Associate Professor of History
Email: Lindsay.Wilson@nau.edu
Office phone: (928) 523-6217
Office LA 207
Teaching Interests
My general approach to education is that students should be encouraged to expect the best of our curriculum and of themselves. I received my Ph.D. in history and humanities, and nearly all my courses are interdisciplinary. In the Western Civilization survey, for example, we read from classics in Greek tragedy and comedy and re-create the trial of Socrates in order to understand the dynamic of contestation and debate that gave such vitality to Greek democracy. In the early modern Europe class, we read from Galileo’s letters, works, and testimony before the Inquisition and then consider how his image was imaginatively reconstructed in the twentieth century by Bertolt Brecht in his play, Galileo, to criticize the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and of McCarthyism in the United States.
I teach intensive writing courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and have come, as a result, to become increasingly interested in the craft of history. History 300W, for example, has two purposes: to explore the social and cultural history of witch beliefs and witch hunts and to develop skills in writing history. Students master specific content matter, but just as importantly, they are guided to an understanding of how knowledge is arrived at in history. What counts as evidence? Upon what criteria is the quality of any historical account measured? In History 498 and in graduate classes, the focus is on how to pose and research significant historical questions.
My newest additions to the curriculum are courses in the social history of medicine. These courses explore changing and differing concepts of health and disease across time and cultures. Etiologies of disease at once incorporate and sanction ideologies. In social debates about race, gender, and class, disease etiologies served to support widely held values and attitudes. They helped shape the identity of those deemed sick and informed public policy. Case studies in the social history of medicine are currently of great interest to anthropologists, historians, and political scientists. Some of the texts that we are studying in these courses are Peter Allen’s The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present, The Doctor’ Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings from the United States Holocaust Museum, and Philippe Aries’ Western Attitudes toward Death.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate:
Western Civilization to 1660
Witch-crazes: A Social and Cultural History
Renaissance and Reformation
Early Modern Europe
Medicine and Society
The Other Side of the Renaissance
Gendered Lives
Graduate:
Medicine and Culture
Life History and the Historical Moment
Women’s History, Theory and Methods
Professional Development.
Research Interests and Publication
My first book, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes, was published in 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. It examines a number of eighteenth-century causes celebres revolving around women and having important social and political ramifications. It reveals the extent to which the traditional values of hierarchy, privilege, and patriarchy were repeatedly challenged in the decades prior to the French Revolution and exposes the fragility of medical judgment in attempting to resolve disputes that were grounded as much on conflicting visions of society as of nature. The value of such an approach is that it broadensthe parameters of the history of medicine to encompass new currents in cultural and social history.
During the academic year 2001-2002, I was on sabbatical in Paris, where I embarked on a new research project entitled “Uncommon Lives, Unorthodox Thoughts: A Study of Three French Women of Science.” What can the study of the lives and works of these intellectuals reveal? First, they offer insight into the social and institutional constraints that limited women’s intellectual contributions to science and social science from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Second, they offer examples of exceptional women who, despite these constraints, found room in which to do significant work and to make their voices heard. Third, they reveal how these women of science used the ideas of scientific revolutionaries to further their own cultural critiques and to formulate alternative ways of thinking about themselves and the world. Fourth, they raise the question of the meaning of feminism, for these women were such independent thinkers that they were as likely to alienate other women as they were men.
Recent Professional Service
Peviewer of books for The American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Left History, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
Reviewer of manuscripts for The American Historical Review, the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of Social History, St. Martin’s Press, and the University of Minnesota Press.
Member of the Program Committee and Panel Chair for the Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, 2000.
At NAU, I have been actively involved in the Women’s Studies Program, the Honors Program, the Graduate Council, the University Program Review Committee, the Office for Teaching and Learning Effectiveness, and the University Library Committee as well as in numerous History Department committees.