This is a capstone seminar for STSC majors, and a required seminar for any STSC junior who wishes to write a senior thesis for honors in the major. It is designed to provide the tools necessary to undertake original research by guiding students through the research and writing process. Students will produce either a polished proposal for a senior thesis project, or a completed research paper by the end of the term. Although each student will work on a different topic, the class will focus on general aspects of historical, and social scientific research and guide students through a close reading of key texts in science and technology studies.

“We shape our technologies; thereafter they shape us.” This course surveys the ways in which technology has shaped our societies and our relations with the natural world. We will examine the origins and impact of technical developments throughout human history and across the globe–from stone tools, agriculture and cave painting to ancient cities, metallurgy and aqueducts; from windmills, cathedrals, steam engines and electricity to atom bombs, the internet and genetic engineering. We will pay attention to the aesthetic, religious and mythical dimensions of technological change and consider the circumstances in which innovations emerge and their effects on social order, on the environment and on the ways humans understand themselves.

Victor Frankenstein created a monster. But he didn’t make it out of nothing: he found body parts in operation rooms and graves, sewed them together, and invested the new whole with life following scripts laid down by thinkers both ancient and new. Likewise, in creating Frankenstein, one of the greatest novels of all time, Mary Shelley put together elements from gothic fiction, moral and political philosophy, romantic poetry and contemporary science. What were the books that Victor Frankenstein read? What ideas animated Shelley’s act of creation? in this seminar we will read from the primary texts that made up Frankenstein and Shelley’s libraries, along with closely related works from this period, ranging from Renaissance magic, modern electrochemistry and physiology, through to Rousseau, Smith, Milton, Poe and Balzac. These readings will bring to life a crucial monment in the history of the West–after the French Revolution and at the start of the industrial age–which will give us perspective on today’s anxieties about technology and science.

This reading seminar will cover writings on the social history of knowledge that are often mentioned by historians of science but less often read; it will give students a chance to read and discuss authors who are neglected, trendy, difficult, and/or foundational in this field. We will begin with Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being and critiques brought against it, moving to classic histories of scientific ideas with a focus on “mechanical philosophy” followed by recent rethinkings of “the Scientific Revolution.” We will then visit major schools of historical interpretation: Foucault’s geneaologies of knowledge and power, Marxist criticism and the Frankfurt School, Max Weber’s analysis of rationalization and the values of science, along with philosophical approaches to technoscience, biopower, the state of exception and artificial life. Throughout, our guiding questions will be the relationship between scientific knowledge and institutions, practices, technologies and values, as well as the connection between local case studies and the “big picture” of science and technology in the modern world. The seminar is open to graduate students from any discipline who want to engage critically with these works.