This course is not a conventional survey of the history of modern science, nor does it qualify as global environmental history. We will instead select moments from the former that have helped create conditions of possibility for the latter. Our aim is to study historically the rise of some of the characteristically modern forms of knowledge that have fed into the uneasy construction of truly global sciences. The recent coinage of "the Anthropocene" has sparked productive debates across the disciplines, yet its capaciousness also challenges the very function of history as a discipline. Does the Anthropocene stand for the late stage of a grand unified theory of historical explanation increasingly driven by knowledge from the natural sciences? Or is it an invitation to reconfigure humanist concepts at a historical moment when humans have become unwitting agents of geological change? How did we move from Nature to "the environment"? Our task will be to trace how various forms of scientific knowledge have contributed to new conceptualizations since the seventeenth century.
- Instructor: Karl Hall