Preserved plant specimens, Museum of the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Photo by Clare Griffin.
History of Magic
Belief in magic and divination has been common to many societies. This course introduces students to the long history of magic, starting in the ancient world and working through medieval and early modern magic to end with modern forms of magic including stage magic, drawing comparisons between different societies on the basis of similar beliefs and practices. This is a primary source focused course, drawing upon documents that have been published as well as online materials. The historiography of magic will be introduced in lectures, whilst essential readings will be taken almost exclusively from historical documents on the practice and the prosecution of magic. Students will learn to read these documents in a sensitive and culturally relativistic way, producing source analysis papers in which they will develop their skills of close reading and analysis of historical documents.
[Last taught: Fall 2020]
| syllabus_hst125_f20.pdf |
Global Histories
Globalisation is a common term in current affairs. In its popular usage, it is a recent development that integrates the human world in an unprecedented fashion, and a process in which there are winners and losers. Yet many historians would disagree. Various points in history - the Mongol Empire, the European invasions of the Americas - have been presented as the 'real' start of globalisation. Various groups, nations, and regions, have been proposed as the winners or losers of globalisation. This class takes a long-term view, beginning with Ancient World Systems, proceeding through the Medieval Global and Early Modern Globalisation, to get to modernity and claims of Westernisation and Easternisation. Particular attention will be paid to views of Central Asia, to analyse how this region has been written into or out of global histories.
[Last taught: Spring 2020]
[Last taught: Spring 2020]
| syllabushst424_524_s20.pdf |
| further_readings_.pdf |
Cannibalism and Civilisation
In the early modern world, people were often concerned with differences between groups of humans, and what the limits of humanity were. One key part of such debates was the accusation of cannibalism: claiming another group to be cannibals was the ultimate weapon in declaring them uncivilized and even inhuman. Such accusations reveal historical ideas about how humans should behave. They also display views on the human body, as accounts of cannibalism were often concerned with the bodies of the eaters and the eaten. This course will examine textual and visual representations of cannibalism from around the world from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, to take a global view on how considering cannibalism can help us understand the history of human behaviour and human bodies.
[last taught: Fall 2020]
[last taught: Fall 2020]
| syllabushst223_ant287f20.pdf |
Representations of Nature in the Early Modern World
This course examines how the arts and the sciences collaborated to gain insight into nature in the early modern world. Early modern naturalists and artists faced a natural world in flux, one that they sought to describe in detail as new realms of natural history emerged, facilitated by a conjunction of sweeping geographic exploration and the invention of new scientific instruments. Exploration, trade, and colonial expansion lead to encounters between different peoples that challenged perceptions of the limits and forms of human beings, nature, and the world. This course takes a thematic approach, informed by a close examination of visual and textual sources to see how questions of creation, morphology, scale, growth, and deformity, were investigated in the early modern world, and how we can retrace their scientific and artistic logic today.
[last taught: Fall 2018]
[last taught: Fall 2018]
| hst240syllabus2018.pdf |
Introduction to the History of Science and Technology
This course takes a long and a broad view of the history of science and technology. Starting in Ancient Babylon, we end on Twitter, having considered astronomy and astrology, magic, the space race, and much besides. The course sets modern science in the context of much earlier developments, many of which look very different to science today, and yet were vital to its emergence. For every period, source, and phenomenon we consider, we will question how and why it should be considered scientific. Students will be expected to approach each period with the aim of understanding why certain practices made sense to historical figures, even if they do not make sense to us.
[last taught: Spring 2020]
[last taught: Spring 2020]
| hst123s21.pdf |
Quarantine Preparations Document
| quarantine_prep.docx |