Teaching

Albert Einstein has become the icon of modern science. Following his scientific, cultural, philosophical, and political trajectory, this course aims to track the changing role of physics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Addresses Einstein's engagement with relativity, quantum...

Examination of the theory and practice of capturing scientific practice on film. Topics will include fictional, documentary, informational, and instructional films and raise problems emerging from film theory, visual anthropology and science studies. Each student will make...

Over the last century, we have produced a new kind of scientific and technological landscape, one put to the uses of scientific, high-tech industrial, and military uses. From radio and optical telescopes to accelerators, nuclear weapons and missile testing areas, the land...

This course focuses on an extraordinary body of work by Thomas Pynchon, including "Entropy," "Crying of Lot 49," "Gravity’s Rainbow," and "Mason and Dixon." By studying this work we explore Pynchon’s vision of modernity, but also important themes in the history of science...

Over the course of the last hundred years-from World War I to the present-the world has assembled a massive system of state secrecy, censorship, security and surveillance. This course introduces the problem, tracking not only how the national and now global system of...

Social theory, philosophical texts, and historical works help situate understandings of the human "self"; how do these and other materials shed light on conceptions and experiences of the "self" enacted in new digital technologies including the internet, surveillance, multi...

Harvard is beginning a new initiative to explore the intersection of digital power, digital making and digital interpretation. This is a working seminar designed to explore these questions through a cluster of projects designed to cross theorizing with making. For example...

Examines recent writings on material culture and collecting as part of development of "Tangible Things": an exhibition drawing from the collections of Harvard museums. Seminar combines critical curatorial work with production of short films.

This course focuses on a single, extraordinary work of fiction, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. By studying this work we explore Pynchon’s vision of modernity, but also important themes in the history of science and in philosophy. We will grapple with the weaponization...

Examination of the relation between external tools and cognition. Can the boundaries of a thinking agent extend beyond the skin? Perspectives from philosophy of mind and history of science, including Clark, Wilson, Galison and others.

Philosophical questions raised by historical developments in 20th- and 21st-century physics, and conversely, historical-scientific questions raised by philosophical inquiry. Special and general relativity. Issues in quantum mechanics surrounding causality, determinism...