Current Courses

In the Spring semester 2012 I am returning to my course on plagues and epidemics, a course I have not taught recently. Through the close study of historical epidemics, we explore what it means to say a certain outbreak of a disease is or is not an epidemic, when an outbreak becomes an epidemic and when it ceases to be one, what constitutes a plague, what it means to say something is a plague, and what is the relationship between the biological disease and the social epidemic. I am reworking the syllabus to take advantage of recent scholarship and to allow us to examine recent fears of epidemics, e.g., avian flu and SARS.

I am also working on a new course, “Technologies as Politics in Early Modern Europe.” The course will explore the increasingly important role of technologies in the exercise of political power in early modern Europe. How and why, in other words, did early modern princes support, develop, and deploy various sciences and technologies such as mapping, mining and metallurgy, scientific instruments, and technical scientific treatises? Why did they support chemical laboratories, observatories, collections of natural and artificial objects (think early museums)? The broad question/problem focuses on the systematic identification and deployment of technical/scientific knowledge as a form of governance.

Descriptions:
Plagues, Epidemics and Diseases in History, HIST 258
Deadly and indiscriminate, plagues and virulent epidemics have devastated and transformed society for more than two millennia. The plague of Athens killed perhaps one third of the Athenians, including the great statesman Pericles. 1700 years later, the Black Death killed a third of the population of Europe, pope and pauper alike. Plagues have caused profound social, political, cultural and demographic upheaval. Many epidemics continue to haunt our imagination: the Black Death of the fourteenth century; syphilis at the end of the fifteenth century; the Yellow Fever epidemic that ravaged Philadelphia; or the influenza pandemic in the early twentieth century. This course investigates the causes and effects of epidemics through detailed analyses of specific historical outbreaks. Of particular interest are the intellectual, social, and cultural resources that were employed to understand and explain the advent of epidemic diseases.