Results for: human bodies in history

Research in Archives: Human Bodies in History

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: History, Gender and Sexuality Studies, IRHUM
  • Year: 2022-23
  • Term: Winter
  • Wed : 09:30 AM-12:20 PM
  • Wed : 09:30 AM-12:20 PM
  • Jordan Bimm, Iris Clever

How have we come to know and experience our bodies? This undergraduate seminar develops humanities research skills necessary to study the body in history. Spanning early modern cultural practices to modern medicine, science, and technology, this course explores how ideas and practices concerning the body have changed over time and how the body itself is shaped by culture and society. A major focus will be learning how to conduct different forms of historical research to produce cutting-edge humanities scholarship about the human body. Readings will introduce key themes and recent scholarship including work on disability, reproduction, race, gender, ethics, extreme environments, and identity. This dynamic research group will grapple with issues at the heart of our corporeal existence by combining perspectives from the history of science, medicine, and technology, cultural history, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS).

Human Bodies in History

  • Course Level: Undergraduate
  • Department: History, IRHUM
  • Year: 2021-22
  • Term: Autumn
  • M/W 3:00-4:20 PM
  • IRHU 26076 / KNOW 26076
  • Iris Clever and Jordan Bimm

How have we come to know and experience our bodies? This undergraduate seminar develops humanities research skills necessary to study the body in history. Spanning early modern cultural practices to modern medicine, science, and technology, this course explores how ideas and practices concerning the body have changed over time and how the body itself is shaped by culture and society. A major focus will be learning how to conduct different forms of historical research to produce cutting-edge humanities scholarship about the human body. Readings will introduce key themes and recent scholarship including work on disability, reproduction, race, gender, ethics, extreme environments, and identity. This dynamic research group will grapple with issues at the heart of our corporeal existence by combining perspectives from the history of science, medicine, and technology, cultural history, anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS). 

IRHU 27001: The Human Body in Extremes

  • Course Level:
  • Department: IRHUM
  • Year: 2020-21
  • Term: Winter
  • IRHU 27001, KNOW 36000, HIPS 26100

Jordan Bimm

What can the human body endure? This interdisciplinary research seminar focuses on the interplay between bodies and extreme environments. Each week we will “visit” a different hazardous context or locale and consider the challenges it poses to human culture and survival. Environments to be covered include outer space, deep seas, polar regions, radiation zones, mountain summits, underground mines, and disaster areas. With tools from environmental history, the history of medicine, the history of technology, medical anthropology, and sociology, we will consider how ideas of the body and how ideas of the environment change over time, and how producing knowledge about the limits of the body helps to define what people consider “normal.” Each seminar will pair short readings drawn from secondary sources with original research tasks in diverse historical archives. Students in the course will develop greater familiarity with humanistic research methods, as well as learn how to apply scientific and biomedical ideas of the body to participate effectively in current debates shaping where people live, work, or simply visit.