Image 1: Teaching fellows discuss the history of racist policies related to blood. Photography by Sara de Ángel.
Tracing the Histories of Blood, from Vampire Myths to Blood Typing
One of the foundational values of Yale College is its emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. The purpose of an interdisciplinary education goes back hundreds of years to the idea of Renaissance thinkers—intellectuals knowledgeable in many different areas. In practice, some students at Yale think about this as simply getting the number of distributional requirements needed to graduate and move on. Most distributional classes—in Quantitative Reasoning or Writing, for example—remain self-contained within their departments, with students from different disciplines often struggling to integrate what they learn across their academic studies. Perhaps the key to not simply requiring, but encouraging, interdisciplinary education at Yale starts with the instructors.
Claudia Valeggia, a Yale professor of biological anthropology, and Moira Fradinger, a Yale professor of comparative literature, met by coincidence at a committee meeting for the Yale Center for International and Professional Experience seven years ago. Despite their disparate academic fields, they bonded over both being Argentinian women with similar worldviews. They became determined to co-teach a course. After months of brainstorming, inspiration struck from the most unlikely place: Valeggia nicked her finger. From that seemingly mundane moment, “Blood: Science, Culture, and Society” was born. It was first taught in the Spring of 2022 and is currently being taught for the second time as a Spring 2024 course offering.
In their class, Valeggia and Fradinger discuss everything from the scientific and cultural origins of the vampire myth to the way some cultures assign personality traits to different blood types. Both professors and their team of teaching fellows are present during lectures, along with occasional guest speakers who bring their unique expertise to discussions. This is also reflected in the class demographics, with there being an equal proportion of STEM, humanities, and social science students. This fosters interactive discussions, with everyone, including the instructors, sincerely asking questions and openly learning from different perspectives.
Both professors cite how much they have learned from each other, combining scientific thinking with the human sciences, a term Fradinger prefers to use to describe the humanities. Fradinger told the story of the first lecture they gave together. “Claudia made her slides very straightforwardly, [with] bullet points, keywords, and a few images. My slides had paragraphs on paragraphs of text,” she said. To Valeggia, this contrast made sense in the context of their disciplines. “The nature of STEM thinking is to be as concise as possible, to get your point across with as few words as possible, but in the human sciences they live through the words. You make a STEM student write a thirty-page paper, and it’s difficult for them to elongate it,” Valeggia said. “And if you made a human sciences student shorten their paper to thirty pages, it’s practically torture,” Fradinger added.
The interdisciplinary nature of the course creates a special type of challenge, where all students, no matter their major, will encounter pedagogical methods they are unfamiliar with. Fradinger and Valeggia expressed that this learning experience does not come without some bumps along the road. The result, however, is illuminating, with both professors encouraging other fellow members of the Yale faculty to consider how they can offer interdisciplinary courses.
“The mutual respect shared between me and Valeggia is the foundation of our partnership, with a genuine openness to discovering the value of each other’s disciplines,” Fradinger said. Valeggia said that the two professors consider themselves friends first and colleagues second, which is evident in the lively and humorous atmosphere of their lectures. This is exactly what the purpose of a liberal arts education is—to create an environment where students are encouraged to let each others’ differing worldviews influence their own. “Blood: Science, Culture, and Society” challenges common attitudes among students that distributional requirements are “filler classes.” Instead, it suggests that these courses can serve as transformative experiences that push students towards being Renaissance thinkers, driven by genuine curiosity.