Worrying about what’s normal and what’s not is an endemic feature of both our popular and scientific cultures. Is my intelligence above average? What about my height? What if I feel awkward? Is there a pill for that? People seem to have always been concerned with fitting in, but the way of describing the general run of practices and conditions as “normal” is inherited from a more esoteric talk. Charting a wide-ranging history of the ways that human attributes – physical, moral, intellectual – came to be scientifically delimited and measured, this course will introduce students to the theories, techniques, and devices used to simultaneously define and establish normality for the past 200 years, and open up questions about the kinds of people they brought into being. Topics include nineteenth century psychiatry and the classification of sexual perversions, social statistics and “the average man,” anthropometry and eugenics, intelligence testing and personality types, the mental hygiene movement, the science of child development and the autism epidemic.