American Addictions

Undergraduate credit

Our subject is addiction. What is it? Why does it matter? This course explores how certain kinds of behavior (and people) have been studied, understood, and treated under the rubric of "addiction" in the United States. We will focus on how theories of addiction and its treatment have embodied different views of personhood, agency, and ethics. One aim of the course is to combine humanistic and scientific ways of thinking, including through individual and collaborative writing projects that bring past and present understandings of addictive substances and behaviors into conversation. This approach is essential to grappling with the political, philosophical, and personal consequences of how we study and stigmatize particular ways of life. Our focus on crucial texts in the history of science and medicine means that we will engage with technical material from psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, while our approach to this work will draw on methods from across the humanities. Given recent and ongoing events surrounding opioid use and dependency as well as the intersections of race, gender, and class with addiction and its treatment, we will consistently return to the uses of history in the present.