Modern Nature

Undergraduate / Graduate

What does it mean to know the natural world, and how has that knowledge been used to shape, defend, critique, and expand the modern world? This course explores the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of "nature" and "modernity" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brings together literature on the rise of the biological and ecological sciences with the histories of industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and colonialism to consider how nature and the natural been mobilized to diverse political and social ends-and how ideas about nature have shaped social and political outcomes in turn. We will also consider how "nature study" and the natural sciences were mobilized for projects of popularization, mass education, and mass politics and how concepts of nature and biocapital are mobilized in the present day.