Spring 2025 | Princeton 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).
General
Readings
All readings should be on reserve in (books) Firestone or (articles and chapters) through the Canvas page for the course. For each week, readings are listed with the book first, followed by an alphabetical list of complementary articles and chapters. The “Additional” sources are if you want to follow up on your own—we will not discuss them in class.
Week 1: The Paradigm of the Revolution (Jan 30)
Core Reading
[\o] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
[\c] Read whichever edition you can get your hands on. The newest edition (2012) includes a useful introduction by Ian Hacking. Read it quickly.
[\c] Mario Biagioli, “The Anthropology of Incommensurability,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 21, no. 2 (1990): 183–209.
[\o] James Secord, “Against Revolutions,” BJHS Themes 9 (2024): 17–37.
[\o] Steven Shapin, “Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling,” in Never Pure (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 1–14.
[\c] Anke te Heesen, “Thomas S. Kuhn, Earwitness: Interviewing and the Making of a New History of Science,” Isis 111, no. 1 (2020): 86–97.
Additional Reading
[\c] Helen Longino, “Theoretical Pluralism and the Scientific Study of Behavior,” in Stephen Kellert, Helen Longino, and C. Kenneth Waters, eds., Scientific Pluralism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 102–131.
[\o] Carolyn Merchant, “The Scientific Revolution and the Death of Nature,” Focus Section, Isis 97, no. 3 (2006): 513–533.
[\c] Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston, eds., Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
[\o] James A. Secord, “Inventing the Scientific Revolution,” Isis 114, no. 1 (March 2023): 50–76.
[\c] Errol Morris, The Ashtray (Or, the Man Who Denied Reality) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[\o] See also: Philip Kitcher, “The Ashtray Has Landed: The Case of Morris v. Kuhn,” Los Angeles Review of Books (May 18, 2018)
Media
[\o] “The Trigger Effect,” the pilot episode of James Burke’s classic BBC history of science and technology series Connections (1978).
Week 2: Epistemic Archaeology (Feb 6)
Core Reading
[\o] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1970]).
[\c] Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, “Introduction: To Classify Is Human,” and “Why Classifications Matter,” in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 1–32 and 319–333.
[\o] Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in T. Heller, M. Sosna, and D. Wellberry, eds., Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–236.
[\c] Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1985]), 9–25, notes 277–278.
Additional
[\c] Gary Gutting, “The Politics of ‘The Order of Things’: Foucault, Sartre, and Deleuze,” History and Theory 55, no. 4 (2016): 54–65.
Media
[\o] “A Game of Grids,” Foucault in conversation with Noam Chomsky on creativity and scientific progress (1971, excerpts)
Week 3: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Feb 13)
Core Reading
[\c] Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011 [1985]).
[\o] David Bloor, “The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1976]): 3–23.
[\o] H. M. Collins, “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks,” Science Studies 4, no. 2 (1974): 165–185.
[\o] Peter Galison, “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief (1998 abridgment),” reprinted in The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999): 137–160.
Additional
[\o] Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “A Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4, no. 1 (1991): 3–22.
[\c] Andrew Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice,” in Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 1–26.
Media
[\o] HPS Podcast, “Simon Schaffer on Leviathan and the Air-Pump: 40 Years Later,”
Week 4: The Science Wars (Feb 20)
Core Reading
[\o] Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989).
[\o] Robert A. Nye, “Medicine and Science as Masculine ‘Fields of Honor,’” Osiris 12 (1997): 60–79.
[\c] Sadiah Qureshi, “‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” History of Science 42 (2004): 233–257.
[\o] Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” The American Historical Review 98 (1993): 382–411.
[\o] Mary Terrall, “Salon, Academy and Boudoir: Generation and Desire in Maupertuis’s Science of Life,” Isis 87, no. 2 (1996): 217–229.
Additional
[\o] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
[\o] Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16, no. 3 (1991): 485–501.
Media
[\o] HPS Podcast, “Donna Haraway on Storytelling in Science,” Season 1, Episode 1 (May 31, 2023)
Week 5: From Actor Network Theory to a Parliament of Things (Feb 27)
Core Reading
[\o] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
[\o] Michel Callon, “Actor Network Theory,” in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001): 62–66.
[\c] H.M. Collins and Steve Yearley, “Epistemological Chicken,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 301–326.
[\o] Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–248.
[\c] Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions,” in John Law, A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Sociological Review Monograph 38 (New York: Routledge, 1991): 26–56.
Additional
[\o] Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), especially “Centers of Calculation,” 215–257.
[\o] Michael Callon and Bruno Latour, “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 343–368.
[\c] Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” Sociological Review 32, no. 51 (1984): 196–223.
Week 6: Practice and Experimentation (Mar 6)
Core Reading
[\o] Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
[\c] Ursula Klein, “Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science A 32, no. 2 (2001): 265–302.
[\o] Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration, and Deconstruction,” Science in Context 7, no. 1 (1994): 65–81.
[\c] Hasok Chang, “How Historical Experiments Can Improve Scientific Knowledge and Science Education: The Cases of Boiling Water and Electrochemistry,” Science and Education 20 (2011): 317–341.
Additional
[\o] Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura, eds., The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Week 7: History of the Body (Mar 20)
Core Reading
[\o] Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 2017 [1997]).
[\c] Projit Mukharji, Brown Skin, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
[\c] Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in Sperber, D., Premack, D., and Premack, A. J. (eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995): 351–383.
[\o] Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 12 (1986): 3–64.
Additional
[\c] Garland E. Allen, “The Double-Edged Sword of Genetic Determinism: Social and Political Agendas in Genetic Studies of Homosexuality, 1940–1994,” in Science and Homosexualities, edited by Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997): 242–270.
[\o] Caroline Walker Bynum, “Death and Resurrection in the Middle Ages: Some Modern Implications,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 4 (1998): 589–596.
[\c] Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York/Cambridge: Zone Books, 1999).
[\c] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
[\c] Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[\c] Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds., Deviant Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
[\c] Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
[\c] Katherine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006).
[\o] Fernando Vidal, “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 1 (2009): 5–36.
Week 8: Objectivity, Evidence, Quantification (Mar 27)
Core Reading
[\c] Theodore M. Porter, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
[\o] Daniela Bleichmar, “The Geography of Observation: Distance and Visibility in Eighteenth-Century Botanical Travel,” in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 373–395.
[\c] Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” [1946], in Collected Fictions, trans. by Andrew Hurley (Viking, 1998).
[\o] Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations no. 40 (1992): 81–128.
[\c] Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 115–145.
Additional
[\c] Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (New York/Cambridge: Zone Books, 2007).
[\c] Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
[\c] Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[\c] If you are curious, Umberto Eco expanded Borges’ one-paragraph story into a longer version (even if it is only 12 pp.): “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1” [1982], in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (Mariner Books, 1995), 95–106.
Week 9: Technology and Labor (Apr 3)
Core Reading
[\c] M Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
[\c] Boris Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in Nicolas Bukharin et al., Science at the Cross Roads (London: Kniga, 1931), 149–212.
[\o] Laura Stark, “Mutual Aid: The Workers’ History of Science,” Isis 114, no. 4 (2023): 841–849.
[\c] Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The Industrial Revolution in the Home,” in Donald McKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999 [1985]): 281–300.
Additional
[\o] Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Economy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
[\c] M Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Week 10: The Technoscience of Globalization (Apr 10)
Core Reading
[\c] Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
[\o] Warwick Anderson, “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000): 713–744.
[\c] James Poskett, “Phrenology, Correspondence, and the Global Politics of Reform, 1815–1848,” The Historical Journal 60 (2017): 409–442.
Additional
[\c] John Krige, “Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age,” in Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach, edited by John Krige (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022): 1–30.
[\c] Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Week 11: Environment and Place (Apr 17)
Core Reading
[\c] Ruth Rogaski, Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
[\o] Deborah Coen, “Climate,” Encyclopedia of the History of Science (December 2023), accessed 21 January 2025
[\c] Thomas F. Gieryn, “Three Truth Spots,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 38, no. 2 (2002): 13–132.
[\c] William Rankin, “Mapping Time in the Twentieth (and Twenty-First) Century,” in Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer, eds., Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 15–34.
Additional
[\c] Deborah R. Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[\c] David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
[\o] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, “Challenging Knowledge: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War,” in Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008): 55–89.
Week 12: Media, Screen, Democracy, Dream (Apr 24)
Core Reading
[\c] Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
[\c] Ludwig Fleck, “To look, to see, to know?” in R. S. Cohen and T. Schnelle, eds., Cognition and Fact (Reidel, 1986), 129–152.
[\c] Jennifer Tucker, “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Imposter: Visual Representation in Victorian Science,” in Victorian Science in Context (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 378–408.
Media
[\c] La Jetée (1963), 23 min
Additional
[\o] Bernard Stiegler, “Economy and Cognition of Attention,” in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 94–106.
[\o] Hito Steyerl, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation,” in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012): 106–175.