Take Social Sciences course "Inventors and Innovation"
Did you know it was common to talk about monsters, freak events, and oddities in 17th- and 18th-century scientific journals?
This course, being taught this spring by Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Sciences Dr. Carolyn Purnell, will tell you all about it! Dr. Purnell is also a Benjamin Franklin Project Postdoctoral Fellow at IIT and pulls from diverse interests and experiences in her teaching. Both of these courses will fulfill the Social Sciences general education requirement.
Course: Inventors and Innovation
Course number: LCHS 286-001
Time offered: MW 15:15-16:30
This course will focus on the institutional, cultural, economic, social, and legal structures that have facilitated innovation between the Scientific Revolution and today. Innovation and invention are not simply the results of a gifted mind; they require the interaction and cooperation of a number of variables that have been frequently shifting since the seventeenth century. Different modes of institutional or government support, communication networks, epistemologies (theories of knowledge), and concepts of property all enhance, or alternatively limit, the possibilities for innovation, and this course will trace the evolution of these various structures over the trajectory of the modern era.
Some of the main questions we will address throughout the course are as follows: what constitutes “fact,” how does knowledge spread, who has access to knowledge, what kinds of factors make an innovation or invention successful, how do different social structures affect the types of innovations that are possible, and what place do key values like rationality, objectivity, and curiosity have in the process of invention?
More about Dr. Purnell:
Carolyn Purnell is a historian. She is also a freelance writer and photographer, interior design aficionada, and lover of all things quirky. Her work appears regularly on ApartmentTherapy.com and in several Chicago-area publications, and her photographs have appeared in Good Housekeeping. She has also worked at a library, an academic journal, a radio station, and a tractor dealership.
A country girl by birth but a city girl by heart, Carolyn grew up in Texas then moved to southern California for college, where she studied under David Foster Wallace and increasingly learned the rigors and pleasures of the written word. Her education introduced her to James Joyce, Gerhard Richter, and the Marquis de Sade, and it was perhaps the subconscious influence of the latter that convinced her to spend the next seven years of her life as a graduate student
At the University of Chicago, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D., Carolyn turned her attention to history, a field that she likes to describe as “fiction with facts.” Her academic specialties are France, sexuality, the eighteenth century, the history of science and medicine, and the history of the senses, but after spending several years in France for research, it might be more accurate to say that her specialties are pastries, cheese, and wine.
Carolyn lives in Chicago with her partner Ed, her dog Minna, her chinchilla Chunky, and a rotating cast of dogs that she fosters for a local rescue.
