HUAS90948 - The Invention of the Scientist

Course Description

The nineteenth century saw the advent of the scientist as both a word and a concept. The “natural philosopher,” whose purview had for centuries been a theoretical understanding of the world, was replaced by a different kind of expert: the scientist (a word coined in 1834), whose expertise was practical and pertinent to a world being dramatically changed by technological developments and widely popularized scientific discoveries. This class explores how nineteenth-century writers, from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, engaged with this novel and exciting figure – an expert, an authority, an individual whose profession was science – and his role and responsibility in a social order being reconfigured by industrialization and the simultaneous professionalization and popularization of science. We will pair our literary explorations with non-fiction readings texts by scientists and science popularizers such as Humphry Davy, Claude Bernard, William Whewell, and Max Weber (“Science as Vocation”) as they meditated on their new roles. Additionally, we’ll consider how this literary genealogy influences both our fictional portrayal of science to this day as well as our perceptions of it – from our contemporary distrust of expertise to perennial fears about scientists “playing god,” a description as frequently applied to the fictional Frankenstein as the real-world Oppenheimer.

Notes

Online registration closes Friday, March 15 at 5 pm CT.

You will receive an invitation to join the Canvas site for the course a week before the class begins. The Zoom link for the course will be in Canvas. For more information about Canvas, please see our Remote Learning Resources page.