I think of the classroom as a laboratory: a place where students learn about the past by questioning familiar categories and working directly with the materials through which knowledge was made. This academic year, 2026-2027, my courses include:

1) Scientific Instruments and the History of Science, an object-centered undergraduate seminar at the Yale Peabody Museum where students work hands-on with historical instruments from the Education Collection, a subset of the Peabody’s History of Science and Technology collection.

2) Early Modern Science and Medicine, a graduate seminar on current topics in the historiography of early modern science and medicine. As part of their assignments, students organize small exhibits of relevant materials in Yale libraries or museums.

3) What Was/Is History? The Craft of Historical Writing from Antiquity to the Present, a graduate seminar that explores the changing practices and meanings associated with historical writings across time, with particular attention to the early modern and Enlightenment periods. We examine the craft of history: the concrete practices through which historians worked—including philology, archival research, antiquarianism, chronology, narrative, and critique—and the intellectual assumptions that gave those practices authority.

In 2025-2026 I had the great pleasure of leading a seminar for the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, open to New Haven public school teachers who developed their own teaching units as part of their work: Making Visible the Invisible.

Collections are central to my teaching. I use historical scientific instruments, rare books, images, and other objects to introduce students to ways of knowing that can be difficult to recover from texts alone, and to the people and practices that conventional histories often leave out. Across my courses, I encourage students to approach both science and history as historically situated forms of inquiry rather than as fixed bodies of knowledge. Working closely with objects and texts, students learn to recognize the many different ways in which people have made sense of nature and of the past. Students in my classes have organized two exhibits at the Yale Medical History Library: “Books of Secrets: Alchemy, Medicine and Magic” (2013) and “The Early Modern Pharmacy” (2018). During the pandemic, we worked on a spectacular website: Epidemic Histories.