SYLLABI

Fertile Bodies: Reproduction from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

The ancient Greeks imagined a woman’s body ruled by her uterus, while medieval Christians believed in a womb touched by God. Renaissance anatomists hoped to uncover the ‘secrets’ of human generation through dissection, while nascent European states wrote new laws to encourage procreation and manage ‘illegitimate’ offspring. Woman with opened uterus From ancient Greece to enlightenment France, a woman’s womb served as a site for the production of medical knowledge, the focus of religious practice, and the articulation of state power. In this course students traced the evolution of medical and cultural theories about women’s reproductive bodies from ca. 450 BCE to 1700, linking these theories to the development of structures of power, notions of difference, and concepts of purity that proved foundational to ‘western’ culture. Students read selections from Hippocrates’ Diseases of Women 1, Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Augustine’s Confessions, The Trotula, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and William Harvey’s Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals.

History of Science: Scientific Revolutions

Illustration of an early modern microscope What is science, anyway? Is it a kind of knowledge? A methodology? A set of beliefs? Between roughly 1450 and 1750, however, a new philosophy and methodology for interrogating the natural world developed in western Europe. This course investigates the origins of science as a way of knowing and asks how this body of knowledge gained widespread cultural authority in the period between roughly 1450 and 1750. Though it features big names like Andreas Vesalius, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it also centers scientists working in artisanal workshops or household kitchens. And though the course remains focused on “Western” science as it developed in Europe, the course demonstrates that this body of knowledge emerged through interactions with goods, ideas, and peoples from across the wider world.

In Spring 2025, students in the History of Science produced Season 5 of the TCU History Frogcast, which aired over seven weeks in October and November of 2025. In this season of the History department’s podcast, students were tasked with debunking myths related to the relationship between religion and science in early modern Europe. Students read Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About the Science and Religion (Harvard UPress, 2009), and selected an early modern myth to investigate. Over the semester, students learned the truth about whether Columbus thought the earth was flat (he didn’t); whether the Catholic church was opposed to medical progress (they weren’t); whether Galileo was tortured by the Inquistion (he wasn’t); and whether Newton’s theory of gravity finally put an end to ideas about God’s role in the universe (it didn’t). Check out all six episodes of Seasone 5, out now from the History FrogCast!

Technologies of History from Cuneiform to Coding

Cuneiform tablet This digital humanities course was first developed in 2021 with a David A. Gardner ‘69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council at Princeton University. You can view the Spring 2021 course website to read Princeton students’ work. Now taught at TCU, “Technologies of History” asks how the ways that humans communicate — via inscription, graffito, letter, or Tweet — have the power to affect society and make history. We explore the history of communications technologies from the invention of writing to the printing press to social media, and each week, we pair these topics with analysis of a cutting-edge digital archive or project. Students then learn how to use the “digital tools” reflected in these projects, building the skills necessary to produce their own works of digital historical scholarship.

Check out the Spring 2026 syllabus or view student work produced in the course on our blog. These two sites are hosted from our course GitHub organization, which contains all the data, digital assignment tutorials, and infrastructure for the course.