A History of STS at Wesleyan

Earl Hanson,Fisk Professor of Natural Sciences
Founder of the Science in Society Program
Program Chair, 1975-86, 1991-93

STS at Wesleyan has its own social and intellectual history.  Since its founding 1975 as the “College of Science in Society”, the long-time “Science in Society Program”, and newly named College of Science and Technology Studies has produced over 500 alumni and maintains a national and international reputation as a center for STS teaching and research in the liberal arts.

The “College of Science in Society” was founded in 1975, both to replace a previously disbanded College of Quantitative Studies, and to complement the “Butterfield Colleges” of Letters and Social Studies.  For its first five years, the College’s founding was supported by the National Science Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. Dr. Earl Hanson, then Professor of Biology, was both the lead investigator of these grants and the founding Chair of the College.  The College’s first faculty were hired contingently on grant money.  Intended to foster interdisciplinary, applied work within the sciences, the College was especially notable for its student projects, involving the solution of problems for outside agencies like Raymond Engineering and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and for its Senior Seminar, an interdisciplinary capstone course including the sciences, philosophy, and public affairs.

In 1979, the Wesleyan Faculty voted to make the College of Science in Society a permanent University unit when that funding expired, with the stipulation that the College gradually move toward a faculty hired on joint appointments with stand-alone departments. The initial jointly appointed tenure-track faculty member joined the College in 1981 (Joseph Rouse, Philosophy) and remains on our faculty.  In late 1980s, the members of the College voted to change its name from the “College of Science in Society” to the “Science in Society Program” due to key untenable differences in major structures, faculty appointments, and cohort size between the Butterfield Colleges at that time.

Like many "Science, Technology, and Society" or "Science, Technology, and Values" programs being developed at roughly the same time at a number of engineering schools (notably MIT, Lehigh, RPI, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech), but adapted to the context of a selective liberal arts university, the original Science in Society Program aimed to encourage a humanistic approach to scientific and technological problems, conjoined with a commitment to scientific excellence and a recognition of the scientific and technological dimensions of many social and political problems. Students initially went through their three years in the Program in a sequence of small Colloquia with all other students in their cohort, while taking additional courses tailored to their particular interests.  The capstone of the Program in its early years was a required thesis, which students typically worked on for up to two years, and a Senior Colloquium in which students presented their thesis research and other current issues in a seminar format. Although the topics for these thesis projects were quite wide-ranging, environmental issues, critical assessments of medical theory and practice, agriculture, urban planning, and human population growth were common foci of student research.

Apart from the founder, Earl Hanson, the initial staffing of the Program was drawn from faculty whose time was borrowed from other departments (notably C. Stewart Gillmor in History and Barry Gruenberg in Sociology) and from faculty hired on term contracts with funding from the initial grant to the University (including science writer Jeffrey Baker, planner Howard Brown, writer Barbara Bell, and historian Howard Bernstein). In 1979, the University confronted the difficult decision whether to establish the Program on a permanent basis after the expiration of its outside funding, at a time in which the University as a whole was reducing the size of the faculty. 

After extensive Committee review and faculty debate, the University decided to commit three full time faculty to enable the Program to continue, with the expectation that these positions would be filled by six or more faculty holding joint appointments between the Program and other departments in the University (including Earl Hanson, whose appointment was officially converted to a joint appointment in Biology and Science in Society). The conversion of the original term appointments to joint tenure-track or tenured appointments began in 1981, with the appointment of Joseph Rouse in Philosophy and Science in Society. Over the next decade, other appointments were added, including Karen Knorr-Cetina (Sociology), Drew Carey (Earth and Environmental Sciences), Sue Fisher (Sociology), Anthony Daley (Government), and Marc Eisner (Government). Robert Wood (Government) and William Trousdale (Physics) also joined the Program for extended periods during the 1980's. Robert Rosenbaum, Professor of Mathematics and founder of the College of Quantitative Studies, rejoined the Program for one year as Chair when Earl Hanson was on leave.

Many of the faculty who had been hired under the original grant continued to teach in the Program during this extended transition; Howard Brown, the last of the original adjunct faculty who had begun the Program, left the University in 1990. Several intellectual and pedagogical trends are discernable in the Program's development through the 1980s and early 1990s. The social sciences took on a more prominent role in the Program, which had originally been conceived primarily by natural scientists: most notably influential were the newly emergent interdisciplinary social studies of science, and political economy and policy analysis. Traditionally structured academic courses in these fields took on a more prominent role in the curriculum, replacing many of the relatively free-wheeling, project-oriented colloquia. While independent research projects remained a prominent part of the Program's requirements, these were gradually scaled back from 2-year to 1-year projects, and some students were permitted to substitute a briefer senior essay for the senior thesis. The Program itself formally changed from a three-year "college" to a two-year interdisciplinary major, a change which also eliminated comprehensive oral and written examinations in the junior and senior years. Although there was no formal division within the Program, students increasingly tended to gravitate toward one of two distinct intellectual foci: critical philosophical and sociological reflections upon the sciences and/or medicine, and environmental studies, especially environmental policy. Many faculty converted their joint appointments back to traditional departmental positions, while continuing to teach in the Program.

The untimely death of Earl Hanson in October 1993 precipitated a substantial reorganization of the Science in Society Program. Not only was Professor Hanson the founder, the Chair, and the faculty member most prominently associated with the Program; his interests provided the primary link between the two distinct "wings" of the Program in environmental studies and interdisciplinary science studies. Because of his many contributions, and deep commitment to the Program, it was widely recognized that no single faculty member could replace his role in the curriculum and administration of the Program.

After extensive discussion, a decision was made to split the Program. With the aid of a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation through their joint initiative on "Science and Humanities: Integrating Undergraduate Education," continuing faculty Joseph Rouse and Sue Fisher were joined by Professors C. Stewart Gillmor, Jill Morawski, and William Johnston. Half a dozen new courses were developed under the auspices of the NSF/NEH grant. By splitting off environmental studies into a separate course of study, the Science in Society Program was able to expand its science requirements, add a substantial curricular component in the history of science, and provide its students with a more intellectually coherent major.

In 1995, the Program branched off into two separate units. A new certificate program in Environmental Studies was organized under the leadership of faculty in Earth & Environmental Sciences, Economics, and History (the nascent Bailey College of the Environment), while the Science in Society Program itself continued with a more specific focus upon the history, philosophy and social studies of science and medicine.

The Program had five core faculty, with no appointments of its own and one joint appointment (the five faculty members were Joe Rouse, Jill Morawski, Bill Johnston, Sue Fisher, and Stewart Gillmor). These remaining faculty won a $95,000 Curriculum Development Award from a joint National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) program for "Science and Humanities: Integrating Undergraduate Education." The title of the grant was “Developing an Undergraduate Major in Humanistic Studies of Science" and it aimed to build a national model for how to unite historical, philosophical, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine with course work in the sciences, in a single undergraduate major. These resources enabled these faculty to develop or revise courses specifically to serve the needs of a major centered on interdisciplinary studies of science, technology, and medicine. 

At that time, the SiSP faculty requested to change the Program’s name to the Science and Technology Studies Program, reflecting the increasing solidification of “STS” as an organizing moniker in the field. The Division III Dean decided that if we changed our name to “Science and Technology Studies,” the Program itself would be closed and our revised major would face intense scrutiny as a new program. Facing this choice, the Program faculty reluctantly decided to keep the name “Science in Society Program” rather than face program closure and a major restructuring. 

After a brief interregnum while the new curriculum was being developed, the first students graduated under the new requirements in 1995. Following this NEH/NSF investment and curricular redesign, the period 1995 and 2015 marked the consolidation of the revised curriculum as a vital component of Wesleyan's overall program of study. The appointment of assistant professor Jennifer Tucker (History and FGSS) in 1997 strengthened our core faculty and the Program secured two additional joint appointments (Laura Stark with Sociology and Gillian Goslinga with Anthropology), gained two more elective core members who were appointed elsewhere (Paul Erickson), and cultivated a larger group of affiliated professors. A parade of brilliant visiting assistant professors also helped to anchor the program’s curriculum over the years. See the table below for a complete list of the core and affiliated faculty who have been involved in the Program.  The Program began appointing core and affiliated faculty on September 1, 2014 and hired its first solely appointed assistant professors of Science in Society—Anthony Hatch in 2015, Mitali Thakor in 2017, Elaine Gan in 2021, and Emily Vasquez in 2024.  A complete list of our core and affiliated faculty can be found in Table 1 below.

Many initiatives, events, and research products in our 50-year history exemplify our distinctive approach to an engaged praxis of science and technology studies. Connected to the Program, through the activities of its core and affiliated faculty, are an important set of co-curricular initiatives that have connected science and technology studies to the world outside of Wesleyan. 

While not exclusively the purview of the College of STS per se, an array of STS initiatives at Wesleyan fall within three broad areas: a) health, medicine, and bioethics, b) animal studies and multispecies ecologies, and c) technology and design. These three broad areas do not encompass all possible subject areas of STS, but they do emerge from faculty and student interests that are fostered within the unique transdisciplinary approach that structures the major.

• Health, Medicine, and Bioethics. STS courses that focus broadly on health, medicine, and bioethics in the US and globally are central to our curriculum and the furtherance of faculty research in these areas. Regularly offered core courses like “Cultural Studies of Health,” “Health, Illness, and Power,” “Antipsychiatry” and “Race and Medicine in America” offer students firm grounding in the social and cultural aspects of health and healthcare systems. Community-engaged learning in public health at Wesleyan has been wholly facilitated by Peggy Carey Best and her course “The Health of Communities,” which the Program has cross-listed and supported for many years. Offered in partnership with the Community Health Center of Middletown, this course offers Wesleyan students the unique opportunity to learn while supporting local health organizations who serve Middletown’s populations. We also are a logical home for continued curricular and co-curricular developments in medical ethics and the medical and environmental humanities. 
• Animal Studies and Multispecies Ecologies. Most of the courses that count towards the well-established Animal Studies minor at Wesleyan are regularly cross-listed due to the close affinities between STS and this area of study. According to the Animal Studies at Wesleyan website, “Animal Studies is an emerging field that builds on scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences to investigate past and present relations between human and non-human animals, the representation of those relations, their ethical implications and their social, political, and ecological effects in and on the world.” As led by Professor Lori Gruen and coordinated by assistant professor of the practice Elan Abrell (both of whom are affiliated with STS), Animal Studies is an exciting and important area of research, teaching, and ethics that the College will continue to support, host, and nurture going forward. Moreover, other core and affiliated faculty in our unit also work in and adjacent to this area (i.e., Megan Glick, Anthony Hatch, Elaine Gan, Mitali Thakor, Joe Rouse), especially in the context of multispecies relationships, more-than-human temporalities, and post/decolonial geographies.
• Technology and Design. Most importantly, the Program has facilitated the formation of a series of interdisciplinary initiatives that study technologies and design in their broader sociological, anthropological, and historical contexts. Here, we briefly highlight two most recent examples of such endeavors: Black Box Labs (Anthony Hatch and Mitali Thakor) and the Center for the Study of Guns and Society (affiliated faculty Jennifer Tucker and Joseph Slaughter). Black Box Labs is a research laboratory situated within the College of STS, that trains students in qualitative, interpretive, and curatorial research practices focused on technology and power. The goal of the lab is to expand the opportunities that Wesleyan students have to learn how to do qualitative interdisciplinary research focused on science, technology, medicine, and health in a way that simultaneously contributes to faculty research and streamlines student advising in these critical areas. Through laboratories, we are establishing the research infrastructure needed to support competitive external grant applications and provide much needed methods training for the Wesleyan undergraduates who want to know how to study the contexts and forces that shape science and technology in medicine, public health, and environmental fields. The Center for the Study of Guns and Society fosters research and collaborations with other institutions, including museums, schools, and the public. It hosts new courses on the history of guns and society at Wesleyan and supports student and faculty research. Both of these endeavors are designed to provide unique opportunities for Wesleyan students to engage with faculty on research and praxis that matters.

Table 1. Historical Roster of Core and Affiliated Faculty in STS