Department website: http://anthropology.jhu.edu/
The Anthropology Department specializes in socio-cultural anthropology: the study of social and cultural forms of human life using ethnographic, historical, and comparative methods. Faculty in our department are engaged in research that addresses topics considered traditional such as the study of ethnicity, language, religion, family and kinship, or medical pluralism, and also new and emergent issues such as those relating to childhood, technological imaginaries, biomedicine, ecology, state, violence, and popular economies. In all cases, the acute awareness of shifting contexts in which institutions are embedded and the impact of global, regional, and national politics on social life is built into the methodology and the theory engaged by faculty and students. Faculty in our department have research expertise in the Americas, South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Our research is oriented toward the investigation of a number of cross-cutting themes of trans-regional concern rather than a comprehensive coverage of global cultural areas.
The department’s distinctive orientation to anthropology can be characterized in terms of its orientation to non-European anthropological and philosophical traditions, alongside the dominant anthropologies which have been seen as definitive of the discipline in the past. In terms of specific topics, faculty in our department are engaged in research on violence, social suffering and theories of everyday life; the material and moral force of the state; money and value; environments; new kinship; anthropology of religion and secularism; anthropology of medicine; media and visual anthropology; health and well-being; and anthropology of language.
The department offers a B.A. program and a Ph.D. program. The B.A. prepares students either to continue to various employment opportunities or degree in anthropology (and related fields) or to develop anthropological skills and imagination as complementary to pre-professional training, such as medicine, engineering, and international relations. Undergraduate course work offers an introduction to the basic methodologies and theories of contemporary anthropology through discussion and directed research on these and other topical issues. Student advising helps interested students to develop concentrations, through sequences of complementary courses tailored to their own interests, including electives outside the department. In addition, majors have the option to pursue an honors program.
Undergraduate majors in anthropology are required to do ten courses, six electives, at least four of which must be taken at 300-level or higher, and one of which can be a cross-listed course taught outside the department. After consultation with faculty, majors can take an independent study course that will count toward the major. All anthropology majors must also meet a foreign language requirement (intermediate level). Native speakers of another language, or those fluent in a language not taught at the university, can devise a plan to meet this requirement in consultation with the department. Students wishing to write an honors thesis are also required to do two additional courses in which they work on their dissertation topics. Minors are required to take five courses, two required courses and three electives, at least two electives must be 300 level or higher.
The core curriculum for majors develops a step-wise sequence from the freshman seminar to the senior honors option. We offer an elective 100-level Freshman Seminar that introduces anthropological approaches to a broad range of contemporary issues. Here, we hope to develop curiosity in anthropology as a way of knowing the world, and to encourage critical reflection by students on their own life experiences. Our 100-level introductory course, Invitation to Anthropology, is geared toward freshmen and sophomores. The objective of this course is twofold: to offer anthropological knowledge and analytic skills to a broad range of students, and to prepare potential majors for further training in social theory and fieldwork methods. Following from this introductory course, our 200-level Ethnographies course furthers student understanding of essential themes through close attention to classic and contemporary ethnographic works in the discipline. The 300-level Methods course is an additional requirement for majors, deepening students’ capacity to link theory and method, preparing students to carry out field research, and guiding students in the writing up and presentation of original research. Building on these foundations, the 400-level Logic of Anthropological Inquiry course, also required of majors, is a thematic capstone course that demands an extended engagement with classic debates and encourages integrative thinking across the range of anthropology courses taken. Majors in anthropology may decide to pursue an honors thesis based on an extended research project. They should discuss their interest in writing a thesis with their faculty advisor in their sophomore year and before the summer of their junior year. Drawing from their previous course preparation and working closely with a faculty advisor, such students spend one summer conducting field research, one semester conducting secondary literature review, and the final semester writing their honors thesis.
Outside of the core curriculum, both majors and minors may take a wide variety of courses. Thematic courses are highly varied and reflect faculty interests, usually including (in any one year) courses in religion and philosophy; medical, legal, economic and linguistic anthropology; and study of diverse areas of the world. Courses on the state, law, and money offer a critical and comparative approach for students aiming toward political, economic, and legal careers. Courses in medical anthropology serve pre-med and public health students. Philosophical and theoretical courses are attractive to humanities students. We see teaching and research as integrally linked, and invite undergraduate students to envisage research as they take introductory and advanced courses in anthropology.
The training of graduate students focuses on providing students with a vocabulary and grammar to engage in anthropological reasoning in socio-cultural anthropology and with skills in research methods. The department emphasizes training in anthropological theory in relation to new developments in other disciplines within the social sciences; understanding of regions in terms of cross-cutting questions rather than geographical questions alone; and the capability to place a problem within a broad history of anthropology that is engaged through multiple national and regional traditions.
Our faculty brings into the classroom an extraordinary range of personal and professional experiences. We are proud to have one of the most diverse faculties in the discipline worldwide, both in terms of gender and ethnic or national origins. Their collective fieldwork experience spans the world, including the Americas, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
Facilities
In addition to the regular departmental colloquium where invited speakers from JHU and other campuses around the world present their ongoing research, the department holds one or two special symposia every year, including one organized by graduate students. The department also invites a distinguished scholar each year to present the Sidney W. Mintz Lecture. The purpose of the Mintz lectures is to integrate scholarly and social concerns, focusing on questions of political and economic inequality, racism, gender, and ethnic differences from an interdisciplinary perspective. Previous lectures have subsequently been published in Current Anthropology.
The Baltimore-Washington area is unusually rich in library, archival, and museum resources relating to anthropology. In addition to the excellent collection in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, the William H. Welch Medical Library, and other libraries at Johns Hopkins, major anthropological holdings are available at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the other specialized libraries and museums in nearby Washington, D.C. Students can use the Smithsonian Institution’s ethnological and library collection through a cooperative arrangement.
Financial Aid
Undergraduate majors and non-majors are eligible to apply for a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award to support special research and write-up projects in their senior year.
Graduate fellowships and teaching assistantships are available, and most students admitted receive support. Some additional funds are usually available on a competitive basis for summer field research (including travel grants from the Institute for Global Studies, the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Program for Latin American Studies), and for special language-learning needs. Write-up students may apply for a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
This course is an introduction to urban anthropology through the study of diverse "urban experiences," how they are shaped by power relations as well as resistance, and how they change through the evolution of technology, shifts in capital investment, and flows of migration. We will examine a variety of ethnographic and historical examples from many regions of the globe to discuss how culture, class, race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, inflect the experience of urbanity; and we will assess how different concepts and perspectives capture the variety of affects and dynamics of urban everyday life in the contemporary world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
In our present "urban age," the city appears as the privileged framework to claim citizenship rights. This demand, however, clashes with issues of urban renewal and development, security and circulation, as well as conditions of stark inequality that relegate vast sectors of the urban population around the globe to informality and precarious residence, without access to adequate healthcare, sanitary services and amenities, or secure housing tenure. This course examines the intricacies of the notion of "urban citizenship" and how the "right to the city" is imagined and demanded in struggles for belonging and inclusion in cities throughout the world.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Climate change is represented in many pictures, such as those of tables, graphs, iconic photographs and filmic images. It materializes in many objects and qualities in our everyday lives, such as emissions, heat, solar grids and taxes. Artists attempt to picturize climate through photographs, installations and performance art. In this class we will examine these myriad representations, materializations and artistic efforts to see what ethical, political and aesthetic issues are at stake within them. We will ask to what concerns and desires does climate change give expression?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course examines mapping through an ethnographic lens. We will both study the design of maps as a key technology to survey territories and populations, as well as forms of countermapping: practices that turn this top-down, governmental tool on its head and facilitate a ground-up, collaborative process of representing space. We will survey various forms of data visualization, oral history and narrative cartography, as methods for the generation of local knowledge. Cases include indigenous counter-mapping of communal land, collective cartography in Latin America, anti-eviction mapping projects in American cities, and others. The course involves critical discussions of theoretical and ethnographic texts, as well as the practical exploration of different mapmaking techniques (ArcGIS, hands-on activities on campus and its surroundings), and their importance as possible contributions to anthropological analysis and community engagement.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This is a hands-on course that introduces students to the process of designing a project of social research, from the initial idea to the final proposal. The class provides tools on: how to frame a problem, ask key questions, review the relevant scholarly literature and determine the data needed to check hypotheses. We will discuss issues related to what defines social science inquiry: its quantitative and qualitative methods, its forms of collecting and evaluating evidence, using archives, doing fieldwork, conducting interviews and surveys, or interacting with various groups of people on the ground, and ethical concerns related to social research. Social science implies venturing into the real, empirical world and its contemporary problems. We will study how researchers analyze, interpret and make sense of multiple human experiences and social processes.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce first-year students to the anthropology of modern South Asia from the lens of its varied minorities. We will interrogate ideas of nation, community, tradition, and belonging across the region to understand contemporary dilemmas of diversity, heterogeneity, and cultural citizenship.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
The course explores contemporary approaches to illness and disease in which somatic expressions reflect broader histories of political violence. The readings in the course will challenge students to consider the ways in which the contours of the human body, its interior as well as its dynamic relations with the milieu are touched by structures of violence and histories of militarization. This will enable students to understand the varying expressions in which illness is expressed in the interactions between medical professionals and patients in clinical and non-clinical settings..
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course is an introduction to urban anthropology through the study of diverse "urban experiences," to explore how they are shaped by power relations as well as resistance. We will read about crowds and anonymity, finance and poverty, media and public space to understand how they change through the evolution of technology, shifts in capital investment and flows of migration. We will examine the scope and limitations of classical (Western) notions of foundational studies city life. We will also explore how the notion of "cityness" better captures the variety of affects and dynamics of contemporary urban everyday life.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
With their biogeochemical power of rearranging elements, plants have sustained and proliferated life on Earth. Accordingly, humans have cultivated different relations with plants, from domestication to sciences, from agriculture to industrialized plantation, across space and time. Planetary ecological crises have radically pushed us to reconsider not simply what it means to be human but also what it means to live as an “earthling” within the complicated, fast-changing webs of life and nonlife, which are fundamentally intertwined with the vegetal forms of life. This course will explore anthropologically-informed diagnoses and prognoses of the various ways of engaging plants. Specifically, we will delve into standard forms through which humans have engaged plants, institutional frameworks that have given rise to these forms, and alternatives to these forms and institutions
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
What is gender? We talk so much about it, but what is it really? How does one distinguish between the social and historical life of gender vis-à-vis sex as a biological category? Yet even the category sex as biology is not as straightforward as it seems and often indicates arbitrariness and blurriness when it comes to demarking definite lines of difference between a binary gender model (male, female). Anthropologists are increasingly exploring gender in multiple contexts, from kinship structures and political economies, as well as in settings of piety and religiosity, to spaces in which the category of human itself becomes difficult to define. In this course we will engage in genealogies as well as current debates. We will learn and discuss a wide array of perspectives, debates, and theories that have shaped feminist anthropology, queer theory, and black feminist theory.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Historical archaeology might be defined as the study of the modern world's development through investigations of material and archival remains of past societies. Because of its focus on the post-Columbian era, Charles Orser drew attention to the “haunts” of historical archaeology, including colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity. This course focuses primarily on the field in North America, including its history and development. Historical archaeology now provides crucial perspectives on the silenced, overlooked, and obscured histories and experiences of marginalized peoples. Anthropological approaches enable historical archaeologists to link past events and processes to our current moment and to better understand the enduring legacies of sociopolitical formations and institutions that perpetuate various forms of inequality.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
We will read sections of the two major epics Ramayana and Mahabharata to see how issues of morality and ethics are posed in these texts and the disputations around these issues.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
An emerging body of literature argues that cities in the Global South work differently than Eurocentric theories of the city and urbanization suggest. This course will focus on such issues as the important role of cities in the nation’s economy, politics, and culture and interrogates the relationship between the city and its “outside.” This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that African cities, as an urban form, concept, and geography have been generative in anthropology, as well as in history, sociology, and urban studies. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of an African city outside of this limiting history? In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of African cities as an urban form, and lived experience, re-sorting its geographies and theorizations. We will explore issues of urban planning, (de)industrialization, urban race/ethnic relations, movement, and other issues important to the urban experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This is an introductory course for those interseted in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. The focus will be on culture and religion and the ways they in which they become interwoven into different kinds of political stakes.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the craft of ethnography as a mode of research and writing fundamental to anthropology. Through the close reading of several ethnographic works, we will consider the intertwining of description, local concepts, and analysis. We will undertake several observation and writing exercises to learn how to write in an ethnographic mode and translate field research into lively texts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
In this course we will examine different conceptions and experiences of "home" through studies of domesticity, kinship and household in diverse cultural settings. Reading anthropological analysis of urban built environment and locality, we will explore the notions of home and homeland, as realms of care, intimacy and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination and gender/racial inequality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the intersections of scientific knowledge and law that shape the experience of environmental and occupational diseases from an anthropological perspective. We will first look at the concepts of risk and danger; medical and legal reasoning on causation; role of expertise in science and law; and the place of victim testimonies in public perceptions of risk. In the second part we will take up four case studies on the topics of lead poisoning, Bhopal gas leak, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters, and exposure to toxic dusts in the workplaces.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
The course is designed to introduce students to the Indian anti-colonialist figure and political thinker Mahatma Gandhi, his key ideas on politics and society in their historical and political contexts, and to put them in conversation with contemporary social and political theory. Many today may consider Gandhi’s ideas, such as that of turning away from technology or an insistence on non-violence even in the face of threat and violence, as too idealistic or impractical for our complicated times. Through a close reading of his work, this course will challenge this reflex response, and explore the relevance of his thought for rethinking our approach to contemporary political and ecological crises.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine new ways of theorizing family and kinship due to changes brought about by technology, experience of war and collective violence, and recognition of the multiplicity of ways of forming relations.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Students will be introduced to problems of global governance in the context of transnational conflicts, changing nature of war, new epidemics and pandemics, and the threats of planetary extinction. What are the ways security is imagined and what kinds of political passions are mobilized for security of people versus security of states.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course invites students to examine an idea central to theories of transitional justice: that holding perpetrators of mass violence legally accountable enables transitions from war to peace and authoritarianism to democracy. We will examine this idea by focusing on Latin America, where social movements for legal accountability and human rights prosecutions have flourished since the 1980s, influencing law and transitional justice mechanisms globally. By engaging ethnographies of transition, we will critically examine concepts such as justice, accountability, catastrophic violence, transition, and the rule of law, comparing how anthropologists and lawyers reason, formulate questions, and engage evidence.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course aims to teach basic fieldwork skills: Choosing and entering a community; establishing contacts; learning to listen and to ask questions and locating archival material that might be relevant. It is a hands-on course that increases student familiarity with various neighborhoods such as the Arts District in Baltimore. Recommended Course Background: two or more prior courses in anthropology (not cross-listed courses). Course is a requirement for anthropology major.
Prerequisite(s): AS.070.132 OR AS.070.273
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Bangladesh, the small, populous Muslim majority country in South Asia, steadily moving into middle income status, offers an off-centered but important vantage point upon the political culture of the region. We will read several new historical and ethnographic works, combined with film, fiction and art, to get a feel for this perspective, even as we interrogate what Bangladesh presumes about itself.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Land acquisition by the government to create useful public infrastructure has long been perceived as both necessary and legal. However, recent land acquisition processes have encouraged widespread illegal land grabs, the loss of livelihoods and the largescale displacement of local communities. This course invites students to examine what has changed in terms of states, economies, and societies to make such processes globally disruptive and violent. We will also consider the range of protests available to prevent or modulate such excesses of the politics of land rights.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course examines the multiple and overlapping crises afflicting Latin America today through an ethnographic lens. Featuring conversations with authors of recent work on the region’s most pressing issues, we will explore the contours of knowledge production itself under conditions of precarity and violence. Discussions will include the retrenchment of borders, migration crises, the state management of life and death, the resurgence of authoritarianism, food insecurity, and resource conflicts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
We approach Iran through building layers of understanding through works of literature, cinema, ethnography, and take particular note of the recent uprising and of some of the central works that are being produced on matters of environment and climate change.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
What is the relation between social life and shelter? How do the kinds of buildings we move through shape our sense of what is important, beautiful, or possible? Why do some buildings feel good and others bad? And how do buildings evolve as people inhabit, repurpose, repair or degrade them over time? The course begins with philosophical reflections on spheres, shells, and containers in relation to childhood and memory. It then explores the long interdisciplinary conversation between architecture and anthropology, focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of built structures. Finally, it considers how architectural practice is responding to contemporary challenges of migration, pandemics, and climate change.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will takes the reverberations of the Korean War to examine the ways in which catastrophic violence is absorbed into and corrodes social life. Particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of conflict, how boundaries around peace and war are established, and how recent scholarly and artistic work on the Korean War has critically engaged dominant frameworks of memory and trauma. Readings will draw from fiction, ethnography, historiography and will also include film. This course also draws from the public syllabus on Ending the Korean War.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Students are invited to attend, for credit, the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester. Students are expected to attend and listen, encouraged to ask questions when they wish, and to write one brief reflection on contemporary trends in the field, based on what they have observed during these sessions. Prerequisite: Students must have completed one Anthropology course previously This course does not apply to Anthropology major or minors towards their minimum department requirement. It counts towards your total credit requirement to degree..
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Invisible Cities by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The curious little book, a kind of re-imagining of Marco Polo’s travels as a parable about the tensions between description and abstraction, has enchanted countless readers and directly inspired projects in architecture, performance art, and the social sciences. This course embarks in a close reading of Invisible Cities to enliven engagements with urban anthropology.?We will explore the hidden and uncanny in urban worlds as an inroads into discussions of theory and ethnographic inquiry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Migration or the global movement of people is occurring at all different scales across the world. While the focus has largely been on the causes and men’s experiences of migration as the norm, this course will focus attention on the relationship between migration, kinship and gender. We will ask, how do existing family relations structure movement, how do migrants form kinship relations in their new homes, and what happens to those left behind. What is a gender perspective on migration? Through an interdisciplinary range of readings, we will explore both the dominant, usually statist frameworks by which migration is studied and how bringing in the perspective of kinship and gender stands to push against these frameworks and commonsensical understandings as to why people migrate.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the idea and practice of the commons through various sites and objects (money, work, natural resources, urban land, knowledge and culture, etc.). We will examine the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Focusing on workers, consumers and housing cooperatives; community currencies; urban gardens; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; we will enquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of living together, and sharing resources, property and labor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. How do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? In this course, we will disscuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about it and explore the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to racialized/gendered forms of violence. We will examine a number of different ethnographic spaces, including genocide in Rwanda, conflict resolution among the Nuer, the concept of criminality in Indonesia, largescale massacres in Thailand, and police violence in the United States
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.070.645 are not eligible to take AS.070.345.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Why are so many social media apps free? How did surveillance take place before the internet? What does the TSA see when you go through a body scanner at the airport? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to the historical development of surveillance cultures as well as their contemporary iterations. We will explore how surveillance shapes communities, politics, subjectivities, and more broadly, our everyday lives. Through readings of key academic texts, documentaries, literary texts, ethnographies, and current events, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of how surveillance has evolved and come to permeate society. By understanding surveillance as a technology of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. In addition, we will examine the political possibilities that emerge from activist and otherwise everyday tactics to counteract surveillance.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course examines ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity. Drawing on detailed case studies from various regions of Buddhist Asia, the course critically examines how Buddhist communities have responded to modernity and continue to navigate the complexities of the modern and contemporary world. Through readings, films, field trips, and creative projects, the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing various ideological, social, and cultural issues that intersect with Buddhist modernism.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines, through an anthropological lens, the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Using the framework of "diverse economies," we will look closely at worker-run businesses; consumer cooperatives; community land-trusts; local currencies; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; to inquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of sharing resources, property, and labor. The course will involve research on some of Baltimore's burgeoning co-op endeavors.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Climate change is a vast topic, pervading our present and casting a pall of uncertainty over the possibility of a livable future. But, stepping back from a sense of climate change as a self-evident set of biophysical realities, how does climate, which unlike weather is only knowable in highly mediated ways, become sensible? What problems does it pose for thought? And how might we become more adequately responsive to its challenges? Departing from these questions, we will explore a variety of angles through which anthropologists have approached climate change, in dialogue with materials from other disciplines and media, to consider what anthropology may contribute to our understanding of life with climate change.
Writing Intensive
This course will invite students to inquire into knowledge production in the context of the Cold War in Asia by exploring how our knowledge of wartime is selected, regenerated, and repressed by archives. The course will examine the dual nature of archives in documenting conflicts and serving as evidence of state violence. We will also consider how the archive may extend beyond documents to incorporate oral narratives and material artifacts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This class is an occasion for speculative anthropology, a chance to reimagine this place (an American city on the Jones Falls river) in a future beyond the bustle of our fossil-fueled present. What culture might people of that distant time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? In this class, we will work together as anthropologists and artists of another time, crafting an inventive and collaborative story about a culture to come, and the material artifacts of a very different collective life. The class will be co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and visual artist Jordan Tierney. We will nurture our imaginations through experiential practices of observing nature, collecting materials, and assembling artifacts. What we build will serve as the core of a spring 2025 local museum exhibition we will plan together.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
"Although we often think of religious freedom as a fixed philosophical doctrine of Enlightenment liberalism, it is a concept continually being (re)made from the ground up in increasingly important ways that today affect national politics and the judiciary. Nowadays, religious freedom has cultivated oppositional meanings: it holds together both a freedom from and to supersede government regulation; where actions in the name of religious freedom seek both to separate from government and to radically engage it as a theological force. We begin by taking this tension as a provocation to look locally and draw widely from a variety of ethnographic, historical, philosophical, literary, and other present-day texts and media, which will deepen how we understand the significant scope of what is at play and at stake in contemporary America and its politics. Through our readings and discussions, we will better grasp how religious freedom and its legal interpretations have grown from the bottom up, moving through local policies, social geographies and institutions, such as churches and prisons, as much as through any singular adherence to transcendent philosophical doctrine. While this class is an overarching exploration of how American Christianity has developed, it will pay particular attention to the Alabama and Louisiana prison systems and their distinctive religious histories. And we will focus on how the varied conceptual forms of religious freedom relate to the social geographies, religious discourses, literary texts, and media produced in and through ideas of the American South."
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the role of science and technology in the making of African histories and politics. We will examine precolonial iron-working, healing, and weaving; the ways guns and railroads functioned as tools of empire; the role of hydroelectric dams in postcolonial nation building; and the rise of digital communication and payment systems in the present. Throughout, we will challenge commonsense distinctions between the material and the spiritual, designers and users, wealth and people.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Students will learn to read legal judgement and decipher how law is used to make and contest claims over infrastructure.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Media Artist in Residence Jane Jin Kaisen is a team-taught class between Clara Han (Anthropology) and Bernadette Wegenstein (MLL). In this class we will prepare the artist residency of Jane Jin Kaisen, a visual artist born in Jeju Island, South Korea and raised in Denmark. In the first part of the semester, we will cover theoretical questions raised in Jane Jin Kaisen’s work such as cross-cultural adoption, diaspora, migration, war, gender and sexuality, and translation. In the second part we will involve students practically in questions of media arts curation for the artist’s exhibit planned for April 2-9, 2022, at the Parkway Theatre, featuring three of her recent and acclaimed installations and films: The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger (2010), Apertures/ Rifts (2016), and Community of Parting (2019. In this class students will be closely involved with JHU's Center for Advanced Media Studies (CAMS), and the Baltimore Stavros Niarchos Parkway Theatre’s artistic director Christy LeMaster. They will also meet the artist Jane Jin Kaisen during her residency.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will collectively craft an anthropological critique of housing, both as a social concern and as an object of public policy and urban planning. As a key component of the structure and functioning of cities, housing is instrumental to urban governance, segregation, and citizenship, as well as to cultures of consumption and class formation, identities, solidarities and the imagination of alternative social orders. We will study several ethnographies to examine how the material and social effects of housing shape the politics of difference, rights, markets and property relations, consumption and activism in the US urban context.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
How does an idea or an observation become a “fact”? How does one study "science” anthropologically? This course will introduce students to the field of science and technology studies (STS) by asking how different societies have defined the relationship between experimentation, knowledge, and power. Through ethnographic portraits of laboratories, clinics, toxic landscapes, and virtual simulations, we will explore how scientists and other experts have understood their relationships with other citizens, the state, and the physical environment.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
One quarter of the planet's urban population lives today in slums, shantytowns, favelas, chawls, colonias and other forms of rudimentary settlements (according to UN Habitat). Despite their prevalence throughout the world, these places are still depicted as spaces of informality and abjection, rather than as sites of emergence ofinnovative -even if disadvantaged-, makeshift ways of producing the city. This course will combine ethnographic and geographical literature, as well as works of fiction and film to explore the lives of squatters and slum-dwellers in many regions of the world and examine in what way their practices, forms of dwelling, sociality, conflict and cooperation are constitutive of the urban experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course offers an advanced examination of the interpersonal, institutional, and societal dimensions of addiction in the United States. The course will be divided into four sections. This first section tracks the evolution of addiction from a moral problem of the will to a formal, biomedical disease category over the course of the 20th century. This section introduces the problem of addiction within the societal context of the United States, exploring questions of political governance, social control, and issues of race, class, and gender inequality. It asks the question: what is the social life of addiction in the United States? The second section of the course will ground these broad inquiries in the urban U.S. by examining how addiction overlaps with mass incarceration, poverty, and homelessness in the U.S. city. Over the course of this section, we will engage and reframe the crack crisis of the late 20th century. The third section of the course will shift our attention to the rural United States and how addiction overlays unemployment, social isolation, and the urbanization of the U.S. Through this social and institutional lens, the third course section will explore the contemporary opioid crisis and draw comparisons with the crack crisis. The course concludes with an examination of the personal dimensions of the addiction experience and explores substance dependence in the realms of kinship, love, and personal understandings of recovery.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on human variation from an anthropological perspective. We discuss biological variation within and between human populations as the product of adaptive, maladaptive, and random changes. This includes an understanding of the diversity of human biologies as the product of complex interactions between environment, culture, and biology.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This seminar explores how precarity in South Korea gains expression in the medium of TV and film. In particular, this seminar will focus on how the moving image brings the viewer into the texture of everyday life. We will focus on the TV show Misaeng and include films such as Parasite and Burning. TV and film will be paired with readings on the transformations of intimate life in contemporary South Korea and comparative work on precarity.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for environmental justice. The course builds on the work of the Sustainable Design Practicum in the fall of 2022. Class sessions will take place each week in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus. Restrictions: Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Recent years have seen a renewed commitment to public work in anthropology, in terms of writing, presentation, and activist engagement. This course will focus on recent ethnographic work in a public vein, examining questions of medium, voice, and responsibility, as well as contexts of circulation and reception. We will explore what it means to pursue anthropology with a broader public in mind.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that Africa, as a concept, has been generative in history, as well as in political and social thought. Although in the long arc of history, the period of European colonialism on the continent was brief, it fundamentally reshaped how we think about Africa as a space and place. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of Africa outside of this limiting history? The idea of Africa has also existed as an important rubric for African scholars to counter such colonial inheritances and for diasporas to re-engage the black Atlantic. The emergence of Pan-Africanism as well as liberation movements across the continent have pushed back against a reading of Africa simply as a site of exploitation, but as home (“Africa for Africans”), space (Afrofuturism), and as a site of radical politics. In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of Africa as an idea, re-sorting its geographies and stories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Governing health explores the vital relationship between governance and health. The class interrogates how the stratification and management of populations are linked with the diagnoses, categories, and inequities that make up our contemporary health landscape. We will explore how the concept of governance troubles our understandings of key concepts in medical anthropology like care, inequality, and the state. Moving from the level of the population to the individual body, from state institutions to the four walls of the clinic, this course traces governance as it generates and degenerates health.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
The household appears as commonsensical to us. It is where people, most often those of a family, reside together, sharing its resources, labor and collective fate. However, anthropologists have been arguing against this commonsense since it emerged in the 1950s. Yet the household is back again in current policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and political violence. How might anthropological debates and controversies relating to households and householding as an activity within the context of war, famine and migration, provide important insights into today’s urgencies?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This seminar offers a close reading of selected works of Karl Marx, along with supplemental secondary literature. We will explore how the central pillars of Marx’s thought--including dialectical materialism, critical political economy, and utopian socialist thought—shape his critical method in interrogating the logic of capital.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
African American Pioneers: Courses focusing on the history and canon of anthropology often fail to consider the important role African American scholars have played in shaping the discipline. This course serves as an intervention by focusing on the contributions these underrepresented intellectuals have made to the field.Restrictions: For advanced undergraduates who have taken anthropology or sociology. Requirement for Anthropology Majors
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
In this course we will examine how forms of governance, politics, expert knowledge, and citizen actions are implicated in the emergence and management of epidemics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
How does language become a site of contestation? From the attention to speech on social media, discrimination and exclusion based on how people sound, the realism of ChatGPT, to debates regarding what constitutes proper and improper language in school textbooks, we seem to increasingly talk about how we talk. How do we study language in these spaces, and amidst contestation and social change? Moving between a number of different contexts, this course explores how language becomes a focal point of agreement and disagreement. Topics include the history of code-switching, language identities around the world, AI and chatbots, indigenous revitalization projects, and how language is thoroughly embedded in our understandings of gender, race, and the concept of the social “other.” Throughout the course, we will read some classic linguistic anthropology texts as well as a contemporary literature, that together provide a foundation for how to think about the role of language in our lives.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This year-long course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects in sustainable design. Team projects will continue in the spring. Class sessions will take place mainly in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This is an advanced course in which we will interrogate the boundaries between war, civil conflict and techniques of policing. Students should be prepared to work through texts of an interdisciplinary character.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
What is the nature of anthropological concepts and what relations do they bear to concepts internal to a society? We invite students to think with key ideas from Hindu and Islamic traditions, asking if anthropological concepts are best seen as abstractions from the particular or as intertwined with ongoing lines of inquiry, say into the nature of the real and continual efforts to test it? Topics in ritual theory, grammar, aesthetics, translation, revelation, luminosity, figuration and the mythological among those to be considered.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the presence of persons and of things in the related genres of ethnography and fiction. Students will be expected to experiment with finding what kinds of struggles for narrative space they can detect with regard to persons,, characters, and things in the texts they read.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Our present is said to be rife with more rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation than ever before. Is this moment so different from previous, historical moments of crisis? Haven't these modes of expression always been present, albeit at the margins of the political order? What does it say about knowledge to have multiple “regimes of truth” (Foucault)? How does a new media landscape based in algorithmic modularity, and particularly social media, change the set up from an old analogue media economy? This course, co-taught by an, a literary theorist, and a media theorist, aims to provide a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives to help us examine the current state of reality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
The household appears as commonsensical to us. It is where people, most often those of a family, reside together, sharing its resources, labor and collective fate. However, anthropologists have been arguing against this commonsense since it emerged in the 1950s. Yet the household is back again in climate change policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with climate change, such as, temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and violence. How might anthropological debates and controversies relating to households and householding as an activity within the context of war, famine and migration, provide important insights into today’s urgencies?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for environmental justice. The course builds on the work of the Sustainable Design Practicum in the fall of 2022. Class sessions will take place each week in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus. Restrictions: Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recent years have seen a renewed commitment to public work in anthropology, in terms of writing, presentation, and activist engagement. This course will focus on recent ethnographic work in a public vein, examining questions of medium, voice, and responsibility, as well as contexts of circulation and reception. We will explore what it means to pursue anthropology with a broader public in mind. Cross-listed with AS.070.403
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that Africa, as a concept, has been generative in history, as well as in political and social thought. Although in the long arc of history, the period of European colonialism on the continent was brief, it fundamentally reshaped how we think about Africa as a space and place. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of Africa outside of this limiting history? The idea of Africa has also existed as an important rubric for African scholars to counter such colonial inheritances and for diasporas to re-engage the black Atlantic. The emergence of Pan-Africanism as well as liberation movements across the continent have pushed back against a reading of Africa simply as a site of exploitation, but as home (“Africa for Africans”), space (Afrofuturism), and as a site of radical politics. In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of Africa as an idea, re-sorting its geographies and stories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Governing health explores the vital relationship between governance and health. The class interrogates how the stratification and management of populations are linked with the diagnoses, categories, and inequities that make up our contemporary health landscape. We will explore how the concept of governance troubles our understandings of key concepts in medical anthropology like care, inequality, and the state. Moving from the level of the population to the individual body, from state institutions to the four walls of the clinic, this course traces governance as it generates and degenerates health.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The 18th century German philosopher Schelling has been hugely influential on 20th century thought (Freud, Heidegger, Nancy, Zizek, Pierce) but remains unknown outside of philosophical circles. This neglect is unfortunate given that he has so much to offer anthropological inquiries into the relations between mind and matter, nature and culture, theology and mythology among other topics. This course places Schelling’s writings and commentaries on his work alongside anthropological texts and figures to explore lines of productive conversation. The theme of a romanticism appropriate to our present will be consistently explored throughout the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The household appears as commonsensical to us. It is where people, most often those of a family, reside together, sharing its resources, labor and collective fate. However, anthropologists have been arguing against this commonsense since it emerged in the 1950s. Yet the household is back again in current policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and political violence. How might anthropological debates and controversies relating to households and householding as an activity within the context of war, famine and migration, provide important insights into today’s urgencies?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar offers a close reading of selected works of Karl Marx, along with supplemental secondary literature. We will explore how the central pillars of Marx’s thought--including dialectical materialism, critical political economy, and utopian socialist thought—shape his critical method in interrogating the logic of capital.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will consist of close reading of anthropological and philosophical texts to tracesome important aspects of the underlying presuppositions of social theory. We will try to see how regions generate both data and theory; and also see how some abiding concerns around the relation between structural formations and formations of subjects are expressed in classical and current anthropological thought.
The seminar will offer a forum for students to reflect on preliminary field research and think further about problems of ethnographic method. We will proceed in the manner of a workshop for ongoing projects. Open to anthropology graduate students only.
Anthropology is an endeavor to think with the empirical richness of the world at hand, a field science with both literary and philosophical pretensions. This course grapples with the nature of anthropological inquiry, reading classic works in the discipline as well as contemporary efforts to reimagine its foundations. Required for anthropology majors.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course we will examine how forms of governance, politics, expert knowledge, and citizen actions are implicated in the emergence and management of epidemics.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
To approach social life as performative marked a pivotal moment in anthropology and related disciplines, and even as an implicit framework it continues to undergird more recent theoretical orientations. Revisiting foundational works in ethnography and critical theory and tracing their resonances in contemporary turns and experiments, this seminar explores play and performance as both subject and method.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How does language become a site of contestation? From the attention to speech on social media, discrimination and exclusion based on how people sound, the realism of ChatGPT, to debates regarding what constitutes proper and improper language in school textbooks, we seem to increasingly talk about how we talk. How do we study language in these spaces, and amidst contestation and social change? Moving between a number of different contexts, this course explores how language becomes a focal point of agreement and disagreement. Topics include the history of code-switching, language identities around the world, AI and chatbots, indigenous revitalization projects, and how language is thoroughly embedded in our understandings of gender, race, and the concept of the social “other.” Throughout the course, we will read some classic linguistic anthropology texts as well as a contemporary literature, that together provide a foundation for how to think about the role of language in our lives.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This year-long course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects in sustainable design. Team projects will continue in the spring of 2023. Class sessions will take place mainly in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate students are encouraged to register for the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is an advanced course in which we will interrogate the boundaries between war, civil conflict and techniques of policing. Students should be prepared to work through texts of an interdisciplinary character.”
Writing Intensive
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Invisible Cities by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The curious little book, a kind of re-imagining of Marco Polo’s travels as a parable about the tensions between description and abstraction, has enchanted countless readers and directly inspired projects in architecture, performance art, and the social sciences. This course embarks in a close reading of Invisible Cities to enliven engagements with urban anthropology.?We will explore the hidden and uncanny in urban worlds as an inroads into discussions of theory and ethnographic inquiry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. For example, how do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? How can we resolve disparate forms of violence such as that of language, environment, and that of the body? What does an anthropological and ethnographic engagement with violence involve? In this course, we will read and discuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about violence and race, and examine the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to violence.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.070.345 are not eligible to take AS.070.645.
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will grapple with pollution as an existential predicament, a permissible effect, and an organizing problem. We will read ethnographic engagements with waste and waste infrastructure, industrial toxicity, fossil fuel production, environmental justice, and environmental health. We will consider pollution’s debt to capitalism and colonialism, and relations between environmental and moral pollution. Working in the manner of both a seminar and a collaborative workshop, we will seek to bring into focus the questions and lessons that arise from readings of diverse places and our own emergent field projects.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How does the idea of a form of life as the mutual absorption of the social and the natural inform anthropological conceptions of the human? Taking the status of the example in both Wittgenstein and Austin, and how it bears on conceptual innovation, this course offers a reading of primary texts from philosophy and anthropology on these issues. Open to advanced undergraduates with permission from the instructor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Pairing classics in the anthropology of religion (e.g. Durkheim, Weber, Turner, Asad) with contemporary writings (ethnography, literature), this course will explore the jagged edge of religious self-making, experience and expression and its intersections with the state, capital and nature.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through this course, first year graduate students in anthropology will prepare for the first-year exam at the end of the spring semester through discussions of assigned texts with anthropology department faculty." Open to First Year Anthropology Graduate Students Only.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The seminar will offer a forum for students to discuss research projects, prepare grant proposals and think further about issues of ethnographic methodology and writing. Open to Anthropology graduate students only.
Writing Intensive
This class is an occasion for speculative anthropology, a chance to reimagine this place (an American city on the Jones Falls river) in a future beyond the bustle of our fossil-fueled present. What culture might people of that distant time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? In this class, we will work together as anthropologists and artists of another time, crafting an inventive and collaborative story about a culture to come, and the material artifacts of a very different collective life. The class will be co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and visual artist Jordan Tierney. We will nurture our imaginations through experiential practices of observing nature, collecting materials, and assembling artifacts. What we build will serve as the core of a spring 2025 local museum exhibition we will plan together.
This seminar will explore how violence and catastrophe are embedded in everyday life in Korea. It will focus on how to interconnect the catastrophic with the everyday, and focus on the level of the household and on forms of state knowledge of the population and the unit called “the family”. This is a research seminar. Students are expected to discuss their research in depth each week and should be prepared to write a significant research paper during the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is the nature of anthropological concepts and what relations do they bear to concepts internal to a society? We invite students to think with key ideas from Hindu and Islamic traditions, asking if anthropological concepts are best seen as abstractions from the particular or as intertwined with ongoing lines of inquiry, say into the nature of the real and continual efforts to test it? Topics in ritual theory, grammar, aesthetics, translation, revelation, luminosity, figuration and the mythological among those to be considered.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the presence of persons and of things in the related genres of ethnography and fiction. Students will be expected to experiment with finding what kinds of struggles for narrative space they can detect with regard to persons,, characters, and things in the texts they read.
Writing Intensive
Our present is said to be rife with more rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation than ever before. Is this moment so different from previous, historical moments of crisis? Haven't these modes of expression always been present, albeit at the margins of the political order? What does it say about knowledge to have multiple “regimes of truth” (Foucault)? How does a new media landscape based in algorithmic modularity, and particularly social media, change the set up from an old analogue media economy? This course, co-taught by an, a literary theorist, and a media theorist, aims to provide a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives to help us examine the current state of reality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We will do a close reading of selected texts of Foucault to track the concepts of power, subjectivity, government, and care of the self.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course we will engage classical texts from the anthropological archives and explore debates and contemporary salience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The relationship between speakers, communities, and forms of language-in-use (ritual, everyday life, oral literature) can only partly be captured by conceptions of language as a sign system. In this course, we will review structuralist approaches most closely identified with semiotics and move on to explore the concept of “presence” and its explanatory potential for anthropological attempts in understanding language.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the anthropological theories of exchange and circulation, both within and beyond the human communities. We explore how intersecting patterns of material flow—fuel, food, cash, gas, heat, or rain—nourish social relations, and give rise to certain ethical stances and political struggles. Course material will bridge classic work on gifts, alienation, and kinship with contemporary accounts of extractivism, climate change, toxicity, and infrastructure.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Readings in Anthropology is a required course for first year graduate students. However, this course does not present a stable canon of anthropology, nor does it assume that anthropological knowledge is delimited by national boundaries. This course is designed for students to engage the crosscurrents in disciplines and thinking that underlie anthropological knowledge. It will introduce so-called canonical works in order to engage in close and critical reading of these texts. In this course, we will look closely at conceptions and descriptions of kinship in light of a history of anthropological knowledge marked by colonial power and authority. How are certain forms of relating made to disappear within the anthropological archive? How do we read such texts to elucidate the traces of lives in the recesses of the text? How has new kinship literatures repositioned the study of family and kinship relations. This course will take us through classic anthropological thought in social anthropology and biological anthropology, as well as historical studies of kinship.
This course is open to anthropology graduate students only and is to be run on a workshopmodel. It is to help those students writing their regional essay for the comprehensive exams toacquire expertise in regional debates and literature relevant to their field research. Our understanding of regions is one of cross-cutting concepts and questions rather than geographical framings alone. After identifying a concept or question, each student will create an annotated bibliography, trace the shape of arguments as they emerge within the readings, create an outline and work toward a draft of the final essay.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Summer Research for doctoral students
Cross Listed Courses
Comparative Thought and Literature
This course offers an introduction to the political forces, cultural values, and social factors which have shaped the history of women’s labor in the US. This course will ask question such as: Why do we place a higher value on work which takes place in the public sphere than work in the home? How do representations of work in literature and popular movies reinforce or subvert gender roles? How have women negotiated gendered and racial boundaries through political action or writing? Focusing on racialized labor, domestic labor, sex work, and factory work, the course will provide an interdisciplinary cultural study of women’s work relevant to our current historical moment. Authors discussed include Saidiya Hartman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, and Kathi Weeks.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
East Asian Studies
You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
First Year Seminars
This course offers an introduction to anthropological perspectives on technology. We begin the human body as our most basic technology, and survey various tradecraft (fire and animal domestication, time-keeping, inscription, sailing) that have adapted us to diverse environments. We then examine the consequences of industrial technology, with its emphasis on automation, standardization and scaling. Finally, we turn to the rise of information technology such as social media, and the ways it has transformed senses of communication and place. Throughout we attend to the complex interplay of technological power and social organization.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What do we mean when we say that something or someone is “religious?” Our First-Year Seminar unpacks this question through a comparative approach, and pays special attention to the ways in which this term has been applied to the study of Islamic cultures and Muslim experience. Through an exploration of the categories of experience, creativity and the individual, we offer a less presumptuous and more open-ended way of imagining the many things it may mean to be religious.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How does language get entangled in our cultural and social understandings? How do we learn to locate a person correctly in a particular social class or ethnicity? This course aims to show the ways in which language is at the center of our daily interactions and our institutions. We will learn conceptual tools to examine the ways in which writers and leaders attempt to persuade their publics in important matters such as climate change, party politics, and religious differences.
Our class will explore how religious and spiritual communities have understood and practiced music as a healing and reparative force, with a particular focus on Sufi spirituality and the living South Asian musical tradition of khayal. Khayal is both a vocal practice and a system of spiritual self-development, and singers are trained to activate the healing that resides in sound. We will take this journey through essays, film, music, meditative listening, and conversations with musicians as well as practitioners of reparative and healing education in the arts. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in an ethnographic project on music and healing with artists and creators in Pakistan.
Distribution Area: Humanities
What do we call "home"? It seems that when we call (something) home, we are all reaching out toward different places or ideas. Is it a haven? a source of identity? the object of longing? a domain of hierarchy and oppression? This course offers a critical examination of the apparently self-evident notion of home. Through the lens of disciplines like anthropology, literature, or socio-legal studies, we will explore home in diverse cultural settings, as realms of care, intimacy, and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination, and gender/racial inequality. Our analysis will extend to a variety of media such as films, podcasts, music, museum exhibits, and personal experiences.
History
An intensive research seminar for graduate students currently conducting research on theories, methodologies, and histories of inter-Asian movements and networks. Instructor permission required.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
To what extent was the body and its depiction a site of contestation, identification, or desire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? If the body in the West since the 1800s is seen to have been shaped by the rise of photography and film, the institutionalization of biomedicine, and the establishment of techniques of surveyance and mechanization, then how was the body represented, disciplined, and experienced in the preceding centuries? In an age of unprecedented encounter with non-European bodies, what did it mean to describe and categorize bodies by race, region, or religion? These are some of the major questions this class seeks to answer, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon insights and methods from anthropology and the history of medicine and history of science to investigate how the body has been represented and imagined in the visual arts. The bodies of the suffering Christ, the female mystic, the dissected cadaver, the punished criminal, and the non-European ‘Other’ will loom large as we work to problematize notions of a normative body, whether in the premodern world or in the contemporary one. While most readings and lectures will concern the body and its representation in the Christian West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, students are encouraged to work on a topic of their choosing from any geographical area 1000-1800 CE for their research papers.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Stelae, altars, colossal heads, thrones, figures, lintels. This course considers how artists created these stone monuments in Mesoamerica, the historical region that encompasses Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and El Salvador. Sculptors meticulously carved stone blocks to shape and then scribes expertly incised their surfaces with hieroglyphic text or iconography. These stone monuments were then transported and moved into position, their physical placements structuring social hierarchy and mediating interactions with the divine. In reviewing recent literature within the fields of art history and material studies, we will explore the full cycle of production for monumental works of art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Interdepartmental
An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in wider cultural, economic, and political processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. In Fall 2024 we will take up the themes of aesthetics, epistemic pluralism, and the question of reality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Islamic Studies
In partnership with the social justice organization Justice for Muslims Collective, this community-engaged course and oral history project will explore how diverse Muslim communities navigated and contested belonging and political and cultural agency amidst state-sponsored violence and national debates on race, gender, citizenship and national security after 9/11 and during the ongoing War on Terror. Through history, ethnography, first-person narratives, film, fiction, and online resources, students will learn about the impact of 9/11 on American Muslim communities. This includes cultural and political resistance to imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia as well as to intersectional inequities within Muslim communities that were intensified in the context of Islamophobia. Students will learn about community activism and organizing from JMC, and complete a participatory action research project with the organization. This project is an oral history archive that will address gaps in the documentation of movement histories when it comes to early organizing against War on Terror policies by Muslim communities and communities racialized or perceived as Muslim. Students will be trained to record stories of resistance among leaders who organized and responded at the local and national-level in the Greater Washington region, to support the building of an archive that will shape a wide variety of future organizing and advocacy efforts.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the pillars of Islam. But Muslims around the world also take part in many other pilgrimages, from the massive annual Shi’a pilgrimage to Karbala to the smaller ziyarat “visits” to Sufi saint shrines, to travel to centers of Islamic learning, to pilgrimage to isolated natural features like mountains, trees, valleys. What are the theologies that propel the act of travel in Islam? How are cities, architectures, economies shaped by these cultures? And how are these traditions affected by the wars and colonial projects that plague many Muslim-majority countries in the contemporary world? Readings in this course will draw from anthropology, philosophy, Islamic interpretive texts (tafsir), and travelogues.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course invites students to take the perspective of gender and sexuality on health and medicine. In this course, we do not see gender and sexuality as a separate domain of health. Instead, we will learn how a gender perspective is in fact crucial for critically exposing the ways in which medicine is interpenetrated by social life and by law. For example, what technologies and discourses constitute “the normal”? How is sexuality braided into disease surveillance? How do we understand the lawfare on the terrain of reproductive rights? What aspects of disease are suppressed in dominant forms of knowledge production, due to the undervaluation of gendered forms of experience? We will take cases involving HIV/AIDS; reproductive justice and rights; poverty, marginality and queer kinship; and household patterns of care.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Before they are ever marketed or consumed, therapeutic resources must first be made. “Pharmaceutical manufacturing” today may conjure the sterile corporate lab, but such antiseptic images obscure the contested spaces – fields, forests, farms, factories, and more – worldwide where medicinal ingredients often begin their lives. This course therefore historicizes and contextualizes the development of global corporate medicine by examining the wide range of ways therapeutic resources (plants, animals, minerals, molecules, compounds) have been prepared and produced in different modern contexts. Students will engage with material from history, anthropology, science & technology studies (STS), and art and music to examine how medicine-making operates across cultures and time periods, as well as becomes integral to socio-political processes like social hierarchization, colonial expansion and anti-colonial struggle, and industrial development. By asking who can make medicines, with what, when, how, and where, this course offers interdisciplinary analytical toolkits to understand therapeutic substances as highly-contested things integral to the exercise of power, with profound effects on the world beyond the body.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
The word for “medicine” in Malagasy, fanafody, can also mean “charm” or “magic.” This seminar uses that linguistic flexibility as a point of departure to explore practices for bodily healing and protection amid broader processes of social transformation, primarily in 20th- and 21st-century East Africa and the western Indian Ocean. How is the medical magical? How is the magical medical? How have separations between magic and medicine been erected, maintained, or questioned? From the role of faith healers to the region's experience of new "miracle drugs," class materials will integrate anthropology, history, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine various permutations of the magic/medicine duality over time. Topics will include facets of traditional medicine; encounters between indigenous and imported healing systems; medical pluralism; colonial and postcolonial conflicts; the rise of humanitarian global health; epidemic and pandemic politics; ritual and religious processes; and the roles of identity, inequality, and empire in healing and protection practices. Grounded in Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, this course will also use magic/medicine to consider the region’s transcontinental and transoceanic connections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Can care exist in a space of punishment? Institutions of incarceration are inherently spaces of violence and social control and, in the U.S.’s current context of mass incarceration, racial oppression. Yet prisons, jails, and detention centers are required to provide individuals access to health care. How can we understand this convergence of care for the body and psyche with multiple forms of carceral violence? This course will examine modes of health and health care inside institutions of incarceration as they are situated within broader socio-political contexts that shape society’s over-reliance on incarceration as a means of social and racialized control. Drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, legal theory, critical race studies, and public health, the course will explore the everyday realities inside institutions of incarceration as they relate to suffering and care and how those are connected to policies and processes of subjugation outside the institutions’ walls. Case studies for examining these relationships include pregnancy, COVID-19, addiction, and mental illness behind bars. Students will engage with concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, carceral and anti-carceral feminism, theories of care, medical abolition, and dual loyalty. While the course will primarily focus on the U.S. context, we will also draw comparisons to non-U.S. settings. Throughout the course we will seek to understand how institutions of incarceration are not, as popularly understood, isolated places “elsewhere,” but implicitly porous with so-called free society—and therefore as exemplars for understanding the connections among health, inequality, and state institutions.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
Beetles, fleas, bees, ants, ticks, butterflies: as the earth’s most abundant animals, insects affect our lives in countless ways. In this seminar, we will explore the diverse world of insects and other arthropods and analyze their appearance in philosophy, literature, and the sciences. Reading our way from John Donne’s “The Flea” and Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia” to Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees,” Uexküll’s biosemiotics, and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” we will ask how concepts and stories of insects reflect and shape the ways we imagine our ecological milieus. We will look more closely at how entomological imaginaries evolved over time and pursue lines of inquiry that will shed new light on human interactions with the environment, politics, and cultural diversity. This course covers a wide range of sources from different European languages (all made available in English translations) and is writing intensive.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Humanists possess a reservoir of scholarly abilities that prime them for contributing to debates well beyond the academy. This semester-long workshop will introduce graduate students to the basics of writing for such broad audience. Each session will be organized around particular topics in public humanities writing, including the pitching, writing, editing, and publishing processes of newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. We will also consider the forms of writing that most allow scholars to draw from their academic training and research: reviews, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and profiles. Throughout the course we will see how the interdisciplinarity, comparativism, and multilingualism of fields from across the humanities can be helpful for reaching wide audiences. Beyond the nuts and bolts of getting started in so-called “public” writing, this course aspires to teach graduate students how to combine quality writing with academic knowledge, scholarly analysis with a general intellectual readership—and, ultimately, make academic knowledge a public good. Taught in English.
Prerequisite(s): Students who took AS.215.748 are not eligible to take AS.215.718.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Near Eastern Studies
A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Childbirth is an event that is highly cultural, and is accompanied by gestures and beliefs that say a lot about the society in which they can be observed. This class will be based on Ancient Egyptian texts (translated), images and objects related to beliefs and practices surrounding pregnancy, birth-giving and the first moments of human life. We will discover the Egyptian views on procreation, the objects, the spells and the formulas used to protect pregnancy and childbirth – one of the most dangerous moments in a woman’s life –, the divine entities invoked, the reactions caused by non-ordinary births (for example, twins), and the purification rites that punctuate the post-partum period. Finally, we will see that the first biological birth is a model on which many beliefs about life after death are based. Several guest researchers will present birth and childbirth in other ancient societies in order to broaden the discussion and establish comparisons.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
One of the most significant transformations in human history was the “urban revolution” in which cities, writing, and social classes formed for the first time. In this course, we compare five areas where this development occurred: China, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, and Mesoamerica (Mexico/Guatemala/Honduras/Belize). In each region, we review the physical setting, the archaeological and textual evidence, and the theories advanced to explain the rise (and eventual collapse) of these complex societies.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
The ancient Egyptians played many games, as we do today. Board games, ball games, games of skill, etc., were not only part of daily life, but also had a role to play in religious practices and beliefs. Although the rules of the games are largely unknown to us, archaeological objects, funerary images, and texts help us to better understand their roles and meanings in ancient Egyptian culture. These various sources also show how games reflect some facets of the organization of the society, and reveal how the ancient Egyptians perceived some aspects of their world - social hierarchy, gender division, representation of death, relationship to chance/fate/divine will, etc. This course will present the evolution of games and play in Ancient Egypt from the 4th millennium B.C., with the first board game discovered in the tomb of a woman, through those deposited in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and up to the Roman period, with the games engraved on the ground by soldiers in the fortresses of the Eastern Desert. Particular attention will be paid to the travels of the games - Egyptian games played outside of Egypt and games of foreign origin played inside Egypt - because they allow for a better understanding of the intercultural connections that were established in between Egypt, Nubia, the Near East in general and the Mediterranean world. By replacing the games in their archaeological, historical and cultural contexts, the course is also intended as an original introduction to the civilization of ancient Egypt.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The ancient Egyptians played many games, as we do today. Board games, ball games, games of skill, etc., were not only part of daily life, but also had a role to play in religious practices and beliefs. Although the rules of the games are largely unknown to us, archaeological objects, funerary images, and texts help us to better understand their roles and meanings in ancient Egyptian culture. These various sources also show how games reflect some facets of the organization of the society, and reveal how the ancient Egyptians perceived some aspects of their world - social hierarchy, gender division, representation of death, relationship to chance/fate/divine will, etc. This course will present the evolution of games and play in Ancient Egypt from the 4th millennium B.C., with the first board game discovered in the tomb of a woman, through those deposited in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and up to the Roman period, with the games engraved on the ground by soldiers in the fortresses of the Eastern Desert. Particular attention will be paid to the travels of the games - Egyptian games played outside of Egypt and games of foreign origin played inside Egypt - because they allow for a better understanding of the intercultural connections that were established in between Egypt, Nubia, the Near East in general and the Mediterranean world. By replacing the games in their archaeological, historical and cultural contexts, the course is also intended as an original introduction to the civilization of ancient Egypt.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Program in Museums and Society
We explore the possible futures of cultural heritage and museums in times of accelerating climate change, pandemics, armed conflict and political and social turmoil by examining past and contemporary events.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Sociology
Today, Islamic finance is a global industry comprising nearly $3 trillion in assets, with hubs from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai to London. But half a century ago, nothing called “Islamic finance” existed. So where did Islamic finance come from? Why is it growing so fast? And what does it mean for finance to be Islamic? We discuss the ban on usury in Islam and other religious and philosophical traditions, finance in early and medieval Islamic societies, petrodollars and the birth of Islamic banking in the 1970s, the rise of Islamic capital markets since 2000, contemporary shariah-compliant financial structures, and the constitution of piety through financial practice.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
This course invites students to take the perspectives of women, gender and sexuality studies in the study of illness and disease. The course asks: What difference do such perspectives make in the study of disease? Are ways of describing and responding to illness and suffering made available for us to rethink the experience of affliction as such? The course will invite students to consider disease, illness, and suffering as embedded within social worlds and as sites where institutions, medical knowledge, and intimacy are entangled. We will explore topics including: the gender politics of asylum, displacement and refugeehood; the clustering of violence and illness in neighborhoods marked by chronic exposure to police violence; the counter-politics of care in the context of claims to reproductive justice; the politics of the population and the household decision-making in relation to scarcity; the rethinking of the clinical encounter as it is criss-crossed by law in cases of sexual violence.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course will encourage encounters with a number of concepts from a critical gendered perspective, including: sameness/difference, identity politics, race/gender, loyalty, security, queer ethics, and queerness in media.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course develops an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to introduce students to ecofeminism through a special focus on its inflections in non-western contexts. Through class discussions and sustained writing engagement, we will develop an understanding of the history of ecofeminism, including theoretical debates linking gender perspectives with political mobilization, as well as ecofeminism's enduring influence on new intellectual and political movements.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
While many recognize Zora Neale Hurston’s creative literary work, her methodological innovations are often overshadowed. This course will examine Hurston’s contributions to theorizing the African diaspora and creative use of ethnography.Dr. Amarilys Estrella, the 2020-2021 ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoc, will teach this course. For more info on Dr. Estrella, see https://history.jhu.edu/directory/amarilys-estrella/
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)