Pathways and Reading Guides

This year we would like to develop some new resources to help students find a path through the course that speaks to particular interests that you might share with each other or with past (or future) students.

If you have a specific topic you want to emphasise in your engagement with the course this year, please talk with Dr Barany or your tutor about building it up as an organised pathway for yourself and your peers.

Pathway: Science and Rhetoric

Across the semester, look for relevant chapters from an older collected volume and a recent one:

Dear (ed.) The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument (Pennsylvania 1991)
Morgan, Hajek, and Berry (eds.) Narrative Science (Cambridge 2022)

From the resource list for the weekly units, focus on the following, in addition to anything else that looks relevant to you:

Unit 1: Zakariya, A final story
Unit 2: Terrall, 'Metaphysics, Mathematics,…'; Oosterhoff, Making mathematical culture
- Related to Oosterhoff, an article more focused on rhetoric in early modern mathematics is Cifoletti: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4130140
- There are important arguments about rhetoric and metaphor in Agar, The Government Machine, and Kline, The Cybertnetics Moment, … see if you can identify this aspect of the bigger picture of the books!
Unit 3: Nappi, The Monkey and the inkpot
Unit 4: Keller, Refiguring life; Secord, Victorian sensation
Unit 5: Qureshi, 'Displaying Sara Baartman'; Duden, The woman beneath the skin; Haraway, Primate visions
Unit 6: Deringer, Calculated Values; Murphy, Economization; Wernimont, Numbered Lives
Unit 7: Galison, Einstein's Clocks
Unit 8: Traweek, Beamtimes and lifetimes
- See also Beller, Quantum Dialogue (Chicago 2001)
Unit 9: Grafton, New worlds, ancient texts; Messeri, Placing outer space; Thongchai, Siam mapped
Unit 10: Daston and Galison, Objectivity