Spring 2013 | 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.
General
Readings
January 14: Introduction
PART I: WAYS OF KNOWING
January 18: The Scientific Revolution
Deborah E. Harkness, Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), introduction and conclusion.
January 28: Medieval Science
David J. Collins, “Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (Spring 2010), pp. 1–44.
Elly Truitt, “Celestial Divination and Arabic Science in Twelfth-Century England: The History of Gerbert of Aurillac’s Talking Head,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (April 2012), pp. 201–222.
Katharine Park, “Observation in the Margins,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 15–44.
Nicholás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008) – preface and introduction only.
February 4: Scientific Sight and Visual Evidence
Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007).
February 11: The Life Sciences since Darwin
Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
Hellen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
February 18: The Physical Sciences since Einstein
Richard Staley, Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
PART II: SCIENCE AND POWER
February 25: The Bomb and the Cold War
Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Alex Wellerstein, “Patenting the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Intellectual Property, and Technological Control,” Isis 99 (2008), pp. 57–87.
R. Scott Kemp, “The End of Manhattan: How the Gas Centrifuge Changed the Quest for Nuclear Weapons,” Technology and Culture 53 (April 2012), pp. 272–305.
March 4: Corporate Science
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
William Rankin, “The Epistemology of the Suburbs: Knowledge, Production, and Corporate Laboratory Design,” Critical Inquiry (Summer 2010), pp. 771–806.
March 25: Science and the Public
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
PART III: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND EVERYDAY LIFE
April 1: Telecommunications and Computing
David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
April 8: Biotech
Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Daniel Kevles, “Eugenics, the Genome, and Human Rights,” Medicine Studies 1 (2009), pp. 85–93.
April 15: Naturetech
David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010).
Etienne Benson, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
PART IV: PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES
April 22: The Isis Focus Section
Jennifer Karns Alexander, “Thinking Again About Science in Technology,” Isis 103 (September 2012), pp. 518–526.
David Edgerton, “Time, Money, and History,” Isis 103 (June 2012), pp. 316–237.
John Pickstone, “Sketching Together the Modern Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine,” Isis 102 (March 2011), pp. 123–133.
Marwa Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101 (March 2010), pp. 98–109.
Steve Fuller, “The Normative Turn: Counterfactuals and a Philosophical Historiography of Science,” Isis 99 (September 2008), pp. 576–584.
Peter Galison, “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science,” Isis 99 (March 2008), pp. 111–124.