Introductory description

Why do many European and American museums contain large collections of human skulls? Why are some diseases associated with particular ethnic groups? And why does facial recognition software perform significantly worse when trying to identify people of African descent? In this course, we explore these questions through the long history of the relationship between race and science. We begin in the seventeenth century, with the rise of Atlantic slavery, and move right through to the present. In the process, we explore the historical development of various racial sciences, from anatomy and psychology through to anthropology and genetics. Throughout the course, there is an emphasis on exploring the relationship between race and science as part of a global history. We cover the history of racial science, not just in Europe and the United States, but also in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. Reflecting recent developments in the field, this course emphasises the agency of colonised, enslaved, and indigenous people in resisting and reworking the relationship between science and race, both in the past and present. This course also confronts the legacies of racial science, questioning how society could better respond to these histories today. Finally, this course draws on best practices in terms of anti-racist pedagogy, both in teaching and assessment. Please note: ‘race’ in this course is treated as a social construction, not a biological fact. Indeed, in this course we explore the very history of how race came to be seen as first biological and then social.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Weeks:

1. Medicalising Blackness
2. Skull Collectors
3. People on Display
4. Colonial Anthropology
5. Sciences of Settler Colonialism
6. Reading Week
7. Eugenic Empires
8. Racial Science and the End of Empire
9. Genetic Nationalism
10. Algorithms of Oppression

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the methods of the history of race and science, and to understand the connections between the history of race and the history of science
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary and secondary source material related to the history of racial science.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

Anderson, Clare. Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia. Berg, 2004.
Anderson, Warwick. ‘Racial Conceptions in the Global South’. Isis 105, no. 4 (1 December 2014)
Augstein, Hannah Franziska. Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760-1850. Thoemmes Press, 1996.
Ballantyne, Tony. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Springer, 2016.
Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Bashford, Alison, and Philippa Levine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Sandrine Lemaire, and Eric Deroo. Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires. Liverpool University Press, 2008.
Burton, Elise K. Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity. Stanford University Press, 2021.
Conklin, Alice L. In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. JHU Press, 2011.
Delbourgo, James. ‘The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World’. Atlantic Studies 9, no. 2 (1 June 2012)
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. HMH, 2014.
Dubow, Saul. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
El-Haj, Nadia Abu. The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Farland, Maria. ‘W. E. B. DuBois, Anthropometric Science, and the Limits of Racial Uplift’. American Quarterly 58 (2006)
Gil-Riaño, Sebastián. ‘Relocating Anti-Racist Science: The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and Economic Development in the Global South’. The British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 2 (June 2018)
Heaton, Matthew M. Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry. Ohio University Press, 2013.
Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840. The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Kishimoto, Kyoko. ‘Anti-racist pedagogy: from faculty’s self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom,’ Race Ethnicity and Education (2018): 540-554
Linstrum, Erik. Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire. 1 edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Lockley, Tim. Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–1874. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Lorcin, Patricia M. E. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria. I.B.Tauris, 1995.
Majeed, Javed. Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. Taylor & Francis, 2018.
Mukharji, Projit Bihari. ‘The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 2 (April 2017)
Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. Beacon Press, 2017.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018.
Poskett, James, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Qureshi, Sadiah. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press, 2011
Redman, Samuel J. Bone Rooms. Harvard University Press, 2016.
Robb, Peter, ed. The Concept of Race in South Asia. New Delhi: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1998.
Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New Press/ORIM, 2011.
Roque, Ricardo. Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930. Springer, 2010.
Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. NYU Press, 2017.
Saini, Angela. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press, 2019.
Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Staum, Martin S. Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848. McGill-Queen’s Press, 2003.
Stepan, Nancy. ‘The Hour of Eugenics’: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press, 1991.
Sysling, Fenneke. Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
TallBear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, 1991.
Tilley, Helen. Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Wade, Peter, Carlos López López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos. Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America. Duke University Press, 2014.
Wagner, Anne E., ‘Unsettling the academy: working through the challenges of anti-racist pedagogy,’ Race Ethnicity and Education (2005): 261-275
Wagner, Kim. ‘Confessions of a Skull: Phrenology and Colonial Knowledge in Early Nineteenth-Century India’. History Workshop Journal 69 (2010): 27–51.

Selected primary sources related to the history of anthropology, psychology, medicine, genetics, and sociology of race. Such as:
Douglass, Frederick. The Claims of the ‘Negro’ Ethnologically Considered. Lee, Mann and Co, 1854.
Morton, Samuel George. Crania Americana. J. Dobson, 1839.
Mourant, Arthur. The Genetics of the Jews. Clarendon Press, 1978.
Risley, Herbert. The People of India. Thacker, Spink, and Co. 1909.
Roy, Sarat Chandra. The Bihors. Ranchi, 1925.
Carothers, J. C. The Psychology of Mau Mau. Government Printer, 1955.
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. William Morrow, 1928.
Mitchell, John. ‘An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates.’ Philosophical Transactions 43 (1745).
de Garay, Alfonso. Genetic and Anthropological Studies of Olympic Athletes. Academic Press, 1974.
The Race Question. UNESCO, 1950.

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.