How did racial scientists think? The concept of ‘race’ has been pivotal in various scientific disciplines including anthropology, psychiatry, genetics, literature and cultural studies from 1850 to 1945. What role did this concept have in structuring scientists’ thought? What tools did scholars use to sort, define and diagnose races, and what happened to racial concepts when the results of studies cut against researcher’s preliminary assumptions? Should we regard these disciplinary fields ‘pseudo-sciences’? If so, what turned them into less-scientific than other branches of knowledge? And if not, what does that imply regarding our understanding of how science works? In the seminar we will reconstruct the thought processes of racial scientists by scrutinizing their scientific works, getting acquainted with the questions they posed and analyzing the tools they used to answer these questions. We will try to decipher the relations between inner-disciplinary dynamics and external influences (social, cultural etc.) on the content of scientific work. We will also examine the socio-cultural implications of racial sorting and the involvement of scientists in designing and implementing racial policies in Germany, the United States, England and Italy. Active participance is required of all students, including the submission of a written analysis of one source and the presentation of a scholarly article to the class