Lan Li is teaching The Body in Global Histories of Medicine this spring at Columbia University, a weekly undergraduate seminar that takes place every Friday from 10:10 AM to 12:00 PM at 311 Fayerweather Hall.
The body is an unstable object. It leaks, bleeds, swells, mutates. It is also historically unstable, in the way it is understood and represented by men and women, patients and practitioners, scholars and laypeople. This course explores cases of the volatile body across historical and geopolitical contexts. By comparing how different people understand and inhabit the body, you will develop new research questions to rethink what it means to study the body at all. Each week takes on different themes of practice, process, classification, ontology, technology, techniques, and theory to offer new genealogies of reading the body. While the body is not a universal entity across time and space, similarities still emerge. What role can history play in conceptualizing emerging fields of “global” studies?
