Birth, Death, and the Human

In the age of AI, the humanities have a vital role to play in reflecting—slowly, deeply, and critically—on what it means to be human in a world shaped by machines. Birth and death as embodied human experiences lie at the heart of this inquiry. This interdisciplinary course treats these topics historically, looking back to the eighteenth century as a moment when modernity brought intense new pressures to bear on the autonomy and precedence of the human. From William Hunter’s scientific illustrations of human pregnancy to Denis Diderot’s pronatalist Tahitian dystopia to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we will put a microscope to a range of images and texts that reflect on birth, death, and the human in this crucial period of transformation. In each case, our acts of collective visual analysis and close reading will lay the groundwork for a broader critical discussion of the challenges these works pose to our own understanding and lived experiences of birth and death in the twenty-first century. In keeping with the capaciousness of Enlightenment thought, this course is geared towards students interested in art history, literature, philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and medical humanities. The course will be taught in English, with required discussion sections.