Graduate
Science Studies Program
Science Studies is a well-established interdisciplinary field that employs the perspectives of the humanities and social science to examine the development of science, medicine, and technology. Science and its allied fields have become defining features of modern societies: shaping intellectual controversies, guiding industrial development, undergirding political authority, and transforming the way that people treat their bodies and conceive their identities.
The development of these sciences has also been central to the creation of the modern university and to the division of knowledge into disciplinary practices. Understanding how the sciences achieved this remarkable position demands a variety of historical, sociological, and ethnographic tools, as well as attention to science’s representational practices. The Science Studies cluster is for students who are interested in supplementing their disciplinary learning with attention to the transformations wrought by science, medicine, and technology.
The Science Studies cluster welcomes graduate students from all departments and also provides fellowships to graduate applicants to Northwestern. The cluster has four categories of graduate student membership: