What does it mean to say that science has a history? To imply that terms and categories which at first seem solid in our contemporary imagination, like “science,” “objectivity,” or “progress,” in fact change over time? What are the implications of such a claim for the fields of history and science, and indeed for society more broadly?

We proceed chronologically and thematically from the global early modern period through the present. While rooted in the historiography of European science, the course seeks to offer a de-centered global view, actively incorporating the history of societies and cultures outside the narrow confines of Western Europe and challenging popular notions of a linear, corporeal “science.”

Chinese science poses fundamental questions for world history. How and when did other great civilization centers begin to diverge from Europe, enabling its two hundred year global hegemony? Why did China supposedly not undergo an early modern scientific revolution, while Europe supposedly did? What do we mean when we talk about nations, cultures, or civilizations? To what extent are they “real” at the level of science, technology, and human experience?

Current scholarship criticizes these comparison-driven questions, asking what Chinese scientific history would look like “on its own terms,” in other words if understood primarily through its own logic, vocabulary, and epistemologies. Taking the critique as a starting point, but treating the comparative questions as still essential, this course covers the central debates in the history of science in China.

This course offer advanced graduate students an in-depth look at the historiography of information, communication, and infrastructure, both globally and within China. The seminar begins with close readings of classic works by Harold Innis, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Jurgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Christopher Bayly, and James Carey, among others. We take histories of the book as seriously as the railroad, or radio. We treat the culture of communications as importantly as its materials. Having established a theoretical base, the students then move to specific case studies of communications in the Chinese cultural context, before developing their own research agenda.

This course offers training in English language writing and research methods. One half the class is devoted to a writing workshop that aims to offer practical training through the analysis of real student work. This group critique, positive and constructive in nature, focuses on vocabulary, grammar, style, and argumentation with an eye toward improving the clarity and firmness of rhetoric. Each writing sample is limited to one or two pages in length in order to facilitate close analysis.

Working from a handbook I have written, students also study the art of historical logic, including the most common fallacies in popular and academic writing. Like other aspects of rigorous writing, Logic is a learned skill, not an innate quality. Therefore, we work together to identify, discuss, and remedy rhetorical weaknesses, while developing critical thinking skills.

I offer research tutorials on a number of topics, according to student interest. The tutorials use sets of primary source documents to train students in historical analysis. What details should we notice? How do we judge a document’s context and reliability? How can it expand our understanding of the society that created it? What are its perspectives and limitations? Past topics have included news and technology in the May Fourth Movement, 1960s Big Character Posters, and late Qing local gazetteers.