Spring 2013 Undergraduate History Seminar Descriptions
As of 3-Dec-2012
*Denotes Pre-modern History Course
Course: HIST W 4046 Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia in Late Antiquity* CLOSED
Professor: Giovanni Ruffini
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): *ANC
Course Description:
This is a fifteen-week undergraduate seminar. It is designed to provide an introduction to the late antique period of the three great civilizations of the ancient Nile Valley, Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia. Course material will cover the social and religious history of Egypt under Roman rule; the collapse of the ancient Nubian civilization of Meroe; the emergence of its independent successor kingdoms; the birth of a centralized and literate society in the Ethiopian highlands; the Christianization of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia; and the survival of all three civilizations in the early medieval period, Egypt under Islamic rule and Nubia and Ethiopia as independent powers.
Course: HIST W 4083 Crime and Punishment in Medieval Europe* OPEN
Professor: Neslihan Senocak
Day/Time: Monday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): MED
Course Description:
This course sets out to explore the nature of crime, particularly those involving violence, and the practices advanced to control and restrict it in the wide geographical area of Europe, with an emphasis on France, England and Italy. The course material will be studied thematically. Themes will include the violent crimes, political violence, the development of courts, the development of criminal law, investigations of specific types of crime such as murder, theft, crimes against women, the mentality and methods of punishment, prisons, torture, and the methods of inquisition. Students will be expected to read primary and secondary historical sources, and strive to arrive at original conclusions and questions, and participate extensively in class discussions. For each week, readings will be limited to 100-120 pages.
+Course counts as History seminar, but is not included in the application process.
Course: RELI W 4170 History of Christianity: The Medieval Papacy*
Professor: Robert Somerville
Day/Time: Monday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): MED
Course Description:
Prerequisite: Instructor's permission required.
An examination of a series of episodes that are of special consequence for papal history in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Readings in both primary and secondary sources in English translation.
Course: HIST W 4127 Enlightenment and its Critics: Montaigne & Skepticism* CLOSED
Professor: Mark Lilla
Day/Time: Friday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): EME
Course Description:
This seminar examines Montaigne's double-sided skepticism regarding our capacity for knowledge and the wisdom of pursuing it, which inspired both partisans and critics of the modern Enlightenment.
Course: Composing the Self in Early Modern Europe* OPEN
Professor: Charly Coleman
Day/Time: Wednesday 9:00-10:50 AM
Field(s): EME
Course Description:
This course explores manners of conceiving and being a self in early modern Europe (ca. 1400-1800). Through the analysis of a range of sources, from autobiographical writings to a selection of theological, philosophical, artistic, and literary works, we will address the concept of personhood as a lens through which to analyze topics such as the valorization of interiority, the formation of mechanist and sensationalist philosophies of selfhood, and, more generally, the human person’s relationship with material and existential goods. This approach is intended to deepen and complicate our understanding of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and other movements around which histories of the early modern period have typically been narrated.
Course: HIST W 4214 The Era of Witness: Twentieth-Century Poland in Personal Accounts OPEN
Professor: Malgorzata Mazurek
Day/Time: Wednesday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): MEU
Course Description:
The course explores the dramatically changing human landscape of modern Poland through personal narratives (diaries, letters, memoirs) and social documentation (autobiography contests, life-record method, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw ghetto). The course serves as an introduction to key personal experiences of the Poland's twentieth century: social distress, emigration and forced dislocation, genocide, and political violence. We will reflect critically on the main categories of "the era of the witness," such as personal experience and literary responses to it, testimony, memory and eye-witnessing. The course aims to broaden, both historically and conceptually, our understanding of the witness as an iconic figure of the twentieth-century atrocities by including the East Central European tradition of personal writing and social documentation of the interwar and postwar periods.
Course: HIST W 4223 Personality and Society in 19th Century Russian Thought OPEN
Professor: Richard Wortman
Day/Time: Monday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): MEU
Course Description:
This seminar traces the role of ideas in shaping the conception of the relationship of the individual to Russian state, society and people among members of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. Students read major texts of the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia—social thought, literature and memoirs—and assess the way each intellectual or group of intellectuals learned to approach the world. Attention will focus upon the formative experiences of members of intelligentsia--family, school, friends, and important books in their lives. The seminar emphasizes the distinctive role of thought and literature in Russian politics and culture. It traces the adoption of various western doctrines in Russia, idealism, positivism, utopian socialism, Marxism, and various twentieth century currents of thought within the framework of intelligentsia attitudes.
Classroom discussions are based on texts in Marc Raeff's Russian Intellectual History, and other collections, novels and memoirs. Students will be responsible for several brief oral presentations analyzing specific texts, a short midterm essay, and a longer final essay that develop themes taken from their discussions. (See Syllabus) Historical background will come from introductory lectures and secondary works such as Berlin's Russian Thinkers and articles cited on the list.
Course: HIST W 4369 The Long War of the 1940s: The Dutch Case in European History and Memory in WWII OPEN
Professor: Peter Romijn
Day/Time: Monday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): MEU
Course Description:
In this seminar we will examine the immediate impact and the longer-running legacies of the Second World War in the Netherlands, with reference to several other Western European nations (France, Belgium). The ‘Long War’ will relate to the Second World War as history in the first place, discussing the place of the occupied nation(s) in ‘Hitler’s Empire’ (Mark Mazower). We also will take into account that the end of the war in Europe was followed by new kinds of external conflicts with strong internal repercussions: the Cold War and the first wave of European decolonization. The perspective will focus on the nation-states, endangered in its very existence by oppressive foreign occupation, subsequently in need of rebuilding and reinventing themselves against many odds. The second element of the seminar is the legacy of the ‘Long War’, stretching over the generations to the present day. The Long War has been subject to a never-ending series of controversies in the public sphere that have profoundly influenced the historiography of the war in the different nations. In the course, we will explore the interconnections between politics of memory, historiography and cultural interpretations of the embattled past (films, novels, televised documentaries in particular).
Course: HIST BC 4368 History of the Senses in Britain and France, 1680 – 1830 OPEN
Professor: Deborah Valenze
Day/Time: Tuesday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): MEU
Course Description:
Examination of European understandings of human senses through the production and reception of art, literature, music, food, and sensual enjoyments in Britain and France. Readings include changing theories concerning the five senses; efforts to master the passions; the rise of sensibility and feeling for others; concerts and the patronage of art; the professionalization of the senses.
Course: HIST BC 4411 Race in the Making of the United States OPEN
Professor: Elizabeth Esch
Day/Time: Tuesday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): US
Course Description:
This seminar will consider what role "race" plays in U.S. culture, politics, economics and foreign policy. Beginning with the origins of racial slavery, we will examine how, when and whether the subsequent development of racial systems - and challenges to them - shaped historical developments. Through a survey of theories about "race relations" and contemporary discussions about affirmative action, immigration, empire and rights, this seminar will ponder the possibilities for a "colorblind" society in the United States.
Course: HIST W 4411 Colonial American History OPEN
Professor: Noah Gelfand
Day/Time: Wednesday 9:00-10:50 AM
Field(s): US
Course Description:
This reading seminar will examine the history of colonial North America from the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries. Employing a comparative Atlantic framework to study Spanish, French, Dutch, and English settlements in North America, this course will explore key themes of conflict and community in the societies that developed during this era. Readings will include some of the most important recent literature in the field and cover topics such as European-indigenous relations, race and slavery, religious culture, and gender construction.
This seminar requires two response papers, a final historiographical essay, and class participation, including an oral presentation.
Course: HIST W 4429 Telling About the South CLOSED
Professor: Barbara Fields
Day/Time: Thursday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): US
Course Description:
A remarkable array of Southern writers have done what Shreve McCannon urged Quentin Compson to do: tell about the South. Historians, novelists, journalists, and essayists have written about, against, despite, and in favor of the South and Southern-ness. And, at least since the era of the Civil War, they have seldom been able to avoid a double consciousness--as Southerners and as Americans--similar to that which W.E.B. Du Bois attributed to Afro-Americans regardless of sectional origin. The issues that Southern writers have confronted in an attempt to understand, interpret, defend, censure, or remake the South remain vital today; and some of the literary works in which they have confronted these issues rank among the most powerful and enduring that the United States has produced. "Telling About the South" will be both an investigation of the history with which these writers tried to come to terms and an exploration of the art of the written word as exemplified in recognized masterpieces of literature.
The intellectual objectives of the course are: to explore how time-consciousness and place-consciousness affect a writer's work; to promote reflection about literary endeavor and the qualities that cause some works to endure long after their contemporaries have disappeared; to reconsider questions of national and regional identification; and to dislodge time-honored conventions of American historical and political writing (such as the one that excludes Afro-Americans from the category "Southerner"), so that reshuffling an overused deck may reveal fresh truths.
Course: HIST W 4434 Atlantic Slave Trade OPEN
Professor: Christopher Brown
Day/Time: Thursday 9:00-10:50 AM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
This seminar provides an intensive introduction to the history of the Atlantic slave trade. The course will consider the impact of the traffic on Western Europe and the Americas, as well as on Africa, and will give special attention to the experiences of both captives and captors. Assignments include three short papers and a longer research paper of 20 to 25 pages.
THIS COURSE OFFERING WAS RECENTLY ADDED
Course: HIST W 4437 Poisoned Worlds: Corporate Behavior and Public Health OPEN
Professor: David Rosner
Day/Time: T 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): US
Course Description:
In the decades since the publication of Silent Spring and the rise of the environmental movement, public awareness of the impact of industrial products on human health has grown enormously. There is growing concern over BPA, lead, PCBs, asbestos, and synthetic materials that make up the world around us. This course will focus on environmental history, industrial and labor history as well as on how twentieth century consumer culture shapes popular and professional understanding of disease. Throughout the term the class will trace the historical transformation of the origins of disease through primary sources such as documents gathered in lawsuits, and medical and public health literature. Students will be asked to evaluate historical debates about the causes of modern epidemics of cancer, heart disease, lead poisoning, asbestos-related illnesses and other chronic conditions. They will also consider where responsibility for these new concerns lies, particularly as they have emerged in law suits. Together, we will explore the rise of modern environmental movement in the last 75 years.”
Course: AMHS W 4462 Immigrant New York OPEN
Professor: Rebecca Kobrin
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): US/JWS
Course Description:
For the past century and a half, New York City has been the first home of millions of immigrants to the United States. This course will compare immigrants' encounter with New York at the dawn of the twentieth century with contemporary issues, organizations, and debates shaping immigrant life in New York City. As a service learning course, each student will be required to work 2-4 hours/week in the Riverside Language Center or programs for immigrants run by Community Impact.
IN ADDITION TO THE APPLICATION, STUDENTS WILL BE REQUIRED TO CONDUCT A 2-MINUTE INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR KOBRIN:
Please contact Professor Kobrin at rk2351@columbia.edu to reserve your timeslot between Nov. 8 and Nov. 14th
Course: HIST W 4483 Military History and Policy CLOSED
Professor: Kenneth Jackson
Day/Time: Monday 6:10-8:00 PM
Field(s): US
Course Description:
This seminar features extensive reading, multiple written assignments, and a term paper, as well as a likely trip to Gettsyburg. It focuses on the Civil War and on World Wars I and II.
Course: HIST W 4509 Problems in International History OPEN
Professor: Anders Stephanson
Day/Time: Monday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
The seminar will largely be devoted this year to a series of 'basic documents' of the early cold war, primary sources which will be examined by means of close readings. The course cannot be taken concurrently with US Foreign Relations W3491.
Course: HIST W 4584 Race, Technology, and Health OPEN
Professor: Samuel Roberts
Day/Time: Tuesday 9:00-10:50 AM
Field(s): US
Course Description:
Prerequisites: Previous course work in African-American history or social science; United States social history; or sociomedical sciences required. Students will gain a solid knowledge and understanding of the health issues facing African Americans since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; sickle cell anemia; and substance abuse.
Course: HIST W 4644 Modern Jewish Intellectual History OPEN
Professor: Michael Stanislawski
Day/Time: Monday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): JWS
Course Description:
This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to 1939. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish life, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, Zionism, Jewish socialism, and Autonomism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy.
Course: HIST BC 4669 Inequalities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Latin America OPEN
Professor: Nara Milanich
Day/Time: Tuesday 12:00-1:50 PM
Field(s): LA
Course Description:
Latin American societies have long been characterized by some of the most dramatic economic and social inequalities--of class, income or resource distribution, race, ethnicity, color, gender, and geography --anywhere in the world. This seminar examines patterns of inequality from different disciplinary perspectives, both historically and in the present. We examine not only causes and proposed remedies but how scholars have defined inequality as an intellectual problem in the first place.
Course: HIST W 4676 History of Cuba from Late Spanish Colonialism to the Present OPEN
Professor: Ariel Lambe
Day/Time: Monday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): LA
Course Description:
An exploration of Cuba’s late colonial period, wars of independence, republican/neocolonial period, 1933 and 1959 revolutions, and eras under the governments of Fidel and Raúl Castro, including recent history. Topics considered will include: Cuban sovereignty; the agricultural basis of the Cuban economy under colonialism and neocolonialism; enslaved labor and abolition; social and political struggles, both nonviolent and armed; the development of Cuban nationalisms, with an emphasis on the roles of race, diaspora, and exile in this process; Cuban–U.S. relations over many decades; and Cuba’s role as a global actor, particularly after the 1959 revolution.
Course: HIST W 4688 1968 in Latin America: Leftist Radicalism and Youth Counterculture in Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay OPEN
Professor: Vania Markarian
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): LA
Course Description:
This course focuses on the cases of Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay to explore the complex relationships between social conflict, youth counterculture, and leftist radicalism which characterized the 1960s all over the region. In-depth reading and discussion of a number of relevant primary sources and available scholarship in English will build a foundation for thinking through these issues. In the first part of the class, we will analyze the political mobilization and cultural modernization in the framework of the conflicts that shaped the Cold War in the subcontinent. After this general introduction, we will focus on 1968 to examine the impact of countercultural ideas and practices on different political traditions, particularly student and leftist politics. Next we will analyze the rise and fall of the New Left, which challenged the ideological commitment, political strategies, and conservative cultural politics of the traditional left. Discussion will incorporate conventional views and recent academic debates on this shift in the region, which also addressing the spiraling of state repression that forced both old and new groups to reconsider strategies in the three countries under examination. Finally, students will be encouraged to assess how all of these events and themes echoed in social memory through cultural representations and their increasing power to either legitimize or discredit political positions.
Course: HIST W 4689 Human Rights Activism in Latin American, 1970s-1990s OPEN
Professor: Vania Markarian
Day/Time: Tuesday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): LA
Course Description:
Focusing on the cases of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, this course examines the birth and development of the movements that protested human rights violations by right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the first part of the class, we will explore some of the basic concerns that historians, political theorists, and social scientists have raised about authoritarian regimes in late twentieth-century South America. We will aim at concocting a working definition of authoritarianism, discussing the emergence of a new authoritarian model in the Southern Cone and examining the specific challenges confronted by the human rights movements. After this brief survey, the class will focus on the different ways of dealing with the repressive, legal, and political legacies of these regimes. We will analyze the first efforts at denunciation launched by political exiles and transnational human rights groups, as well as the formation of groups of victims’ relatives that aimed at exposing ongoing abuses in their countries. We will also study the role of human rights claims during the transitional periods and the ways in which the post-transitional democratic governments faced these calls for accountability. The course will make a basic distinction between concrete legal actions taken to punish those accused of human rights violations, where the state was called to play a decisive role, and more disorganized efforts to know what happened and spread this knowledge to the society at large. We will explore this distinction, discussing how different actors posed their claims and constructed narratives to account for human rights violations and past political violence. This exploration will include the existing literature on justice and truth telling in the politics of transition, as well as scholarship on social memory and historical commemorations.
Course: HIST W 4713 Orientalism and Historiography of the Other CLOSED
Professor: Rashid Khalidi
Day/Time: Tuesday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): ME
Course Description:
This course will examine some of the problems inherent in Western historical writing on non-European cultures, as well as broad questions of what it means to write history across cultures. The course will touch on the relationship between knowledge and power, given that much of the knowledge we will be considering was produced at a time of the expansion of Western power over the rest of the world. By comparing some of the "others" which European historians constructed in the different non-western societies they depicted, and the ways other societies dealt with alterity and self, we may be able to derive a better sense of how the Western sense of self was constructed.
Course: HIST BC 4788 Gender, Sexuality, and Power from Colonial to Contemporary OPEN
Professor: Abosede George
Day/Time: Thursday 6:10-8 PM
Course Description:
The central themes of the course will be changes and continuities in gender performance and the politics of gender and sexual difference within African societies; social, political, and economic processes that have influenced gender and sexual identities; connections between gender, sexuality, inequality, and activism at local, national, continental, and global scales. Readings will include key works in African gender history and the history of sexuality, along with texts, broadly construed, on gender, sexuality, and governance from other disciplines or focusing on other parts of the world. The main objective of the course is to introduce students to significant debates in the study of gender and sexuality in the African History field. Emphasis will be placed on the theoretical and methodological approaches that have informed scholarship on gender and sexuality in African History.
Course: HIST W 4789 Poverty in Africa: Historical Perspectives OPEN
Professor: Rhiannon Stephens
Day/Time: Tuesday 9:00-10:50 AM
Field(s): AFR
Course Description:
In this course we will explore in a critical manner the concept of poverty in Africa. The emphasis is on historicizing categories such as poverty and wealth, debt and charity and on the ways in which people in Africa have understood such categories. As such the course takes a longue durée approach spanning over a millennium of history, ending with contemporary understandings of poverty.
+Course counts as History seminar, but is not included in the application process.
Course: HSEA W 4725 Tibetan Material History
Professor: Gray Tuttle
Day/Time: Tuesday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): EA
Course Description:
A seminar exploring the nature and implications of Tibetan visual and cultural material in historical context, with biweekly visits to NYC area museum collections. Topics include object biographies, Buddhist art & ritual objects, Tibetan arms & armor, clothing & jewelry, rugs & furniture. As we explore the incredibly rich Tibetan material resources of New York City's museums, students will have the opportunity to encounter first hand objects from Tibet's past. While the class as a whole will survey a wide variety of materials‑‑from swords & armor to Buddhist images & ritual implements, from rugs & clothes to jewelry & charms-students will select one or two objects as the subject of their object biographies. There will also be opportunities to explore the process and motivations for building collections and displaying Tibetan material culture.
+Course counts as History seminar, but is not included in the application process.
Course: HSEA W 4870 Japan Before 1600*
Professor: David Lurie
Day/Time: Monday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): EA
Course Description:
Introduces the cultural, political, social, and economic history of the Japanese archipelago from earliest times through the 16th century C.E. A variety of primary source materials in translation and a sampling of English-language secondary sources. Loosely organized around particular places or spaces of pre-modern Japan, and emphatically not a comprehensive survey.
+Course counts as History seminar, but is not included in the application process.
Course: HSEA W 4890 East Asian Historiography
Professor: Madeleine Zelin
Day/Time: Wednesday 10:10 AM -12:00 PM
Field(s): EA
Course Description:
Major issues in the practice of history illustrated by critical reading of important historical works on East Asia. Designed primarily for majors in East Asian studies in their junior year and lower-level graduate students; others may enroll with the instructor’s permission. CC GF GS
+Course counts as History seminar, but is not included in the application process.
Course: HSEA W 4891 Law in Chinese History
Professor: Madeleine Zelin
Day/Time: Tuesday 4:10-6:00 PM
Field(s): EA
Course Description:
An introduction to chines Legal history and the role of law in Chinese society and culture with a focus particularly on Qing period. Issues covered include civil and criminal law, formal and informal justice, law and the family, law and the economy, law and literature, and the question of a rule of law in China.
Course: HIST BC 4830 Bombay/Mumbai and Its Urban Imaginaries OPEN
Professor: Anupama Rao
Day/Time: Wednesday 6:10-8:00 PM
Field(s): SA
Course Description:
Explores the intersections between imagining and materiality in Bombay/Mumbai from its colonial beginnings to the present. Housing, slums, neighborhoods, streets, public culture, contestation, and riots are examined through film, architecture, fiction, history and theory. It is an introduction to the city; and to the imaginative enterprise in history.
Course: HIST W 4900 The Historian’s Craft OPEN
Professor: Eric Wakin
Day/Time: Thursday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): Methods
Course Description:
Intended for history majors this course raises the issues of the theory and practice of history as a discipline. Special emphasis on conceptualization of research topics and subsequent investigation of appropriate archives.
Course: HIST BC 4901 Reacting to the Past II OPEN
Professor: Mark Carnes
Day/Time: Wednesday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
The collision of ideas in two contexts: Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France, 1791; and Hindu and Muslim nationalism, Gandhi, and India on the eve of independence, 1945. The course is structured as an elaborate simulation.
Course: HIST BC 4909 History of Environmental Thinking OPEN
Professor: Deborah Coen
Day/Time: Monday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
This course will consider how experiences of the natural world and the meaning of "nature" have changed over the past three centuries. We will follow the development of the environmental sciences and the origins of environmentalism. The geographical focus will be Europe, with attention to the global context of imperialism.
Course: HIST W 4915 The History of Domestic Animals OPEN
Professor: Richard Bulliet
Day/Time: Wednesday 6:10-8:00 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
This course will consider the evolution of human-animal relations on a global basis over the entire course of human history. Student papers will engage specific topics from different times and places.
THIS COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Course: HIST W 4918 Drugs in World History
Professor: Adam McKeown
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10-4:00 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
This course will look at global trade, use and regulation of drugs over the past 500 years. It will focus on the relationship of drugs to the rise of modern capitalism and states, and how particular drugs come to be understood as beneficial or harmful.
THIS COURSE OFFERING WAS RECENTLY ADDED. PLEASE FOLLOW THE ENROLLMENT PROCEDURES DETERMINED BY THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT.
Course: SOCI W 3958 Fact and Fiction
Professor: Jonathan Cole
Day/Time: Monday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
This course on “Fact and Fiction” will use materials from a variety of fields, including: sociology, history, economics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, journalism, science, and medicine. It will also use actual studies that make claims to fact that I will ask students to analyze and apply skeptical reasoning. It will deal with the social construction of medical facts; it will question the media’s presentation and representation of facts; it will confront the issues of fact and fiction in historical writings as well. The aim of the course is to be unsettling – to disturb students’ comfort with their own presumptions about facts. The challenge for me is to make them better and more sophisticated critical thinkers.
THIS COURSE OFFERING WAS RECENTLY ADDED. PLEASE FOLLOW THE ENROLLMENT PROCEDURES DETERMINED BY THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT.
Course: SOCI W 3960 Law, Science, and Society
Professor: Jonathan Cole
Day/Time: Tuesday 11:00 AM-12:50 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
This course will examine basic contemporary social, political, and cultural issues from the perspectives of scientists, social scientists, legal scholars, and judges. Through the use of case studies, we will examine the nature of theories, evidence, facts, proof, and argument as found in the work of those who have engaged the substantive issues presented in the seminar. This is a long reading list, but few readings are required. I’ve provided an extensive list of “suggested readings” for students who want to go into greater depth in each topic and for those who may be writing papers related to the topics. Each of the subjects listed below will occupy us for two or more seminar sessions.
THIS COURSE OFFERING WAS RECENTLY ADDED. PLEASE CONTACT PROFESSORS FOR ENROLLMENT PROCEDURES.
Course: INSM C 3940 Science Across Cultures
Professors: George Saliba and Daniel Newsome
Day/Time: Wednesday 4:10 PM-6:00 PM
Field(s): INTL
Course Description:
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited. Open to seniors and some qualified juniors. Priority given to seniors. Development of scientific thought from various cultures and from antiquity till the time of the European Renaissance. Provides examples of the process by which scientific thinking has developed and illustrates that although science may not have always developed in a linear fashion, the problems science was called upon to solve exhibited a continuity that crossed cultural, linguistic, and religious borders.