Somehow, it's August already, and the start of the semester is rushing towards us. I have two courses at Berkeley this fall: a lecture course on the history of premodern science (the same course from last fall) and an undergraduate seminar. The seminar should be interesting--last fall, I taught a seminar on Darwin and social thought, which went very well. I thought about repeating that course, but decided instead to try something different.
My seminar is (somewhat whimsically) titled "The Final Frontier: Science and Fiction in Twentieth Century America". The idea is that we'll be using works of fiction as a framework for looking at social and cultural changes in twentieth-century American history. The seminar structure is a little bit of an experiment for me--the assigned readings are almost all fiction, and the students will have research assignments to find secondary source material that puts the fiction in a historical context. This type of seminar is supposed to help history majors develop experience with secondary source research and historiographical analysis, and I think (I hope!) this is a good way to meet those goals. A lot of history courses use novels in their course reading, but I don't think a lot of students ever have a chance to think critically about the ways that fiction can inform historical research and analysis. And since I really do think that science fiction has the potential to cast some light on the relationship between science and society, this is a chance for me to see how my students see those same relationships. (I'll let y'all know when the course website is ready, so that you can critique my reading lists!)
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