Part III Manager: Helen Curry
MPhil Managers: Marta Halina and Staffan Müller-Wille
Part III and MPhil Lectures and Seminars 2021–22
The HPSM MPhil/HPS Part III Lectures, which are mandatory for all students enrolled on these courses, will be held on Wednesdays from 3.00–4.30pm in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre. Any lecture-based portion of these meetings will be recorded for students who cannot attend; discussion or Q&A will not be.
Students from other courses who wish to attend one of these lectures should obtain permission in advance from the lecturer.
Each lecturer will offer at least one follow-up discussion on their topic, for students who wish to discuss the subject in-depth with a smaller group. This discussion session will typically be held on Monday from 10.00–11.30am in HPS Seminar Room 1. It will be capped at 14 participants; students must sign up for this session in advance on Moodle.
If more than 14 students wish to attend the follow-up discussion, the lecturer will make a second session available when possible, typically on Wednesday from 10.00–11.30am.
Michaelmas Term
Week 1 (13 October)
Helen Anne Curry: Histories of extinction
- Qureshi, Sadiah, 'Dying Americans: Race, Extinction and Conservation in the New World', in A. Swenson and P. Mandler (eds), From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c. 1800–1940, Proceedings of the British Academy 187 (2013), 267–286
- Sepkoski, David, 'Extinction, Diversity and Endangerment', in F. Vidal and N. Dias (eds), Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 62–86
- TallBear, Kim, 'Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity', Social Studies of Science 43 (2013), 509–533
Week 2 (20 October)
Marta Halina: Kinds of minds
- Shettleworth, Sara J., 'Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology', Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(11) (2010), 477–481
- Fitzpatrick, Simon, 'Doing away with Morgan's Canon', Mind & Language 23(2) (2008), 224–246
Week 3 (27 October)
Tim Lewens and Stephen John: Is, can or should science be 'value-free'?
- Douglas, Heather, 'Inductive Risk and Values in Science', Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), 559–579
Week 4 (3 November)
Simon Schaffer and Josh Nall: Instruments and empires
- Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chapter 6 ('When Human Travellers become Instruments: The Indo-British Exploration of Central Asia in the Nineteenth Century', pp. 181–222)
- Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chapter 5 ('Astrophysics and Imperialism', pp. 121–143)
- Anderson, Katherine, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 6 ('Science, State and Empire', pp. 235–284)
Week 5 (10 November)
Staffan Müller-Wille: Race and history
- Doron, Claude-Olivier, 'Race and Genealogy. Buffon and the Formation of the Concept of "Race"', HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (2012), 75–109
- López Beltrán, Carlos, 'Hippocratic bodies, temperament and castas in Spanish America (1570–1820)', Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8 (2007), 253–289
- Seth, Suman, 'Materialism, Slavery, and the History of Jamaica', Isis 105 (2014), 764–772
Week 6 (17 November)
Hasok Chang: Realism, relativism and pluralism
- Chang, Hasok, 'Relativism, Perspectivism and Pluralism', in Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 398–406
- Chang, Hasok, 'Pragmatism, Perspectivism, and the Historicity of Science', in Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy (eds), Understanding Perspectivism: Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 10–27
Week 7 (24 November)
Salim Al-Gailani: COVID-19 and the history of medicine
- 'Reimagining Epidemics', special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94 (2020), esp. the introduction, 'Epidemics Have Lost the Plot' and 'Reconsidering the Dramaturgy'
- Lachenal, Guillaume, and Gaëtan Thomas, 'COVID-19: When History Has No Lessons', History Workshop Online, 30 March 2020
- Harrison, Mark, 'Pandemics', in M. Jackson (ed.), The Routledge History of Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 129–46 (available on Moodle)
Week 8 (1 December)
Jacob Stegenga: The sciences of sexual desire
- Lloyd, Elisabeth, 'Pre-Theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality', Philosophical Studies 69 (1993), 139–153
- Stein, Edward, The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), introduction and chapter 7
- Stegenga, Jacob, Book Synopsis Draft
Lent Term
Week 1 (26 January)
Anna Alexandrova: Evidence-based policy and its discontents
- Deaton, Angus, and Nancy Cartwright, 'Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials', Social Science & Medicine 210 (2018), 2–21
- Khosrowi, Donal, and Julian Reiss, 'Evidence-Based Policy: The Tension Between the Epistemic and the Normative', Critical Review 31 (2019), 179–197
- Kohler-Hausmann, Issa. 'Eddie Murphy and the Dangers of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination', Northwestern University Law Review 113, no. 5 (2019), 1163–1228 (skim for general idea)
Week 2 (2 February)
Richard Staley: Defining climatic periods and making climate history
- Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, and Fabien Locher, 'Modernity's Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity', Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 579–598
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 'Anthropocene Time', History and Theory 57 (2018), 5–32
- Antonello, Alessandro, and Mark Carey, 'Ice Cores and the Temporalities of the Global Environment', Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017), 181–203
Week 3 (9 February)
Mary Brazelton: Histories of global health
- Petryna, Adriana, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), chapter 6
- Espinosa, Mariola. 'Globalizing the History of Disease, Medicine, and Public Health in Latin America', Isis 104, no. 4 (2013), 798–806
- Anderson, Warwick, 'Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine', Social History of Medicine 27, no. 2 (2014), 372–84
Week 4 (16 February)
Liba Taub and Dániel Margócsy: What is a scientific instrument?
- Warner, Deborah Jean, 'What is a scientific instrument, when did it become one, and why?', British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990), 83–93
Week 5 (23 February)
Matt Farr: Does time have a direction?
- Farr, Matt, 'C-theories of time: On the adirectionality of time', Philosophy Compass 15, no. 12 (2020); preprint