Science, Medicine, and Technology
Please click here for the Undergraduate Minor in History of Science and Medicine
Graduate Program in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Introduction
Faculty
Funding
Requirements for Doctorate
Related UCLA Centers and Programs
Selected UCLA Collections
Los Angeles Resources
Introduction
The History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Program at UCLA offers graduate students the opportunity to work with leading scholars in the history of science, medicine, and technology. Specific application directions may be found on the History website.
For individual research interests, please consult the faculty homepages. Students accepted into the history of science, medicine, and technology field at UCLA will also work with professors in other fields of history. There are professors in other departments who are interested in various aspects of science studies, and students are encouraged to work with them for interdisciplinary involvement. The program runs a regular colloquium series on the history of science, medicine, and technology, which meets Monday afternoons throughout the academic year. Speakers include outside visitors as well as local faculty and graduate students. In addition, the Southern California Colloquium in history of science organizes occasional day-long workshops. Graduate students are welcome to participate with faculty in organizing events and inviting speakers to the colloquium. A lecture program in the "Medical Classics and Humanities" also welcomes students and faculty.
Faculty
Faculty associated with the field are:
- Joel Braslow: history of psychiatry
- Soraya de Chadarevian: history of modern biology
- Robert Frank, Jr.: history of biology and biomedicine, including neurosciences
- Margaret Jacob: British, French and Belgian early mechanization
- Theodore M. Porter: history of 19th- and 20th-century science; history of statistics; history of social science
- Mary Terrall: history of early modern science; gender and science
- Sharon Traweek: history of 20th century physical science (U.S. and Japan); cultural studies of science; gender and science
- Dora Weiner: history of 18th- and 19th- century medicine and psychiatry
- M. Norton Wise: history of physical sciences, 18th-20th centuries
Funding
The History Department has five-year fellowship and teaching assistant packages and the science, medicine, and technology field has additional funds to support graduate students. A special five-year fellowship for a graduate student working on 20th-century biology or biomedicine is also available. Students interested in this fellowship should submit applications in the normal way.
The field also offers an undergraduate minor in the history of science and medicine. We teach a four-course undergraduate sequence (History 3A-D) as well as more topical lower-division classes (2B, 2D), all of which are taught with discussion sections led by teaching assistants. Graduate students in the field have the opportunity to teach in these courses, as well as in other departmental offerings. The field also has some funds for supporting graduate student conference and research travel. Two fellowships for research in the UCLA collections are available to graduate and medical students: the James and Sylvia Thayer Short Term Fellowship and the new Ahmanson Graduate Student Research Grant in History of Medicine. The History Department offers the Franklin D. Murphy, M.D. Prize for the best undergraduate paper related to the history of medicine.
Requirements for Doctorate
Students entering our graduate program in the history of science, medicine, and technology are asked to develop expertise in three fields. One, a general overview of the history of science, medicine, and technology from the ancients to the present, integrated with an informed sense of relevant historiography and historical methods; two a quite specific field intended to be the area in which a dissertation would be classified, for example, English and French science in the seventeenth century, political economy and science, physics in 20th century Japan, the quantification of science, medicine in the era of Enlightenment and Romanticism, history of heredity, etc. These are but examples and the student in consultation with the relevant faculty would name the second field. The third must be a field from those offered in the larger department (European, Japanese, medieval history, etc.), or in some cases in another department. In order to fulfill the requirements of the first field, in their first year students are strongly encouraged to audit at least three lower or upper division undergraduate courses taught by our faculty and by March of the second year to produce an annotated bibliography in the general history of science. All students are required to take History 200 O - Advanced Historiography - twice, in the autumn of their first and second years, when it will rotate between early modern and modern history of science and medicine. Two foreign language exams must be passed before the oral exams unless the student's second field is one where only one foreign language is relevant. The general field exam will be set by the entire faculty within the field; the second field is set by the relevant faculty with research interests in the area, the third is offered by the other fields in the department.
Related UCLA Centers and Programs
- Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture (BEC)- unites scholars exploring the connections among evolution, culture, the mind, and society. BEC provides a framework to facilitate research and training on the interaction among natural selection, cultural transmission, social relations, and psychology.
- Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies - promotes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies of the period from Late Antiquity to the middle of the seventeenth century.
- Center for Oral History Research - has an extensive collection of interviews that document various aspects of the history of Los Angeles.
- Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies - provides a forum for the discussion of central issues in the field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies. It organizes academic programs, bringing together scholars from the area, the nation, and the world, with the goal of encouraging research in the period from 1600 to 1800.
- Center for Society and Genetics - studies the co-evolution of science and humanity by promoting innovative and socially relevant research and education.
- Programs in Medical Classics - is a series of presentations designed to enhance an appreciation of the links among key medical writings, clinical practice, basic research, and humanistic scholarship.
- The Study of History of Medicine at UCLA - is an interdisciplinary program which encompasses the activities of a variety of faculty and staff drawn together from the general and medical departments of the campus.
Selected UCLA Collections
- Biomedical Library History and Special Collections for the Sciences - support the study of the history of medicine and biology. Collections consist of books, journals, manuscript, prints, portraits, and medical artifacts.
- Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library - has many first editions of scientific classics, including the papers of Richard Edgeworth on his schooling in natural philosophy at Edinburgh in the 1790s and scientific education in general and the complete Boulton-Watt papers on microfilm.
- John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection - promotes and ensures the study of the history of pain research and pain therapy in the post-World War II era, in particular, the origins, growth, and development of the international, interdisciplinary pain field.
- Neuroscience History Archives - identifies and preserves the papers of living neuroscientists and records of their professional organizations; assists neuroscientists in finding appropriate repositories for their papers; promotes access to this documentary evidence through the preparation of finding aids and other guides; facilitates scholarly use of the collections; and carries out research and education in the history of neuroscience.
Los Angeles Resources for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
- Caltech Einstein Papers Project - selects from among more than 40,000 documents contained in the personal collection of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and an additional 30,000 Einstein and Einstein-related documents discovered by the editors since the 1980s, to eventually create a complete series of The Collected Papers, which will provide the first complete picture of a massive written legacy that ranges from Einstein's first work on the special and general theories of relativity and the origins of quantum theory, to expressions of his profound concern with civil liberties, education, Zionism, pacifism, and disarmament.
- Caltech Institute Archives - serves as the collective memory of Caltech by preserving the papers, documents, artifacts and pictorial materials that tell the school's history, from 1891 to the present. Researchers will also find here a wealth of sources for the history of science and technology worldwide, stretching from the time of Copernicus to today.
- Clarke Museum - shows the history of Humboldt County, with emphasis on the late 1800's. The displays include furniture, glassware, clothing, and other items from the Victorian period.
- Dibner Fellowship Program (scroll down link for description) - offers long- and short-term fellowships which are designed to further study in the Burndy Library and the other history of science and technology resources at The Huntington.
- The Getty - photographic collection of post-1850 period.
- The Huntington - is an independent research center with holdings in British and American history, literature, art history, and the history of science and medicine.