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course description
    This course explores the early career of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous scientists. It ends with the publication of his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, in 1859. But Charles Darwin was hardly an individual acting alone, but rather was one in a crowd of scientists and social critics investigating the prehistory of the earth and its inhabitants – plants, animals, people, as well as minerals – in an enterprise that had been on-going since the beginning of the seventeenth century. We will pick up this story in midstream, reading two of the works that most deeply influenced the aspiring gentleman scientist, the travel account of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Lyell’s systematic description of the causes of geological change.
    As a premise, we hold that no individual genius operates in a vacuum but rather genius is shaped by scientific debates, in the narrow sense, and by social structures more broadly. Much of our efforts, therefore, will be spent attempting to reconstruct the world of European science in the first half of the nineteenth century, just as nineteenth-century scholars attempted to reconstruct, on the basis of fragmentary evidence, both human history and the pre-human history of the earth. In addition to reading in common some of the most important primary and secondary literature, students will write a major paper on one of the debates that surrounded the publication of the Origin of Species ca. 1860.

requirements

1. Reading notes & discussion             40%
2. Research paper                                60%, of which
1. source analysis 1     10%
2. source analysis 2     10%
3. institution report      15%
4. literature review      15%
5. presentation draft   30%
6. final draft                 20%

procedure
    Read all assignments before class. Schematize the arguments in the readings on a separate sheet of paper that you can reference at a glance. This will be the basis of small-group discussions in the first hour of the seminar. Your sheet of notes will be taken as evidence of your engagement with the texts and preparation for class. See Notebooks, below.

• The first hour will be spent in small-group discussion (two or three undergraduates, led by a graduate student), defining the specific arguments and evidence advanced by the authors.
• The second hour will be a plenary discussion of the texts, the small groups coming together as a whole class.
• The third hour will be a writing workshop.

  Please plan to attend all class sessions. Skipping classes will ruin your ability to do well in this course.
  Bring the relevant readings to all class sessions.

books
    1. Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Voyage to Venezuela (0140445536)
    2. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (014043268x)
    3. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (0140432051)
    4. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (014043528x)
    5. M. J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (9780226731025)
    6. Steven Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1989) (978-0393307009)
    7. Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge (9780226302317)
    8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (9780679753353)