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Honors Courses Spring 2020

The following honors courses are available this spring:

Technology, Science and Medicine (HIST 268-1, CRN: 32836)
Professor Susan Lawrence
Description: Over the last 500 years, humans have transformed the world. In this course, we focus on the complex ways that technologies – technologies of food production and transportation, of information and experimentation, of vaccines and pharmaceuticals – have given humans unprecedented power over their environments, over their bodies and over other people. The emergence of modern science and biomedicine offer us case studies in the globalization of particular ways of understanding and manipulating nature. As we survey the globe over half a millennium, we explore how the histories of technology, medicine and science have been enmeshed in the course of world events, from colonial conquests and plagues to political revolutions and world wars.

Science and Technology in the Making of the Modern World (HIST 268-2, CRN: 33365)
Professor Shellen Wu
Description: This course covers world history from 1400, focusing in particular on the rise of science, with important and wide-ranging implications for the modern world and the society we live in today. Global travel, exploration, trade, and technological innovations played essential roles in the exchange of knowledge and the development and rise of modern science. This course will examine some of the key turning points in the history of science in the context of world history. The small size of the honors section will allow us to take field trips to Oak Ridge and the American Museum of Science and Energy and to work closely with holdings in the McClung Museum of Natural History.