Associate Professor
About
Henry Cowles is a historian of science and medicine. He writes and teaches about a range of topics, including psychology, addiction, self-help, and expertise. In addition to the History Department, he is affiliated with the Science, Technology, & Society Program, the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. Current projects include a material history of mental health since 1800 and a history of habit from the celebration of daily routine in Thoreau's Walden to the rise of “persuasive technologies" in Silicon Valley and beyond.
I am away on research leave for AY 2024–2025.
Undergraduate Courses:
Minds and Brains in America
American Addictions
Self-Help to Self-Care
Recent Academic Publications:
The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020)
"The Average Isn't Normal," Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, Volume 3 (2023, with Joshua Knobe)
"Attention and Boredom in Early American Psychology," in Scenes of Attention (Columbia U.P., 2023)
"Special Issue: Dilemmas of Archival Objectivity," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (February 2023)
Recent Non-Academic Publications:
"What Is It Like to Have a Brain?" LARB (October 2022)
"Sciences of Dune," LARB (March 2022)
"Horrible Sanity," LARB (June 2021)
