale University
This graduate-level seminar approaches sacred space in ancient Italy (ca. 500 BCE–100 CE) from several evidential and methodological perspectives. The class probes how different kinds of sacred artifacts (places, buildings, and bodies) textured ritual space, forming its recognizable character then and now. While assessing the available evidence (material, literary, epigraphic) for each of these categories, we devote time to untangling the ways that modern scholars and Roman authors have written about ancient holy places. The emphasis on "approach" also provides an avenue to begin to reconstruct the lived experiences of sacred space, moving from the realia of locations, structures, and objects to the possible responses of ancient people.
Alexander Ekserdjian | Fall 2024 | Yale University
For almost forty years, scholars have spoken of a “spatial turn” in history—or of “spatial history” as a new methodological sub-field—that promises to use new sources, new tools, and new theoretical commitments to ask new historical questions. Now with the easy availability of GIS software and historical GIS data, the spatialization of history has come to seem even more urgent. But how does one actually do spatial history? And what does it mean to think geographically? This seminar is an attempt to zoom out from the rhetoric of the “new,” the “turn,” or any particular research tool in order to investigate the broader intellectual intersection of history and geography. Our approach will be optimistic but circumspect; we will explore the history of geography as a discipline, dive into recent spatial theory, take a critical stance towards maps, GIS, and other forms of digital scholarship, and spend a lot of time helping each other with our own research in progress.
The course is divided into three parts. It begins with theoretical approaches to space and spatial history by both geographers and historians. Second is a more practical methodological analysis of the uses (and abuses) of maps, including reflections on historical GIS and the digital humanities. The course then ends with several weeks of round-table workshopping.
William Rankin | Fall 2025 | Yale University
All classes are licensed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.
