HISTORIES OF RACISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES in Spring 2027 (HI1099FB2)

While race is not a scientifically meaningful category, founders of the modern social sciences in the long 19th century in Europe believed otherwise. This course looks at the history of the emergence of the modern social sciences and their early fixation on race as a central category of human difference. Modern social science's interconnected intellectual hubs in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and London were also deeply intertwined with experimental colonial research in Africa, the Pacific, and North America in the 19th through early 20th centuries. Students in this course will grapple with the constructed nature of scientific knowledge and scientific authority, and will also deconstruct, as historian Nell Irvin Painter terms it, "The History of White People".