Treats a series of topics that change every year and deal with various aspects of psychology. Courses are taught by permanent or visiting faculty and are generally related to their fields of specialization.This course can be used to fulfil the fundamentals requirements in the psychology major.
This course begins by examining mysterious epidemics or ‘plagues’ of the past and considers the various prisms through which they were understood at the time (religious, political, social and medical). Through the analysis of original source material (texts, images, maps, etc.) and translations, students will have the opportunity to think about how terms used in ancient clinical descriptions and in different languages may be difficult to identify today. Following up on problems of translation, we will see how the arrival of a ‘new’ epidemic can mobilize and reshape the memory of past vulnerabilities and defenses.
Though a case-study approach, we will consider a variety of historically significant past epidemics with unknown etiologies (as well as epidemics during a time when their etiology had yet to be elucidated). We will compare approaches from retrospective medicine with those from history where emphasis is placed on understanding what the outbreak in question could signify for those who experienced it. We will also consider new research using recent technologies to examine material traces of past pathogens. The sort of research involved in paleovirology, for example, may also be justified by concerns about the return of ancient viruses. The topic of epidemics is thus particularly propitious for studying retrospective and prospective aspects of social memory and for examining different and often conflicting views on the relationship between history and memory of the body and the social body.