Teaching
Department of History, Boston College, 2017-present
Histories of engineering and targeted advertising at its finest - GE’s famous sun lamps! (Jan. 30, 1950, Life Magazine)
HIST1627/ENGR1801: Making the Modern World: Design, Ethics, & Engineering (Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023) - Engineering systems present pressing technical, ethical, and moral problems that we must grapple with as global citizens. In this class students engage with the social, cultural, and institutional history of engineering; learn foundational skills in quantitative analysis of real-world engineering designs; and understand the political, environmental, economic, and ethical tradeoffs associated with building the modern world. Students collaborate on design projects based on human-centered engineering that culminate in an end-of-semester design conference. This interdisciplinary Core course for first-year students was also the first pilot course for BC’s Human-Centered Engineering program.
Contemporary representations of gender ideologies in human fertilization (source).
HIST2846: Gender and Science (Fall 2019) - Understanding the continued underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) requires looking into the past. From Enlightenment natural philosophers and Victorian naturalists to the tech bros of Silicon Valley, this course uses historical methods to explore how ideas about sex and gender have influenced scientific research and how scientific communities have stratified along gender lines.
Arduino 101: Getting a gas sensor working for STEM Lab (image by me)
BIOL1503/HIST1511: Science and Technology in American Society (Fall 2017 & 2018 & Spring 2020) - I created the curriculum and directed STEM Lab, a hands-on science and technology laboratory practicum centered on Arduino-based technologies. STEM Lab is part of the interdisciplinary Complex Problems course, Science and Technology in American Society for first-year students, which investigates the history and practice of science and technology since 1945.
HIST2845 collaborates with the Burns Library
HIST2845: Women in U.S. Medicine (Spring 2018 & Fall 2019) - This course explores the history of women in U.S. medicine from the colonial period to the present. This course addresses both the changing place of women within the medical profession and the development of medical knowledge about women’s bodies. It pays particular attention to structural inequalities within the medical profession and the important role that practitioners, feminists, and patients have played in challenging gender-based discrimination in medicine and sexist assumptions about the female body.
In the Spring of 2018, HIST2845 collaborated with the amazing Burns Library at Boston College to quick curate a collection of materials related to course themes. See our online exhibition, Women in Medicine: Nurses, Home Caregivers & Pop-culture Icons!
HIST1708 visit to the New England Aquarium
HIST1708: Nature on Exhibit: From Sea Monsters to SeaWorld (Spring 2018) - What does it mean to turn nature into a sensation? Putting animals on display in museums, zoos, and on the silver screen is big business. This course explores the historical roots of how the natural world has been transformed into something to be coveted, marveled at, and consumed. From seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets to twenty-first century blockbuster museum exhibitions, we will think about who the audiences are for these sensations, how they have changed, and what they reveal about humans, nature, and the environment. Drawing on the history of science, animal studies, and museum studies, this course asks what it means to use nature as mass entertainment.
This seminar, part of a Core Renewal Enduring Questions pair for first-year students called Buying, Trashing, and Selling the Natural Environment, was co-offered with Prof. Lucy McAllister's Environmental Studies seminar, Through the Looking Glass: Business and the Natural Environment.
Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University, 2015-2017
Science lab at Lindenwood University, ca. 1950 (source)
Junior Tutorial - Interdisciplinary Research Methods: Research methods in feminist methodologies across the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences.
Gender, Biology & the Body: Intro to feminist science studies, gendered cultures of science, and scientific constructions of sex and gender since the early modern period.
Women in American Medicine: History of women as practitioners and patients, gendered constructions of medical knowledge, and major changes in American medicine since the colonial period.
Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, 2010-2017
Surgeons-in-training at the Woman’s Medical College, ca. 1900. (Drexel Univ. Special Collections)
Between 2010-2017, I had the pleasure of supervising 14 senior thesis students in 25,000-word research projects in the history of science, technology, and medicine with a focus on women, gender, and race. I also taught courses related to evolutionary theory, gender studies, and the history of gender and science.