Programma

Global Intellectual History is an emerging field that examines how ideas, concepts, and ideologies circulate across different cultural and geographic contexts. Yet, significant debate remains about its scope and methodologies. This course explores the diverse interpretations of what constitutes global intellectual history, addressing questions such as whether some ideas are inherently more global than others, what geographic scales should be considered, and which actors and case studies deserve attention. It also investigates how ideas travel - under what conditions, through which channels, and with what consequences - tracing both how societies are transformed by new ideas and how they, in turn, reshape those ideas. Ultimately, the course seeks to provide an overview of this evolving discipline and to develop a critical framework for understanding intellectual developments in a global perspective.
The course will also include a specific focus on the transformations experienced by the history of science and colonial empires in the last decades, analysing the construction of medical and scientific knowledge within a widened landscape - that of the circulation and reformulation of conceptions, practices and scientific objects between colonial and metropolitan spaces and across imperial borders.

EVALUATION
Student evaluation will take into account both active participation during lectures and a final oral examination at the end of the course.

ATTENDING students are expected to complete the required readings carefully in order to engage in class discussions. Each week, one student will be asked, in turn, to give a short oral presentation (no longer than 15 minutes) on one of the required readings.
The final examination will be an oral exam covering the indicated readings. It will assess the student’s overall understanding of the texts, as well as the ability to connect each part of the syllabus.

For NON-ATTENDING students:
The oral exam will be based on a selection of books, listed below

Testi Adottati

FOR ATTENDING STUDENTS:

Part 1: Global Intellectual History

Week 1: Introduction

Lecture 1: Introduction to the course
- O. Rosenboim, Global History Through the Lens of Intellectual History, «Cromohs», (2024)

Week 2: Introduction to Global Intellectual History

Lecture 2:
- S. Moyn, A. Sartori, Approaches to Global Intellectual History, in Id., Global Intellectual History, pp. 3-30
- F. Cooper, How Global do we want our Intellectual History to Be?, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 283-294

Lecture 3:
- The Capital of the Men Without a Country’: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris. The American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1444–1467.
- D. Bell, Making and Taking Worlds in Global Intellectual History, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 254-273.

Week 3: On the Global Circulation of Ideas

Lecture 4: Intermediaries

- K. Raj, Beyond Postcolonialism... and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science, «Isis», 104 (2013), pp. 337-347
- V. Smith, Joseph Banks’s Intermediaries: Rethinking Global Cultural Exchange, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 91-105. OK

Lecture 5:
- C. L. Hill, Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century, in Global Intellectual History. pp. 134-158

Week 4: On the Global Circulation of Ideas: Translation and Temporalities

Lecture 6:
- S. Pollock, Cosmopolitanism, Vernacularism, and Premodernity, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 59-79.

Lecture 7:
- S. Stuurman, Common Humanity and Cultural Difference on the Sedentary- Nomadic Frontier. Herodotus, Sima Qian, and Ibn Khaldun, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 33-54
- M. Diouf, J. Prais, “Casting the Badge of Inferiority Beneath Black Peoples' Feet: Archiving and Reading the African Past, Present, and Future in World History,” in Global Intellectual History, pp. 205-222.


Part 2: History of Science, Medicine and Colonial Empires: A Global Turn

Week 5: Defining Science, Defining Medicine and Scientific Knowledge

Lecture 8: Defining Science as a (Situated) Practice
- S. Shapin, Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling», in Id., Never Pure. Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority, The John Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. 1-14.
- [Optional Reading]: D. N. Livingstone, A Geography of Science? In Id., Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 1-16.

Lecture 9: Thinking Science Beyond Europe: The Diffusionist Paradigm of Scientific Development and Its Critique
- G. Basalla, The Spread of Western Science, «Science» 156 (1967), pp. 611-22
- [Optional Reading] W. Anderson, Remembering the Spread of Western Science, in «Historical Records of Australian Science», 29 (2018), pp. 73-81.

Week 6: Science and Medicine as (Contested and Negotiated) Tools of Empire

Lecture 10:
- F. Fanon, Medicine and Colonialism, in A Dying Colonialism, Grove Press, 1994 [1959], pp. 121-145.

Lecture 11:
- E. Said, Orientalism, Penguin Books, 2019 [1978]: Introduction
- D. Arnold, Introduction: disease, medicine and empire, in Id. Imperial medicine and indigenous societies, Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 1-21.

Week 7: The Transnational Turn in The Historiography of Colonial Medicine and Science

Lecture 12: Science as a “Global Enterprise”
- Rohan Deb Roy, Science, medicine and new imperial histories, in «The British Journal for the History of Science», 45/3 (2012), pp. 443-450;
- P. Chakrabarti, M. Worboys, Science and Imperialism since 1870, Slotten H. R., Numbers R. L., Livingstone D. N. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 8, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 9-31.

Lecture 13: The Notion of Circulation Reconsidered
- M. A. Duarte Da Silva, T. A. S Haddad., K. Raj, Science and Empire. Past and Present Questions. Beyond Science and Empire, Id. Circulation of Knowledge in an Age of Global Empires, 1750-1945, Routledge, London 2023.
- [Optional reading] F. Fan, The Global Turn in the History of Science, «East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal», 6 (2012), pp. 249-258.

Week 8: Case Studies 1

Lecture 14: Transnational History of Colonial Medicine
- M. Mertens, G. Lachenal, The History of “Belgian” Tropical Medicine from a Cross-Border Perspective, in «Revue belge de philologie et histoire», 90 (2012), pp. 1249-1271.

Lecture 15: Medicine and the Informal Empire
- M. Capocci, D. Cozzoli, Tropical Medicine, the Nation, and the Colonial Expansion in the View of Italian Royal Navy Physicians at the End of the Nineteenth Century, in Id., Empire, Nation-building, and the Age of Tropical Medicine, 1885-1960, Springer, 2024, pp.

Week 9: Case Studies 2
Lecture 16: Global Trajectories of Immunological Products
- S. Nosaka, M. A. Duarte da Silva, Plague and the Global Emergence of Microbiology, 1894-1920, In Beyond Science and Empire. Circulation of Knowledge in an Age of Global Empires, 1750-1945, Routledge, London 2023.

Lecture 17:
- S. Coghe, Inter-imperial Learning and African Health Care in Portuguese Angola in the Interwar Period, «Social History of Medicine», 28/1 (2015), pp. 134-154.

Week 10: Case Studies 3 and Closing Discussion

Lecture 18:
- Helen Tilley, Introduction, in Id. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 1-30
- M. Hodge, Science and Empire: An Overview of the Historical Scholarship, in Brett M. Bennett, Joseph M. Hodge (a cura di), Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800-1970, Basingstoke, 2011, pp. 3-29.



For NON-ATTENDING students:
The oral exam will be based on the following books:

- S. Moyn, A. Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013
- E. Said, Orientalism, Penguin Books, 2019 [1978]: Introduction, Chapter 1 (The Scope of Orientalism) and Chapter 2 (Orientalist Structures and Restructures)
- One book from the following list (NB it is mandatory to contact the lecturer in advance to communicate your choice):

K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, New York., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
D. N. Livingstone, Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge, Chicago, Univ. Chicago Press, 2004.
A. Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Modalità Frequenza

Attendance is not mandatory but recommended