Associate Professor
About
Henry Cowles is a historian of modern science and medicine. His research and teaching focus on the sciences of mind and brain, evolutionary theory, and the experimental ideal in the United States and Great Britain. In addition to the History Department, he is affiliated with the Science, Technology, & Society Program, the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. His book, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey, has just been published by Harvard University Press. Current projects include a study of the relationship between tools and theories in psychology and psychiatry since 1800 and a history of habit from the celebration of daily routine in Thoreau's Walden to the rise of “persuasive technologies" in Silicon Valley and beyond.
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Undergraduate Courses:
Minds and Brains in America
American Addictions
Self-Help to Self-Care
Some Academic Publications:
The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020)
"Special Issue: Pandemic Subjects," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (February 2021)
"Habit and the Limits of History," Reviews in American History (June 2020)
"A Claim for Cognitive History" and "Another Claim for Cognitive History," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (November 2019/March 2020)
"History Comes to Life," Modern Intellectual History (April 2019)
"On the Origin of Theories: Charles Darwin’s Vocabulary of Method," The American Historical Review (October 2017)
"History Naturalized," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (February 2017)
"The Age of Methods: William Whewell, Charles Peirce, and Scientific Kinds," Isis (December 2016)
"Hypothesis Bound: Trial and Error in the Nineteenth Century," Isis (September 2015)
"A Victorian Extinction: Alfred Newton and the Evolution of Animal Protection," The British Journal for the History of Science (December 2013)
Some Non-Academic Publications:
"Horrible Sanity," LARB (Jun. 2021)
"The Machine Stops," LARB (Feb. 2021)
"Peak Brain," LARB (Nov. 2020)
"Brain Work," Aeon (May 2019)
"Orwell Knew," Aeon (July 2018)
"Child's Play," Aeon (Jan. 2017)
"Yes We Can," Vice (June 2012)
