* HSHM 0005a / HIST 0106a, Medicine and Society in American History  Rebecca Tannenbaum

Disease and healing in American history from colonial times to the present. The changing role of the physician, alternative healers and therapies, and the social impact of epidemics from smallpox to AIDS. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
TTh 1:30pm-2:20pm

HSHM 2060a / HIST 1114a, Histories of American Reproductive Health, Rights, and Activism from 1800  Megann Licskai

Are all politics reproductive politics? This course traces the reproductive history of the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Questions about reproduction–and about not reproducing–are deeply tied to questions of gendered and racial rights; of bodily autonomy; of American expansion and empire; and of who counts as a citizen, or even as a human being. In the past few years, we’ve encountered new stories about everything from new and restrictive abortion laws, to immigrant woman who were sterilized without their consent, to new technologies in male birth control, to the inequitable childcare burden that falls to women during times of hardship, to the racist roots of foster care and residential school systems. In this course, we come to understand the historical changes in American reproduction to better understand the complicated roots of our current moment. By analyzing articles in newspapers and scientific journals, advertisements, film, patient and physician narratives, and exhibitions and material culture, students will understand reproduction as a site for empowerment and activism, as a site of medical professionalization, and as a site of health disparity. We examine reproduction capaciously, including pregnancy and childbirth, birth control and abortion, assistive reproductive technologies, and adoption and foster care. Our analysis is intersectional, and we consider what different identities meant for reproduction historically, as well as in our current moment.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HSHM 2070a / AMST 1199a / EVST 1199a / HIST 1199a, American Energy History  Staff

The history of energy in the United States from early hydropower and coal to present-day hydraulic fracturing, deepwater oil, wind, and solar. Topics include energy transitions and technological change; energy and democracy; environmental justice and public health; corporate power and monopoly control; electricity and popular culture; labor struggles; the global quest for oil; changing national energy policies; the climate crisis.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HSHM 2090a / EVST 2090a / HIST 1765a, Making Climate Knowledge  Deborah Coen

This course explores the history of scientific knowledge of Earth’s climate from Europeans’ first encounters with the Americas to the politics of climate knowledge in the 2020s. We see how scientists learned to track interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary, and how they conceived the ambition of predicting and even controlling the climate system. Ironically, the rise of modern climate science depended on the very processes of industrialization that it later called into question. It was also indelibly shaped by European imperialism and by the theories of human difference that Europeans used to justify colonization and enslavement. Coming to terms with the historical entanglement of climate science with colonialism and racial capitalism is a necessary step towards climate justice. To make vivid the multiplicity of ways of knowing climate, the course includes visits to the Yale Farm, the Medical Historical Library, and the Center for British Art.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HSHM 2140b / HIST 1752b, Extraterrestrials in History  Ivano Dal Prete

The notion of extraterrestrials and "radical others" in history and culture from antiquity to the present. Topics include other worlds and their inhabitants in ancient Greece; medieval debates on the plurality of worlds; angels, freaks, native Americans, and other "aliens" of the Renaissance; comet dwellers in puritan New England; Mars as a socialist utopia in the early twentieth century; and visitors from space in American popular culture.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

HSHM 2260a / HIST 1236a / HIST 236 / HUMS 2260a, The Global Scientific Revolution  Ivano Dal Prete

The material, political, cultural, and social transformations that underpinned the rise of modern science between the 14th and 18th century, considered in global context. Topics include artisanal practices and the empirical exploration of nature; global networks of knowledge and trade, and colonial science; figurative arts and the emersion of a visual language of anatomy, astronomy, and natural history.   HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HSHM 2270a / EVST 2270a / HIST 1275a, Botanical Bodies: Plants, Medicine and Colonial Science  Staff

Plants weave their way into every aspect of our lives. From the food that we eat to our growing obsession with houseplants, from the pharmaceutical industry to recent meditations on queerness and reproductive freedom, plants are inescapable, offering both practical and metaphoric roots, tendrils, and blossoming ideas about our own bodies and our engagement within changing social, political, and cultural structures. This course considers the ways that plants (and fungi) have shaped ideas about gender, sexuality, race, health, medicine, capitalism, power, and consciousness from the early modern period to the present, moving chronologically to examine our complicated relationships with the natural world. Working within the (broadly construed and ongoing) colonial context, we follow plants and their collectors, cultivators, and stewards across oceans and continents, charting the rise of plantation agriculture and specious ways of classifying species to twentieth-century focuses on breeding and genetics, attempts to patent plants as medicines, and, in recent years, calls to use plants as models for new (or, perhaps, very old) models for kinship that upturn these very systems of power.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HSHM 2380b / ANTH 2821b, The History of Drugs in America  Marco Ramos

Virtually every American today “does” drugs. As a nation, our drug use ranges from everyday activities, such as drinking coffee or beer, to combating illnesses with prescription medications, to using illegal drugs for recreation. This course follow a loose chronology beginning in the early twentieth century and ending in the present day. Instead of focusing on the biography of a single drug, or class of drugs, this course incorporates a wide range of substances, including alcohol, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, and narcotics. Through a selection of essays, book chapters, and primary source material, we discuss how certain ways of using and selling drugs have been sanctioned and encouraged, while others have been pathologized as addiction or criminalized. We explore how drug definitions are constructed, how they shift over time, and how they reflect, reinforce, and sometimes challenge anxieties about race, disability, sexuality, and gender. Throughout the course, films, images, music, and television episodes are also presented as objects of analysis to provide insight into the cultural lives of drugs. We explore how historians approach this subject, assess their sources and assumptions, and consider the choices they have made in researching and writing. Students are expected to apply these historical lessons to the present and demonstrate the ability to think and write critically about the history of drugs. Students previously enrolled in HSHM 488, The History of Drugs in 20th Century America, are not eligible to enroll in this course.  HU, SO  0 Course cr
TTh 9:25am-10:15am

* HSHM 2390a / ARCH 2105a / HIST 1755a / URBN 3320a, Reckoning Environmental Uncertainty: A Global History since 1100  Anthony Acciavatti

How have people made decisions about the future when the environment is uncertain? This lecture class provides a global perspective on how societies have tried to understand and live with an unpredictable world. Beginning in 1100, we examine a series of historical episodes when communities faced environmental dangers, uncertain futures, and how they managed risk. Case studies include water and landscape management in the Song Dynasty, navigation across the Pacific Ocean, utopian cities in the Americas, agricultural and urban systems in South Asia, environmental design in West Africa, and the global rise of weather observatories to monitor atmospheric changes. Rather than telling a linear history of progress or decline, the course asks a more fundamental question: how do people claim to know the environment, and how does uncertainty shape that knowledge? Throughout the semester, we examine how different cultures develop their own strategies for understanding a world that has never been entirely predictable. Drawing on the histories of science, technology, architecture, and the environment, students see how debates about risk, planetary health, and expertise have deep historical roots.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

* HSHM 4090b / HIST 3170b, Community Histories: Reproductive Health in New Haven  Megann Licskai

How does a local focus help us to understand the history of reproductive health, and how does reproductive health help us to understand local history? As a project within Yale’s Community Histories Lab, students join a team of Yale researchers and community partners committed to producing new knowledge about the history of health in New Haven. Students collaboratively build an archive of reproductive health histories in New Haven. This archive will be a site of academic interest, developed in response to community needs as we consider how to leverage historical research to imagine a better future. The first unit provides students with targeted methodological training in oral historical and traditional archival methods in preparation of the collection of oral histories and compilation of paper archives. The remainder of the seminar engages these methods in project work. Students use their training to build a publicly accessible reproductive health archive housed at Yale, to develop their own research questions coming out of this nascent archive, and to support New Haven organizations that can use these histories to serve their communities.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

* HSHM 4200a or b, Senior Project Workshop  Megann Licskai

A research workshop for seniors in the HSHM major, intended to move students toward the successful completion of their senior projects and to provide a community for support and for facilitated peer review. Meets periodically throughout the semester for students to discuss stages of the research process, discuss common challenges and practical strategies for addressing them, and to collaboratively support each others' work. The workshop events are structured around the schedule for the fall-to-spring two-term senior project, but students writing one-term projects or spring-to-fall projects also benefit from them, and there is at least one peer review session to support their key deadlines each semester too. Students completing their senior project in the same semester as the workshop have to share their key findings with peers in a celebratory discussion of key ideas, findings, and processes. Students may take both the Fall and the Spring workshop or select the semester that best helps them complete the SP. Students must be seniors in the HSHM major and must be signed up for HSHM 490, 491, or 492 to take this course.  ½ Course cr
HTBA

* HSHM 4380b / HIST 3761b, Unnatural History: Colonialism and Inequality in the Making of Nature  Elaine Ayers

Penetrated jungles, “mother” nature, and quests to preserve the redwoods – for hundreds of years, colonial agents have characterized environments in racialized, gendered, sexualized, classist, and ableist terms, anthropomorphizing nature along ongoing systems of inequality.  This class traces shifting conceptualizations of nature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on how naturalists and scientists have described, collected, and displayed “new” environments and peoples while building extractive and exploitative natural history collections, from cabinets of curiosity to Yale’s own Peabody Museum. By analyzing methodologies like classification, conservation, and scientific communication, we will discuss how divisions between the “natural” and “unnatural” were created in western cultures along unequal ideas about human bodies. Critical analyses of sources across multiple disciplines will inform conversations about knowledge production with the goal of interrogating how these power structures have silenced voices and enacted long-lasting violences on both environments and the peoples inhabiting them. Using both primary and secondary sources while conducting original research, students will learn how binary and reductive categories have been used and abused in colonial science and beyond. This class will include visits to museums around Yale’s campus and beyond, with two of your assignments focused on the Peabody Museum.  WR, HU
W 4pm-5:55pm

* HSHM 4410b / HIST 3197b / HSAR 4375b, Museums: Power and Politics  Elaine Ayers

Museums are in a state of crisis. From calls for decolonization and repatriation to protests over human remains collections and unethical donor policies, museums and related cultural institutions find themselves at a crossroads, reckoning with their violent colonial histories while handling ongoing concerns about workers’ rights, systemic inequality, and their role in shaping knowledge in the public sphere. Whether addressing climate change policy, Black Lives Matter protests, fights for unionization, or Indigenous representation, it’s clear that museums are rich sites for critique in the history of science and beyond. How did we get here, and where do we go from here? Beginning with early modern cabinets of curiosity and moving through nineteenth century encyclopedic museums, controversial anatomical collections, and more recent natural history institutions, we investigate how museum politics and power produce knowledge, from the depths of their archives to sensationalized exhibits while questioning what an ethical, holistic museum might look like in the future. Amidst ongoing debates over controversial collections like the Benin Bronzes, human remains stored in universities across the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2023 admission of looting practices, and the American Museum of Natural History’s shallow apology for its eugenic past, the role of museums has expanded beyond the bounds of the academy, stoking universal struggles around human rights, international repatriation policies, and the politics of preservation, display, and loss. We bridge the classroom and the collection, visiting institutions around New Haven, practicing skills like provenance research and ethical handling of difficult objects while working towards a practice-based final project that suggests ways forward for museums and collections.  WR, HU
F 4pm-5:55pm

* HSHM 4450a / HIST 3139a, Fetal Histories: Pregnancy, Life, and Personhood in the American Cultural Imagination  Megann Licskai

In our twenty-first-century historical moment, the fetus is a powerful political and cultural symbol. One’s fetal politics likely predicts a lot about how they live their life, vote, worship, and even about how they understand themselves. How, then, has the fetus come to carry the cultural significance that it does? Are there other ways one might think of the fetus? And what is happening in the background when we center the fetus up front? This course examines the many cultural meanings of the fetus in American life: from a clump of cells, to a beloved family member, to political litmus test, and considers the way that these different meanings are connected to questions of human and civil rights, gender relations, bodily autonomy, and political life. We look at the history of our very idea of the fetus and consider how we got here. Each of us may have a different idea of what the fetus is, but every one of those ideas has a particular history. We work to understand those histories, their contexts, and their possible implications for the future of American political life.  WR, HU
Th 4pm-5:55pm

* HSHM 4460b / AMST 3037b / ER&M 4049b / HIST 3737b, Globalizing Disability: Histories and Theories from the Non-West  Jiya Pandya

Is disability a universal identity? Who decides who is disabled and how they get treated? How do experiences of illness, disability, access, and care differ in different modern global contexts? Can (and should) disability – as identity, rights, and pathology – be decolonized? We tackle these and other questions in this course, which offers students insight into historical and theoretical contributions from the growing fields of disability studies and mad studies. We focus primarily on ideas and critiques that emerge from scholars and practitioners working in and on the complex geographies that are given the uneven labels of the non-West, Third World, Developing World, and Global South. Tracing histories across multiple countries and regions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we examine how the forces of colonialism, post-colonial nation-building, and international governance shaped the lives of people who were labeled or came to identify as disabled. Structured thematically, we read historical, anthropological, critical theory, and cultural studies interventions into topics such as global medicine, humanitarianism, rights, war, welfare, and mental health. Even as we read widely, we center disability (and its intersections with race, gender, sexuality, and class) as a political methodology and a form of radical embodiment. Students from all disciplinary backgrounds may take this class, which both works alongside and builds on WGSS 2235’s broader introduction to disability studies.  WR, HU
HTBA

* HSHM 4490a / EVST 4490a / HIST 3749a / HUMS 3446a / URBN 3312a, Critical Data Visualization: History, Theory, and Practice  Bill Rankin

Critical analysis of the creation, use, and cultural meanings of data visualization, with emphasis on both the theory and the politics of visual communication. Seminar discussions include close readings of historical data graphics since the late eighteenth century and conceptual engagement with graphic semiology, ideals of objectivity and honesty, and recent approaches of feminist and participatory data design. Course assignments focus on the research, production, and workshopping of students’ own data graphics; topics include both historical and contemporary material. No prior software experience is required; tutorials are integrated into weekly meetings. Basic proficiency in standard graphics software is expected by the end of the term, with optional support for more advanced programming and mapping software.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HSHM 4520a / ER&M 3032a, Cultural and Racial History of Mental Health  Ximena Lopez Carrillo

Since the 1960s, social scientists have analyzed how the scientific ideas about mental illness, mental health policies, institutions, healing practices, and popular discourses surrounding mental health have been influenced by the social and cultural contexts. This course introduces students to the debates and questions guiding the history of mental health since the Civil Rights and the Psychiatric Survivor Movements in the 1960s, especially those that relate to Critical Race Theory. Through primary sources and secondary literature, students learn about the intersections between mental illness, race, and ethnicity. The class materials include topics such as disability justice, psychopharmacology, the community mental health movement, and the history of asylums in a comparative perspective.  SO
W 9:25am-11:20am

* HSHM 4580a / HIST 3179a, Scientific Instruments & the History of Science  Paola Bertucci

What do scientific instruments from the past tell us about science and its history? This seminar foregrounds historical instruments and technological devices to explore how experimental cultures have changed over time. Each week students focus on a specific instrument from the History of Science and Technology Division of the Peabody Museum: magic lantern, telescope, telegraph, astrolabe, sundial, and more!  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HSHM 4670b / HIST 3747b / WGSS 4465b, History of the Body  Ziv Eisenberg

What does it mean to have a “bad hair day?” How should you care for your skin? What happens when you eat a burger and drink wine? How are babies made? What happens when you die? The answers depend not only on who provides them, but also on where and when. This seminar examines historical production of systems of corporeal knowledge and power, as well as the norms, practices, meanings, and power structures they have created, displaced, and maintained. Structured thematically, the course familiarizes students with major topics in the history of the body, health, and medicine, with a particular focus on US history.  WR, HU
HTBA

* HSHM 4680a / HIST 3260a, Sex, Life, and Generation  Ivano Dal Prete

Theories and practices of life, sex, and generation in Western civilization. Politics and policies of conception and birth; social control of abortion and infanticide in premodern societies; theories of life and gender; the changing status of the embryo; the lure of artificial life.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HSHM 4730b / HIST 3703b, Vaccination in Historical Perspective  Jason Schwartz

For over two centuries, vaccination has been a prominent, effective, and at times controversial component of public health activities in the United States and around the world. Despite the novelty of many aspects of contemporary vaccines and vaccination programs, they reflect a rich and often contested history that combines questions of science, medicine, public health, global health, economics, law, and ethics, among other topics. This course examines the history of vaccines and vaccination programs, with a particular focus on the 20th and 21st centuries and on the historical roots of contemporary issues in U.S. and global vaccination policy. Students gain a thorough, historically grounded understanding of the scope and design of vaccination efforts, past and present, and the interconnected social, cultural, and political issues that vaccination has raised throughout its history and continues to raise today.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HSHM 4770a / HIST 3728a / HUMS 3463a / RLST 4370a, Critical Theories of Science and Religion  Noreen Khawaja and Joanna Radin

This course is an introduction to new thinking about the relationship of science and religion in global modernities. This semester, we study how frameworks of secularization and enchantment affect our theoretical and lived approaches to matter, media, and meaning. In particular, we explore the Catholicism of key thinkers shaping the field of contemporary science and technology studies, including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Marshall MacLuhan, and their many critics. Social science since Weber has abounded in models to think about the interplay of secular culture and Protestant spirituality. What tools might we need to think about the kind of world Catholic science has made? What is a world, and who gets to define it?   HU
M 9:25am-11:20am

* HSHM 4810a / AFST 4481a / BLST 2213 / HIST 3383a, Medicine and Race in the Slave Trade  Carolyn Roberts

Examination of the interconnected histories of medicine and race in the slave trade. Topics include the medical geography of the slave trade from slave prisons in West Africa to slave ships; slave trade drugs and forced drug consumption; mental and physical illnesses and their treatments; gender and the body; British and West African medicine and medical knowledge in the slave trade; eighteenth-century theories of racial difference and disease; medical violence and medical ethics.  HU
F 9:25am-11:20am

* HSHM 4900a or b and HSHM 4910a or b, Yearlong Senior Project  Megann Licskai

Preparation of a yearlong senior project under the supervision of a member of the faculty. There will be a mandatory meeting at the beginning of the term for students who have chosen the yearlong senior project; students will be notified of the time and location by e-mail before classes begin. Majors planning to begin their projects who do not receive this notice should contact the senior project director. Students expecting to graduate in May enroll in HSHM 490 during the fall term and complete their projects in HSHM 491 in the spring term. December graduates enroll in HSHM 490 in the spring term and complete their projects in HSHM 491 during the following fall term. Majors planning to begin their projects in the spring term should notify the senior project director by the last day of classes in the fall term. Students must meet progress requirements by specific deadlines throughout the first term to receive a temporary grade of SAT for HSHM 490, which will be changed to the grade received by the project upon the project's completion. Failure to meet any requirement may result in the student's being asked to withdraw from HSHM 490. For details about project requirements and deadlines, consult the HSHM Senior Project Handbook. Students enrolled in HSHM 491 must submit a completed project to the HSHM Registrar no later than 5 p.m. on the due date as listed in the HSHM Senior Project Handbook. Projects submitted after 5 p.m. on the due date without an excuse from the student's residential college dean will be subject to grade penalties. Credit for HSHM 490 only on completion of HSHM 491.
HTBA

* HSHM 4930a / AMST 3302a / ER&M 3512a / WGSS 3312a, Technology, Race and Gender  Kalindi Vora

In this course, we discuss technology and the politics of difference through a survey of topics including artificial intelligence, digital labor (crowdsourcing), and robotics and computer science. Materials for study include humanistic and social scientific critique, ethnographies of technology, technical writing and scientific papers, as well as speculative art practices including design, visual art and fiction. What assumptions and politics of imagination govern the design and development of new technologies? What alternative imaginaries, politics, or even speculations, can be identified with a feminist analytic lens? The seminar also includes a practicum component where we practice the politics of speculation through writing and design projects. To do this we study everything from active STEM projects at Yale to speculative fiction and film to think about how structures of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and religious difference inform how we "speculate" or imagine the future through the ways we design and build technological worlds in practice and in fiction.  HU, SO
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HSHM 4960b / HIST 3110b, Childbirth in America, 1650-2000  Rebecca Tannenbaum

This course considers the ways childbirth has been conducted in the United states over three centuries.  Topics include the connections between childbirth and historical constructions of gender, race, and motherhood, as well as changes in the medical understanding and management of childbirth.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm