Courses

Spring Semester information

300A: Topics: History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Global South

Science is necessarily a transnational project, emerging from exchanges between nations. However, dominant Western narratives have often deemed certain regions of the world peripheral to the production of scientific knowledge. The so-called "Global South," as a racialized category contingent on the economic development of a nation rather than on geography, serves to encapsulate those countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa that have been left out of the historical discourse on scientific progress. This course redresses that oversight by discussing the past and present of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge in the Global South. We will analyze distinctive ways of understanding nature within Indigenous knowledge systems while also examining how imperialism and colonialism have influenced scientific practices and applications. Discussions on the role of science and medicine in the production of meanings attributed to gender, race, and sexuality will also be at the core of this course.

300B: Topics:Chicagoland

Chicagoland encompasses a historical landscape that transcends a major U.S city's boundaries to include city, suburbs, and a vast hinterland. As a central place, Chicago has drawn together people and material resources from around the world by every kind of transportation imaginable: rivers, roads, and canals, planes, trains, and automobiles. This course examines the story of Chicagoland in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion, putting history in dialogue with the arts. Through the eyes and ears of a variety of writers, musicians, architects, actors, and scholars, we will see and hear how greater Chicago has made, remade, broken, and re-formed itself across two centuries and into our own time.