Programme

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

Core Documentation

FOR ATTENDING STUDENTS:

Part 1: Global Intellectual History

Week 1: Introduction
2 March: Introduction to the course / History, Historiography and "Global" Spaces

Week 2: Introduction to Global Intellectual History
5 March: What Is Global Intellectual History?
- O. Rosenboim, Global History Through the Lens of Intellectual History, «Cromohs», (2024)

9 March: Concepts and Perspectives
- S. Moyn, A. Sartori, Approaches to Global Intellectual History, in Id., Global Intellectual History, pp. 3-30

Week 3: On the Global Circulation of Ideas
12 March: Intermediaries
- V. Smith, Joseph Banks’s Intermediaries: Rethinking Global Cultural Exchange, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 91-105.
- [Optional Reading] K. Raj, Beyond Postcolonialism... and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science, «Isis», 104 (2013), pp. 337-347

16 March: Translation
- 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: Decentering the Gaze
19 March: Universal Values or the Globalization of Values?
- Cemil Aydin, Globalizing the Intellectual History of the Idea of the “Muslim World”, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 159-182

23 March: Networks and Actors
- M. Goebel, ‘The Capital of the Men without a Country’: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris, «The American Historical Review», 5 (2016): pp. 1444-1467
- 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.

Week 5 Translation, Temporalities, and Critiques
30 March:
- S. Pollock, Cosmopolitanism, Vernacularism, and Premodernity, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 59-79.
- 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

30 March: Global Intellectual History - Critical Perspectives
- F. Cooper, How Global do we want our Intellectual History to Be?, in Global Intellectual History, pp. 283-294


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

Week 6: Defining Science, Defining Medicine and Scientific Knowledge

9 April: 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.

13 April: 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.
- [Optional Reading] R. D. Headrick, Introduction, in Id., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New York-Oxford 1981, pp. 3-14.

Week 7: Science and Medicine as (Contested and Negotiated) Tools of Empire

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

20 April:
- 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 8: The Transnational Turn in The Historiography of Colonial Medicine and Science

23 April: 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.

27 April: 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 9: Case Studies 1

30 April: 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.
- [Optional reading - 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.

4 May:
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 2 and Closing Discussion

7 May: Global Trajectories of Immunological Products and discussion
- 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.
- 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.

Attendance

Attendance is not mandatory but recommended