Since 2002, I have been teaching courses at Brown University on the history of Europe and the history of science. I love teaching collaboratively because I get the chance to learn from colleagues in other fields and disciplines. I also sometimes incorporate hands-on research in my history of science courses, inviting students to explore historical processes of making and knowledge production by reconstructing them today. Here are some of the courses I have taught recently.
HMAN 2400X (Spring 2020)
Premodern Art-Science,
or the Work of Knowing in Europe before 1800
with Harold J. Cook, Brown Dept. of History
and Michael Gaudio & J.B. Shank, University of Minnesota
This collaborative graduate seminar examins premodern ways of knowing through entangled histories of art, craft, science, and medicine in Europe before 1800. Whether through the visual representations of naturalists or the manipulation of matter by artists/artisans to render nature meaningful, useful, or both, premoderns made knowledge in ways that defy modern disciplinary divisions. In studying premodern knowledge work through its own disciplinary understandings, we explore the research methodology of reconstruction, i.e., the argument that we must reconnect material objects with texts, and both with laboratory research practices, to fully understand premodern knowledge work. Taught in parallel at the University of Minnesota.
HIST 2981J (Spring 2018)
The Body
with Debbie Weinstein, Brown Dept. of American Studies
At once discursive and material, bodies are bearers of politics, culture, gender, race, and the sacred. They are sites of knowledge and expertise, as well as economic value, and identity. Bodies can circulate in life and in death, whole or in parts. As cyborgs, they can straddle nature and technology. What does it mean to write a history of the body? Is there such thing as a pre-modern body or a modern body, or a Western body, Chinese body, African body, or Latin American body? This seminar asks whether it is possible to write “a” history of the body, or whether the body simply dissolves into historical specificity.
HIST 2930 (Fall 2018 & 2019)
Colloquium, or Theory and Practice of History
with Daniel Rodriguez, Brown Dept. of History
Required for all incoming PhD students in History at Brown, “The Theory and Practice of History” encourages critical thinking about some of the different ways in which historians approach thinking and writing about the past. In particular, we explore some of the major theoretical stances that have influenced the discipline of history. Our focus throughout will be the interplay between theory and practice. By examining how historians have grappled with questions posed by influential thinkers (often working within other fields of knowledge), we chart the trajectory of the discipline and assess its working methods.
HIST 1825F (Fall 2019)
Nature, Knowledge, and Power
in Early Modern Europe
This course examines the creation, transformation, and circulation of scientific knowledge in Renaissance Europe, ca. 1450-1600. We explore the practices, materials, and ideas not just of astronomers and natural philosophers, but also of healers, botanists, astrologers, alchemists, and artisans. Taking sites of knowledge production as our organizing framework, we will explore how social, political, economic, and artistic developments during this period reshaped how naturalists proposed to learn about, collect, manipulate, and commercialize nature. We also consider the ways in which colonial projects forced Europeans to engage with other “ways of knowing” and rethink classical knowledge systems. The class incorporates “lab sessions” in special collections, where students work with books from Brown’s Special Collections that are related to each week’s theme.
HIST 1956J (Fall 2018)
Making Meaning: Extracting Knowledge from Matter in Early Modern Europe
with Rachel Berwick, RISD Glass
In this studio/seminar, co-taught by a RISD artist and a Brown historian, we examine how material attains meaning. Through demonstrations, workshops, lectures, and hands-on making, we will explore instruments used to understand materials in 16th and 17th-century Europe (e.g. microscopes, alchemical alembics, printed books). We also consider how those devices have inspired contemporary art practice. Final projects, which may take a variety of forms, will interrogate the relationship between matter and the devices used to understand it.
HIST 1216 (Spring 2020)
The Paradox of Early Modern Europe
This course explores European social, intellectual, political, and economic history from the 15th to the 18th centuries, with an eye to the paradox embodied in the term "early modern." On the one hand, this is supposedly the heroic era of Columbus, Machiavelli, Newton, and Montesquieu, when Europeans became increasingly global, urban, and critical. On the other hand, this period also saw the rise of judicial torture, new regimes of discipline, colonialism, and a robust belief in the unseen world of demons, angels, and witches. We explore the interplay of these paradoxical forces in Europe's transformation from medieval into modern, as well as Europeans’ changing place in the world.