Courses

How does the United States know the world it seeks to govern? And how does the desire to know the world — to make peoples and polities legible — shape American knowledge? This course examines the mutual constitution of expert knowledge and U.S. global power from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. It explores how experts and expertise have both directed American initiatives abroad and created forms of knowledge that diffused around the world, with profound consequences. It also asks how, within the United States, the tensions between experts and democratic publics have changed over time—and why ignorance has often trumped knowledge.