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Not offered during 2022-23 academic year.

This class presents a genealogy of the development of the race concept since the 19th century. Most centrally, we will examine the ways in which race been conceptualized, substantiated, classified, managed and "observed" in (social) science and medicine. We will read that history of science in tandem with philosophical, anthropological, and historical literatures on race and the effects of racial practices in the social and political world writ large. This class will address a series of questions, historical and contemporary. For example, how has the relationship between "race" and "culture" been articulated in the history of anthropology in particular, and in racial theory more broadly? How and why were particular phenotypes understood to signify meaningful biological and social differences? Can there be a concept of race without phenotype—a solely genotypic racial grouping? More broadly, we will examine how particular scientific projects have intersected with, authorized, or enabled specific social and political imaginations.