Signature Seminars

As Europe entered the modern era of nation-states, liberal politics, Enlightenment philosophy and capitalist economies, physicians' influence expanded beyond the bedside. Governments increasingly measured national strength by the health and productivity of their populations. Medical authorities became instruments of the state, helping build bureaucratic systems that used medicine to classify, monitor and control people perceived as threats to white, European, patriarchal authority.

Science was employed to label behaviors and entire groups of people as "unhealthy," often with little medical evidence. Cloaked in the language of therapeutic ethics, physicians diagnosed as diseased those who challenged social norms, male authority or imperial power. Backed by the state and broader cultural institutions, they sought to cure, suppress or eliminate these perceived threats, whether labeled hysterics, neurasthenics, imbeciles or morons.

Bad Medicine examines how those who disturbed social order or threatened established authority were defined as deficient, abnormal or aberrant. The course is organized into five units: the citizen, the female, the underclass, the deviant and the defective. Through each unit, students will explore how modern Western states used medicine to define and control populations, incarcerate and harm those deemed deficient, and sterilize and kill those considered dangerous.

Ultimately, the course argues that to be a patient has long meant, in the most literal sense, to suffer.

Course Credit: 

All Students:

• Honors College Credit

Trish Starks joined the history department at the University of Arkansas in 2000 and was named a distinguished professor in 2023. In addition to her infamous BAD MEDICINE, she has shocked and shepherded students through the history of medicine, world history, Russian and Soviet history, and gender history. Starks is a member of the University of Arkansas Teaching Academy, and has been named a Master Teacher in Fulbright College and a Student Alumni Board Teacher of the Year. She has mentored honors students and graduate students who have gone on to programs in Russian history and history of medicine, as well as students pursuing higher degrees in education, law, and medicine. Starks's research explores the extraordinary history of public health in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of three monographs – The Body Soviet (Wisconsin, 2008), Smoking under the Tsars (Cornell, 2018) and Cigarettes and Soviets (Northern Illinois, 2022) – and coeditor of several collections – most recently A Frozen State: Cold in Russian History and Culture (Toronto, 2026). She has received funding from Fulbright-Hays, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the National Councils for East-European and Eurasian Research, the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine to pursue her research. In 2017 Starks was named a Master Researcher for Fulbright College, and the Honors College recognized her as a Dean's Fellow in 2014 and with the Distinguished Faculty Teaching and Research Award in 2021.

Special attention will be given to holy men and women as sources of religious and social authority and to their relationships with political power, including cases in which they exercised political authority themselves. Students will also explore their contributions to the spread and development of religious traditions, both scriptural — including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism—and non-scriptural.

The course examines institutional practices surrounding holiness, including the canonization of saints and the formalization of devotion to holy figures in different religious traditions. Although the primary focus is on human embodiments of holiness, students will also consider the significance of sacred places, objects and animals.

Readings draw on scholarship in religious studies, anthropology, history, ethnography and literary studies, alongside primary sources such as saints' lives (vitae), chronicles, religious manuals and other historical texts.

Course Credits: 

All Students:

• Honors Credit

Nikolay Antov is an associate professor of history and director of the Religious Studies program at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. A historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, he earned his bachelor’s degree at the American University in Bulgaria, after which he went on to study Ottoman history at Bilkent University in Turkey, and completed his doctoral studies in Islamic history at the University of Chicago. Since joining the University of Arkansas in 2011, he has been teaching courses in Islamic civilization, Ottoman history, history of the early modern Islamic empires, and history of the Crusades. His research interests include the formation of Muslim communities and the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the early modern Ottoman Empire, Sufism, popular Islam, and sainthood in the pre-modern Islamic world, comparative religion, and the late Crusades. He is the author of The Ottoman Wild West: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Research Institute in Turkey.

Students will examine everyday life in Iran as it has been shaped by Persianate ethical and literary traditions, Islamic philosophy and theology, and transnational exchanges of people and ideas, including those with the United States. The course encourages critical perspectives on revolution, war and economic hardship that move beyond common media narratives.

Along the way, students will strengthen their close reading, analytical writing and discussion skills while developing a deeper understanding of contemporary Iran and the forces that continue to shape it.

Photo by Gohar Dashti.

Course Credits: 

All Students:

• Honors Credit

Milad Odabaei is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas, where he is also affiliated with the Middle East studies, gender studies, and global and international studies programs. His expertise spans political and psychological anthropology, the anthropology of religion, critical theory, and modern Iranian thought. His research examines religion and revolution, violence and destruction, migration and refuge, translation, and gender and sexuality. He has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Tehran and Qom, Iran; Iranian Kurdistan; and North America among LGBTQ+ refugees and Iranian diasporic communities.