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Academic Year 2004/2005


Life Science, Art & Culture
HIST 331 SP

Crosslistings:
SISP 331
WMST 331

The place of visual images and image-production in the history of scientific and medical knowledge is a new area of inquiry reflecting growing interest in the changing relations between scientific practice and theory, pictures and truth claims, art and "non-art", and science and the public. This course explores changing uses of visual media (drawings, etchings, sketches, photographs, diagrams, X Ray images, computer-generated images, film) in the life sciences and medicine from the late Renaissance to the present day. In each lecture we will look at and discuss selected images representing different objects of knowledge: the human body, microscopic organisms, plants and animals, physiological processes, anthropological subjects, the brain, disease, and the environment. Some of the questions we will investigate are: Why do producers of knowledge make and circulate visual images? In what sense are scientific visualizations gendered? How and why are graphical representations used to communicate scientific and medical knowledge among different individuals and social groups (e.g., physicians, researchers, lab technicians, students, judges, magazine editors, science journalists, children) through different channels (e.g., textbooks, slide lectures, newspapers and magazines, courtrooms, books, television, film)?

MAJOR READINGS

Kemp, LEONARDO ON PAINTING
Meyers, ART & SCIENCE IN AMERICA
Treichler & Cartwright, eds., VISIBLE WOMAN: GENDER, IMAGING TECHNOLOGIES, AND SCIENCE
Nancy Stepan, PICTURING TROPICAL NATURE
and primary historical documents

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Midterm, final, response papers, museum exhibition proposal (creative and collaborative independent research project).

COURSE FORMAT: Seminar

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS HIST    Grading Mode: Graded   

Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-21-2005


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