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Anthropology

Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

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    • Admission and Aid
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        • Financial Aid
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      • Discrimination and Harassment Policy and Procedures
      • Equal Opportunity and Title IX Notice
      • Sexual Misconduct Policy and Procedures
    • Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities
      • Academic Grievance Policy: Students and Postdoctoral Fellows
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  • Bloomberg School of Public Health
    • Academic Calendar
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    • CEPH Requirements
    • Departments
      • Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
        • Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, MHS
        • Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, ScM
        • Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Biostatistics
        • Biostatistics, MHS
        • Biostatistics, ScM
        • Biostatistics, PhD
      • Department of Environmental Health and Engineering
        • Environmental Health, MHS
        • Environmental Health, SCM
        • Toxicology for Human Risk Assessment, MS
        • Environmental Health, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Epidemiology
        • Epidemiology, MHS
        • Epidemiology, ScM
        • Epidemiology, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Health, Behavior and Society
        • Health Education and Health Communication, MSPH
        • Genetic Counseling, ScM
        • Health, Behavior, and Society, MHS
        • Social and Behavioral Sciences, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Health Policy and Management
        • Health Administration, MHA
        • Health Economics and Outcomes Research, MHS
        • Health Finance and Management, MHS
        • Health Policy, MSPH
        • Health Policy and Management, PhD
        • Health Policy and Management, DrPH (Tsinghua)
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of International Health
        • Global Health Economics, MHS
        • International Health, MSPH
        • International Health, MSPH, Human Nutrition-​Dietitian
        • International Health, MA/​MSPH
        • International Health, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Mental Health
        • Mental Health, MHS
        • Mental Health, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology
        • Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology, MHS
        • Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology, ScM
        • Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, MHS
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, MHS Online
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, MSPH
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, PhD
      • Doctor of Public Health (DrPH)
      • Graduate Training Programs in Clinical Investigation
        • Clinical Investigation, MHS
        • Clinical Investigation, PhD
        • Clinical Investigation, ScM
      • Master of Arts in Public Health Biology
      • Master of Bioethics
      • Master of Public Health Program
        • DNP/​MPH
        • DVM/​MPH
        • JD/​MPH
        • LLM/​MPH
        • MBA/​MPH with China Europe International Business School
        • MD/​MPH
        • MPH/​MBA
        • MSW/​MPH
      • MAS-​Office
        • Master of Applied Science in Humanitarian Health
        • Master of Applied Science in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality
        • Master of Applied Science in Population Health Management
        • Master of Applied Science in Spatial Analysis for Public Health
      • Bachelor's/​Master's Degrees
      • MD/​PhD
      • Residency Programs
        • General Preventive Medicine Residency Program
        • Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency
    • Certificates
      • Adolescent Health, Certificate
      • Bioethics, Certificate
      • Climate and Health, Certificate
      • Clinical Trials, Certificate
      • Community-​Based Public Health, Certificate
      • Demographic Methods, Certificate
      • Environmental and Occupational Health, Certificate
      • Epidemiology for Public Health Professionals, Certificate
      • Evaluation: International Health Programs, Certificate
      • Food Systems, the Environment &​ Public Health, Certificate
      • Gender and Health, Certificate
      • Gerontology, Certificate
      • Global Digital Health, Certificate
      • Global Health, Certificate
      • Global Health Practice, Certificate
      • Health and Human Rights, Certificate
      • Health Communication, Certificate
      • Health Disparities and Health Inequality, Certificate
      • Health Education, Certificate
      • Health Finance and Management, Certificate
      • Healthcare Epidemiology and Infection Prevention and Control, Certificate
      • Humane Sciences and Toxicology Policy, Certificate
      • Humanitarian Health, Certificate
      • Implementation Science and Research Practice, Certificate
      • Injury and Violence Prevention, Certificate
      • Leadership for Public Health and Healthcare, Certificate
      • Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Public Health, Certificate
      • Maternal and Child Health, Certificate
      • Mental Health Policy, Economics and Services, Certificate
      • Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, Certificate
      • Population and Health, Certificate
      • Population Health Management, Certificate
      • Product Stewardship for Sustainability, Certificate
      • Public Health Advocacy, Certificate
      • Public Health Economics, Certificate
      • Public Health Informatics, Certificate
      • Public Health Preparedness, Certificate
      • Public Health Training Certificate for American Indian Health Professionals
      • Public Mental Health Research, Certificate
      • Quality, Patient Safety, and Outcomes Research, Certificate
      • Rigor, Reproducibility and Responsibility in Scientific Practice, Certificate
      • Risk Sciences and Public Policy, Certificate
      • Social Epidemiology, Certificate
      • Spatial Analysis for Public Health, Certificate
      • Training Certificate in Public Health
      • Tropical Medicine, Certificate
      • Vaccine Science and Policy, Certificate
    • Policies
      • Academic
        • Academic Ethics Code
        • Compliance Line
        • Grade Appeal Policy
        • Grading System
        • Graduation Policy
        • Interdivisional Registration
        • Multi-​Term Course Policy
        • Post-​Doctoral Fellow Student Status
        • Student Grievance Policy
        • Voluntary Leave of Absence Policy
      • Research
        • Animal Research
        • Human Subjects Research
        • Worker's Compensation
  • Carey Business School
    • Admission
      • Master’s Programs
      • Certificate Programs
      • Graduate Degree Requirements
      • International Student Admission Policy
      • Verification of Credentials
      • Other Admission Policies
    • Degrees and Certificates
      • Artificial Intelligence for Business, Graduate Certificate
      • Business Administration (Flexible), MBA
      • Business Administration (Full Time), MBA
      • Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, Master of Science
      • Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Business Analytics and Risk Management, Graduate Certificate
      • Design Leadership, MBA/​MA Dual Degree
      • Digital Marketing, Graduate Certificate
      • Entrepreneurial Marketing, Graduate Certificate
      • Finance (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Finance, Master of Science
      • Financial Management, Graduate Certificate
      • Financial Management, Graduate Certificate, Investments, Graduate Certificate, Applied Economics, MS
      • Health Care Management (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Health Care Management, Master of Science
      • Healthcare Management, Innovation, and Technology, Graduate Certificate
      • Information Systems and Artificial Intelligence for Business, Master of Science
      • Information Systems and Artificial Intelligence for Business (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Investments, Graduate Certificate
      • Leadership Development Program, Graduate Certificate
      • Marketing (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Marketing, Master of Science
      • MBA/​Applied Economics, MS Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Biotechnology, MS Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Communication, MA Dual Degree
      • MBA/​DNP Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Government, MA Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Healthcare Organizational Leadership, MSN Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Health Care Management, MS Dual Degree
      • MBA/​JD Dual Degree
      • MBA/​MA in International Relations
      • MBA/​MD Dual Degree
      • MBA/​MPH Dual Degree
      • Real Estate and Infrastructure (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Real Estate and Infrastructure, Master of Science
      • Business, Minor
    • Policies and Resources
      • Academic Calendar
      • Academic Ethics Policy
      • Academic Progress and Standards
      • Changing Degree Program
      • Grading Policy
      • Graduation
      • Attendance Policy
      • Leave of Absence
      • Registration
      • Student Accounts
      • Transfer of Graduate Credit
      • Waiver Exams
  • Peabody Institute
    • General Information, Procedures and Regulations
      • Introduction and Nomenclature
      • Mission
      • Accreditation
      • Links
      • Honor Societies
    • Procedural Information
      • Applicability
      • Studio Assignments
      • Course Numbering
      • Large Ensemble Participation
      • Competitions
      • Recitals
      • Academic Advising
      • Inter-​Institutional Academic Arrangements
      • Study Abroad Program
      • Outside Instruction and Public Performance
    • Academic Regulations
      • Applicability
      • Academic Code of Conduct
      • Program Classification, Status, and Credit Limits
      • Sources of Credit
      • Grading System and Regulations
      • Dean's List Criteria
      • Academic Standing
      • Registration Regulations
      • Attendance and Absences
      • Interruption of Degree Work
      • Graduation Eligibility
    • Degree and Diploma Programs
      • Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance (BFA)
      • Bachelor of Music (BM)
        • Curricula
          • Bachelor of Music in Composition
          • Bachelor of Music in Hip Hop
          • Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance
          • Bachelor of Music in Music Education
          • Bachelor of Music in Music for New Media
          • Bachelor of Music in Performance
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Computer Music
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Guitar
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Harpsichord
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Historical Performance
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Orchestral Instruments
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Organ
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Piano
            • Bachelor of Music in Performance -​ Voice
          • Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts &​ Sciences
        • Minors
          • Business of Music, Minor
          • Directed Studies, Minor
          • Historical Performance, Minor
          • Historical Performance: Voice, Minor
          • Liberal Arts, Minor
          • Music Theory, Minor
          • Musicology, Minor
        • Combined Degree Programs
          • Peabody-​Homewood Double Degree Program
        • Accelerated Graduate Degrees
          • Five-​Year BM/​MM Program
          • Five-​Year BMRA/​MA Program
            • Five-​Year BM/​MA: Music for New Media Variant
      • Master of Music (MM)
        • Master of Music in Composition
        • Master of Music in Film and Game Scoring
        • Master of Music: Performance
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Choral Conducting specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Computer Music specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Guitar specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Harpsichord specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Historical Performance Instruments specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Historical Performance Voice specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Jazz specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Orchestral Conducting specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Orchestral Instruments specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Organ specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Piano specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Wind Conducting specialization
          • Master of Music, Performance -​ Voice specialization
        • Master of Music: Academic Majors
          • Performance, Master of Music -​ Pedagogy emphasis
          • Music Education, Master of Music
          • Musicology, Master of Music
          • Music Theory Pedagogy, Master of Music
        • Master of Music: Low Residency
      • Master of Arts (MA)
        • Audio Sciences: Acoustics, Master of Arts
          • Five-​Year BM/​MA Program Requirements: Acoustics
        • Audio Sciences: Recording Arts and Sciences, Master of Arts
          • Five-​Year BM/​MA Program Requirements: Recording Arts
      • Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)
        • Composition, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Guitar specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Historical Performance Instruments specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Orchestral Conducting specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Orchestral Instruments specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Organ specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Piano specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Voice specialization
        • Performance, Doctor of Musical Arts -​ Wind Conducting specialization
      • Performer’s Certificate (PC)
        • Guitar, Performer's Certificate
        • Orchestral Instruments, Performer's Certificate
        • Organ, Performer's Certificate
        • Piano, Performer's Certificate
        • Voice, Performer's Certificate
      • Graduate Performance Diploma (GPD)
      • Artist’s Diploma (AD)
    • Extension Study
      • Music Education Certification -​ Instrumental
      • Music Education Certification -​ Vocal
  • Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
    • Degrees and Certificates
      • International Studies, Doctor of Philosophy
      • International Affairs, Doctor of
      • European Public Policy, Master of Arts
      • Global Policy, Master of Arts
      • Global Risk, Master of Arts (On-​site)
      • Global Risk, Master of Arts (Online)
      • International Affairs, Master of Arts
      • International Economics and Finance, Master of Arts
      • International Relations, Master of Arts
      • International Studies, Master of Arts
      • International Public Policy, Master of
      • Strategy, Cybersecurity, and Intelligence, Master of Arts
      • Sustainable Energy, Master of Arts (Online)
      • Chinese and American Studies, Hopkins-​Nanjing Center Certificate
      • Dual Degrees and Exchange Programs
      • Graduate Certificates
      • International Studies, Diploma
    • Policies and Resources
      • Academic Integrity
      • Academic Policies and Resources
      • Student Life
    • School Leadership and Key Contacts
  • School of Education
    • Academic and Student Policies
      • Academic and Student Conduct Policies
      • Academic Standards
      • Grading System and Academic Records
      • Grievances and Complaints
    • Admission
    • Graduation
    • Programs
      • Doctoral Programs
        • Education (Online), EdD
        • Education, PhD
      • Master's Programs
        • Counseling, Master of Science
        • Education, Master of Science
          • Education, Master of Science – Digital Age Learning and Educational Technology (Online)
          • Education, Master of Science -​ Educational Studies
          • Education, Master of Science -​ Gifted Education
          • Education, Master of Science -​ School Administration and Supervision
        • Education Policy, Master of Science
        • Health Professions (Online), Master of Education
        • Learning, Design, and Technology, Master of Education
        • Special Education, Master of Science
        • Teaching Professionals, Master of Education
      • Post Master's Certificates
        • Applied Behavior Analysis, Post–Master’s Certificate
        • Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Post–Master’s Certificate
        • Evidence-​Based Teaching in the Health Professions, Post–Master’s Certificate
      • Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study
        • Counseling, Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study
      • Graduate Certificates
        • Education of Students with Autism and Other Pervasive Developmental Disorders, Graduate Certificate
        • Educational Leadership for Independent Schools, Graduate Certificate
        • Gifted Education, Graduate Certificate
        • Leadership in Technology Integration (Online), Graduate Certificate
        • Mathematics/​STEM Instructional Leader (PreK-​6) (Online), Graduate Certificates
        • Mind, Brain and Teaching (Online), Graduate Certificate
        • School Administration and Supervision, Graduate Certificate
        • Urban Education, Graduate Certificate
    • Centers &​ Institutes
    • Scholarships
    • State Authorization of Distance Education (NC-​SARA)
  • School of Medicine
    • General Information
      • Conduct in Teacher/​Learner Relationships (Learner Treatment Policy)
      • Lectureships and Visiting Professorships
      • Loan Funds
      • Medical Student Advising
      • Named Professorships
      • Office of Medical Student Affairs
      • Scholarships
      • Student Research Scholarships and Awards
      • Tuition
      • Tuition and Other Fees
      • Young Investigators’ Day
    • Policies
    • Graduate Programs
      • Anatomy Education, MS
      • Applied Health Sciences Informatics, MS
      • Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, PhD
      • Biological Chemistry, PhD
      • Biomedical Engineering, PhD
      • Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry, PhD/​Molecular Biophysics, PhD
      • Cellular and Molecular Medicine, MS
      • Cellular and Molecular Medicine, PhD
      • Cellular and Molecular Physiology, PhD
      • Clinical Anaplastology, MS
      • Clinical Informatics, Post-​Baccalaureate Certificate
      • Cross-​Disciplinary Program in Graduate Biomedical Sciences, PhD
      • Functional Anatomy and Evolution, PhD
      • Health Sciences Informatics, MS
      • Health Sciences Informatics, PhD
      • History of Medicine, MA (On-​site)
      • History of Medicine, MA (Online)
      • History of Medicine, PhD
      • History of Medicine, Post-​Baccalaureate Certificate (Online)
      • Human Genetics and Genomics, PhD
      • Immunology, PhD
      • Medical and Biological Illustration, MA
      • Medical Physics, MS
      • Medical Physics, PhD
      • Medical Physics, Post-​Baccalaureate Certificate
      • Neuroscience, PhD
      • Pathobiology, PhD
      • Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, PhD
    • Medical Program
      • Doctor of Medicine, MD
      • MD-​MBA, Combined Degree
      • MD-​PhD, Combined Degree
      • Subject Areas
        • Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine
        • Biological Chemistry
        • Biomedical Engineering
        • Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry
        • Cell Biology
        • Department of Genetic Medicine
        • Dermatology
        • Emergency Medicine
        • Epidemiology
        • Functional Anatomy and Evolution
        • Gynecology and Obstetrics
        • Health Sciences Informatics
        • History of Medicine
        • Medicine
        • Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology
        • Molecular Biology and Genetics
        • Multi-​Department Courses
        • Neurology
        • Neuroscience
        • Oncology
        • Ophthalmology
        • Pathology
        • Pediatrics
        • Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences
        • Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
        • Physiology
        • Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
        • Public Health
        • Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences
        • Radiology and Radiological Science
        • Surgery
    • Postdoctoral Fellows
  • School of Nursing
    • Admission
    • Advising
    • Certificates
      • Healthcare Organizational Leadership, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Nursing Education, Post-​Master's Certificate
      • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Post-​Master's Certificate
    • Doctoral Degrees
      • Doctor of Nursing Practice, Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Critical Care Clinical Nurse Specialist, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Health Clinical Nurse Specialist, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Family Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Nurse Anesthesia, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Pediatric Critical Care Clinical Nurse Specialist, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Pediatric Dual Primary/​Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Pediatric Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
      • Doctor of Nursing Practice: Executive Track
      • Nursing, Doctor of Philosophy
      • Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP): Advanced Practice Track/​Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing (PhD) Dual Degree
    • Dual Degrees
      • DNP Executive/​MBA Dual Degree
      • DNP Executive/​MPH Dual Degree
      • Healthcare Organizational Leadership, MSN/​MBA, Dual Degree
    • Financial Aid
    • Master's Degrees
      • Entry into Nursing, Master of Science in Nursing
      • Healthcare Organizational Leadership Track, Master of Science in Nursing
    • Online Prerequisites for Health Professions
    • Policies
      • Academic Integrity Policy
      • Academic Standards for Progression
      • Administrative Leave
      • Absence and Attendance Policy
      • Canvas and SON IT Help
      • Clinical Placements
      • Clinical Warnings
      • Complaint/​Grievance Policy
      • Compliance
      • Course Policies
      • Criminal Conduct/​Background Check Policies
      • Drug Testing Policy
      • Email Policy
      • Examination Policy
      • Grading Policy
      • Health Insurance for Students
      • Incomplete Coursework
      • Independent Study Policy
      • Leave of Absence
      • Letters of Recommendation
      • NCLEX
      • Non-​Degree-​Seeking Students
      • Notification of Missed Clinical Time
      • Pet Guidelines
      • Printing and Copying
      • Professional Attire Policy
      • Professional Ethics Policy
      • Registration Policies and Procedures
      • Religious Observance Attendance Policy
      • Social Media Guidelines
      • Student Code of Conduct
      • Technical Standards for Admission and Graduation
      • Transcripts and Enrollment Verifications
      • Transfer of Graduate Credit
      • Withdrawal Policy
    • Student Accounts
    • Tuition and Fees
  • Whiting School of Engineering
    • Full-​time, On-​campus Undergraduate and Graduate Programs (Homewood)
      • Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences &​ Whiting School of Engineering Full-​Time, On-​Campus Undergraduate and Graduate Policies
      • Departments, Program Requirements, and Courses
        • Applied Mathematics and Statistics
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Bachelor of Science
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Minor
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, PhD
          • Data Science, Master of Science
          • Financial Mathematics, Master of Science in Engineering
        • Biomedical Engineering
          • Bioengineering Innovation and Design, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Biomedical Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Biomedical Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Biomedical Engineering, PhD through the School of Medicine
        • Center for Leadership Education
          • Accounting and Financial Management, Minor
          • Engineering Management, Master of Science
          • Global Innovation and Leadership Through Engineering, Master of Science
          • Leadership Studies, Minor
          • Marketing and Communications, Minor
          • Professional Communication Program
          • Professional Development Program
          • W.P. Carey Entrepreneurship and Management, Minor
        • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
          • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, PhD
        • Civil &​ Systems Engineering
          • Civil Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Civil Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering (MSE)
          • Civil Engineering, Minor
          • Civil and Systems Engineering, PhD
          • Systems Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Systems Engineering, Master of Science
          • Systems Engineering, Minor
        • Computational Medicine
          • Computational Medicine, Minor
        • Computer Science
          • Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts
          • Computer Science, Bachelor of Science
          • Computer Science, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Computer Science, Minor
          • Computer Science, PhD
        • Doctor of Engineering
          • Engineering, Doctor of Engineering
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering
          • Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Electrical and Computer Engineering, PhD
          • Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Energy, Minor
        • Environmental Health and Engineering
          • Engineering for Sustainable Development, Minor
          • Environmental Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Environmental Engineering, Minor
          • Environmental Sciences, Minor
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, Master of Arts
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, Master of Science
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, PhD
          • Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, Master of Science
        • General Engineering
          • General Engineering, Bachelor of Arts
        • Information Security Institute
          • Security Informatics, Master of Science
          • Security Informatics, Master of Science/​Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Master of Science in Engineering Dual Master's Program
          • Security Informatics, Master of Science/​Computer Science, Master of Science in Engineering Dual Master's Program
        • Materials Science and Engineering
          • Materials Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Materials Science and Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Materials Science and Engineering, PhD
        • Mechanical Engineering
          • Engineering Mechanics, Bachelor of Science
          • Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Mechanical Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Mechanical Engineering, PhD
        • NanoBioTechnology
        • Robotics and Computational Sensing
          • Computer Integrated Surgery, Minor
          • Robotics, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Robotics, Minor
      • Multi-​School Programs of Study
        • Business, Minor
        • Peabody-​Homewood Double Degree Program
        • Space Science and Engineering
    • Part-​Time, Online Graduate Programs (Engineering for Professionals)
      • Academic Policies
        • Academic Calendar
        • Academic Regulations
        • Registration Policies
        • Tuition and Fees
      • Admission Requirements
      • Applied and Computational Mathematics
        • Applied and Computational Mathematics, Graduate Certificate
        • Applied and Computational Mathematics, Master of Science
        • Applied and Computational Mathematics, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Applied Biomedical Engineering
        • Applied Biomedical Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Applied Biomedical Engineering, Master of Science
        • Applied Biomedical Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Applied Physics
        • Applied Physics, Master of Science
        • Applied Physics, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Artificial Intelligence
        • Artificial Intelligence, Graduate Certificate
        • Artificial Intelligence, Master of Science
      • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
        • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Master of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
      • Civil Engineering
        • Civil Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Civil Engineering, Master of Civil Engineering
      • Computer Science
        • Computer Science, Graduate Certificate
        • Computer Science, Master of Science
        • Computer Science, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Cybersecurity
        • Cybersecurity, Graduate Certificate
        • Cybersecurity, Master of Science
        • Cybersecurity, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Data Science
        • Data Science, Graduate Certificate
        • Data Science, Master of Science
        • Data Science, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Electrical and Computer Engineering
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Master of Science
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Engineering Management
        • Engineering Management, Graduate Certificate
        • Engineering Management, Master of Engineering Management
      • Environmental Engineering, Science, Management, and Sustainability Programs
        • Climate Change, Energy, and Environmental Sustainability, Graduate Certificate
        • Climate, Energy, and Environmental Sustainability, Master of Science
        • Environmental Engineering
          • Environmental Engineering, Graduate Certificate
          • Environmental Engineering, Master of Environmental Engineering
          • Environmental Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Environmental Engineering and Science
          • Environmental Engineering and Science, Graduate Certificate
          • Environmental Engineering and Science, Master of Science
          • Environmental Engineering and Science, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Environmental Planning and Management
          • Environmental Planning and Management, Graduate Certificate
          • Environmental Planning and Management, Master of Science
          • Environmental Planning and Management, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Financial Mathematics
        • Financial Mathematics, Master of Science
        • Financial Risk Management, Graduate Certificate
        • Quantitative Portfolio Management, Graduate Certificate
        • Securitization, Graduate Certificate
      • Healthcare Systems Engineering
        • Healthcare Systems Engineering, Master of Science
      • Industrial and Operations Engineering
        • Industrial and Operations Engineering, Master of Science
      • Information Systems Engineering
        • Information Systems Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Information Systems Engineering, Master of Science
        • Information Systems Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Materials Science and Engineering
        • Materials Science and Engineering, Master of Science
      • Mechanical Engineering
        • Mechanical Engineering, Master of Science
        • Mechanical Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
        • Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, Master of Science
      • Robotics and Autonomous Systems
        • Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Master of Science
      • Space Systems Engineering
        • Space Systems Engineering, Master of Science
        • Space Systems Engineering, Post-​Master's Certificate
      • Systems Engineering
        • Systems Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Systems Engineering, Master of Science
        • Systems Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering (ABET-​accredited)
        • Systems Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
  • Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
    • Full-​time, On-​campus Undergraduate and Graduate Programs (Homewood)
      • Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences &​ Whiting School of Engineering Full-​Time, On-​Campus Undergraduate and Graduate Policies
      • Departments, Program Requirements, and Courses
        • Anthropology
          • Anthropology, Bachelor of Arts
          • Anthropology, Minor
          • Anthropology, PhD
        • Archaeology
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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. Department faculty 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 the department have research expertise in the Americas, South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Their 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, department faculty 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 degrees in anthropology (and related fields). Students 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 take ten courses and 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. The department offers an elective 100-level Freshman Seminar that introduces anthropological approaches to a broad range of contemporary issues. Here, instructors 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. The 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, the 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.

Anthropology faculty bring an extraordinary range of personal and professional experiences into the classroom. The department is 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.

Programs

  • Anthropology, Bachelor of Arts
  • Anthropology, Minor
  • Anthropology, PhD

For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/

Courses

On This Page
    • Cross Listed Courses
      • Comparative Thought and Literature
      • East Asian Studies
      • First Year Seminars
      • History
      • History of Art
      • Interdepartmental
      • Islamic Studies
      • Medicine, Science and the Humanities
      • Modern Languages and Literatures
      • Music
      • Near Eastern Studies
      • Program in Museums and Society
      • Sociology
      • Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
AS.070.105.  City Life: Adventures in the Urban Environment.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.118.  Urban Citizenship.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.132.  Invitation to Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.202.  Mapping Communities.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.203.  Anthropology of Mental Illness.  3 Credits.  

Who is the subject of mental illness? This course brings us into the study of mental illness and addiction by considering the relations, institutions, and vocabularies in which illness is embedded. It will bring us into the questions of the normal and the pathological, the shifting line of the normal, the quotidian experiences of madness within the scene of the domestic, and the ways in which mental illness is legitimated or denied by institutions. We will also work towards developing an anthropological perspective on mental health within the context of humanitarian intervention and assistance, global health policies and frameworks.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.208.  Designing a Social Research Project.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.211.  Baltimore's Solidarity Ecosystem.  3 Credits.  

Baltimore is replete with economic experimentation, organizing, and transformation. Learning from/with these experiences and contributing to them is the main aim of this course. It involves a combination of engaged service, collaborative research, reading, and reflection to understand and inform place-based efforts to build equitable urban futures in the city. Sponsored by the JHU Center for Social Concern, the course is co-taught with community organizers to give first-hand exposure to economic conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts. Students will work closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for social justice and urban regeneration. Schedule is flexible to facilitate visits to on-site work and conversations.

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.070.214.  Magic, Science, and Religion.  3 Credits.  

This course explores the intersections and boundaries between magic, science, and religion. Students will examine how these domains of knowledge and practice have been defined, differentiated, and interrelated in various societies. Central questions include: How are the differences between magic, science, and religion consolidated, negotiated, and manifested in everyday life? How do these categories shape worldviews, social structures, and individual experiences? Through case studies, theoretical readings, and hands-on projects, students will gain a nuanced understanding of how humans make meaning and navigate between different ways of knowing and acting in the world.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.218.  South Asia in Film: Faculty Present their Favorite Films.  1 Credit.  

South Asia boasts a rich history of film making of different genres and languages, ranging from commercial to art films. Many have come to be the favorites of the faculty of Hopkins who work on South Asia. In this course each of the faculty teaching this course will introduce a film of their choosing, pairing it with a reading.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.070.221.  Cityness: Anthropology and the Urban Experience.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.223.  Engaging Plants: Human-Plant Relations in Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.227.  Sex, Gender, Culture.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.229.  Introduction to Historical Archaeology.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.239.  Hinduism and Ethics: The Epics.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.241.  African Cities.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.253.  Introduction to Medical Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.267.  Culture, Religion and Politics in Iran.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.273.  Ethnographies.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.281.  Home and Belonging.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.284.  Life and Labor in Toxic Environments: Anthropological Perspectives.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.286.  Reading Gandhi in the Contemporary Moment.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.289.  Family Reconsidered.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.295.  Conflict and Security in a Global World.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.305.  Law after Mass Violence in Latin America.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.309.  Migration and Empire/Imperialism.  3 Credits.  

Given that we inhabit a world after European colonialism, some would argue that empires are an artifact of the past. Yet, imperialism continues to shape our contemporary multipolar world. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will explore topics ranging from transnational anti-colonial worldmaking projects to (post)colonial infrastructures, to the politics of citizenship and race, contested border regimes, and the rise of far-right movements to focus on the modalities of (im)mobility, subject formation, and how difference and belonging within these often-fraught imperial settings have been both defined and defied. We will also attend to non-European imperial varieties and decenter a Eurocentric perspective on migration and empire.SPECIAL NOTE: There will be a $30 lab fee for the course.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.070.310.  Tracing Urban Life.  3 Credits.  

Baltimore is often described as "a city of neighborhoods." But what exactly does this mean? In this class we will use the tools of urban anthropology to disentangle the notion of "neighborhood," inquiring how it is defined by spatial contours, layouts and material histories; and asking about the vibes, experiences, and cultural traits that characterize neighborhoods and distinguish them from one another. We will engage in an on-the ground, hands-on exploration of a local neighborhood to collectively craft a biography of its lived and built environments. First, we will examine how city-wide and local events might leave marks on the experiences of local dwellers and the stories of the urban landscape, and we will use these as entry points for tracing the life of the neighborhood. We will do archival research to learn how the neighborhood has been shaped by power relations as well as resistance, how it has changed through shifts in capital investment, zoning and political decision-making, and flows of populations. Then, we will refresh our skills in various methods of urban ethnography, such as participant observation among local residents and organizations, in-depth interviews, life-stories, kinship charts, and narrative maps, that will allow us to trace individual trajectories as well as the unfolding, in time and space, of buildings and urban areas. Our aim will be to map out variety of affects and dynamics of contemporary urban everyday life.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.317.  Methods.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.319.  The Political Culture of Bangladesh.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.322.  The Politics of Land Rights.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.328.  Ethnographies Of Iran.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.332.  Reverberations Of The Korean War.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.334.  Contemporary Anthropology.  1 Credit.  

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. 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), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.070.336.  Ethnographic Perspectives on Brazil.  3 Credits.  

Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes.  We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.070.636, are not eligible to take AS.070.336.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.337.  Invisible Cities.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.338.  Transnational Migration through the Lens of Kinship and Gender.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.342.  Common Ground: Shared Resources, Social Economies.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.345.  Violence, Race and the Unruly Body.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.350.  Cultures of Surveillance.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.353.  Korean War: Inter Asia, Cold War, and Partition.  3 Credits.  

The Korean War from the dominant U.S. perspective is seen as a “forgotten war”, one that today registers in caricatures of the predicament of the two Koreas. This course will explore the entangled histories of empire in the Korean War. It will seek to shift our understanding of Korean War from a U.S. dominated Cold War perspective to the Inter Asian contexts in which war unfolded. Further, it will examine closely how scholars in Korea and diasporic scholars have engaged an ongoing war and partition and moved beyond ethnonationalist frameworks. As a study of war, we will consider how techniques of punishment and torture came to be justified and refined in specific sites, the role of the Korean War within multiple other wars, such as Vietnam, and in mass atrocity (such as Gwangju Uprising and Massacre) and the figure of the political prisoner and the subject of humanitarianism.

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.355.  Buddhist Modernism.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.356.  Diverse Economies.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.357.  What is Climate Change? Anthropological perspectives from politics to art.  3 Credits.  

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.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.358.  Anthropology of the Archive: The Cold War Politics of Knowledge Production in Asia.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.361.  The Future of Here: An Art and Anthropology Studio.  3 Credits.  

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), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.363.  Religious Freedom and Prisons in America.  3 Credits.  

"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

AS.070.367.  Science and Technology in Africa.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.368.  Law and Infrastructure.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.369.  Media Artist in Residence Jane Jin Kaisen.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.380.  Slumworld: Life in informal Settlements.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.381.  Addiction: An anthropological approach to substance dependence in the U.S..  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.387.  Human Variation: “Race,” Biology, Culture.  3 Credits.  

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: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.402.  Environmental Justice Workshop.  4 Credits.  

The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.

Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)

AS.070.403.  Public Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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)

AS.070.404.  The Idea of Africa.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.406.  Governing Health: Care, Inequality, and the State.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.410.  Households and Crisis.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.419.  Logic of Anthropological Inquiry.  3 Credits.  

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

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.421.  Repair.  3 Credits.  

Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.070.427.  Method and Theory in Biological Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

This course begins with reading the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin’s monumental work that was published some 150 years ago. We then build on this foundation to survey biological anthropology as a Darwinian historical science, with an emphasis on human evolution, variation, and biocultural histories. This allows us to understand how Darwin’s theory was misunderstood and misrepresented within social and scientific circles for more than a century. In the early 1950s, Sherwood Washburn called for a “new physical anthropology.” His approach shifted away from static, descriptive typology towards a dynamic, biocultural history of the human species. Recently, the “biocultural” approach is being revitalized to challenge disciplinary practices that consider the body as either a constructed cultural symbol or a natural anatomical specimen. We conclude with scholars’ creative attempts to decolonize knowledge production within ecologies of beings that are historical, relational, and multiple. This course requires the student to have taken at least one Anthropology course previously.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.428.  The Body Immortal in Yoga and Ayurveda.  3 Credits.  

This course will trace the history of an idea - how to make the human body physically immortal - in two Indian systems of knowledge, Yoga and Ayurveda. The course will follow the development of this idea in both theory and practice in the ancient and medieval Indian world. Beginning with accounts of immortal humans that are found in early Sanskrit literature, the course will move on to the elaboration of yogic practice in the tantric movements and to the refinements to alchemical theory (rasayana-sastra) in Ayurvedic texts. The course will then move to the emergence of postural yoga (ha?ha-yoga) as an independent discipline, which marks a new phase in the pursuit of corporeal immortality. Throughout we will keep track of competing theories of the body - its systems, components, processes, subtle dimensions, channels, centers, layers of physicality, and interactions with breath and spirit - as these form the ground on which to apply bespoke, immortality-creating methods.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.070.433.  Development without Displacement: Sustainable Design Practicum.  4 Credits.  

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)

AS.070.435.  New War/ Civil Conflicts/ Policing.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.466.  Persons and Things in Ethnography and Fiction.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.070.472.  Rumors, Conspiracy Theories And Disinformation.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.497.  Black Feminist Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

Anthropologist Irma McLaurin explains that Black feminist anthropologists are “Black women (first) who do anthropology (second).” Broadly, Black feminism is based on the notion that Black women and their knowledge matter. Being Black and female within a patriarchal white supremacist society subjects Black women to unique experiences that give insight into the many forms that oppression can take. But Black feminisms and Black feminists are not homogenous. There are various political views and disciplinary approaches. Of course, not all Black feminists are academics—there are artists, organizers, and mothers. There are different gender identities and sexualities. What is shared among Black feminists is an emphasis on retrieving and (re)producing Black women’s knowledge, doing activist work, and a commitment to humanism. In this course, we focus on engagements with Black feminism in all subfields of anthropology.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

AS.070.503.  Independent Study.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.504.  Independent Study.  1 - 3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.561.  Senior Essay-Fall.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.562.  Senior Essay - Spring.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

AS.070.602.  Environmental Justice Workshop.  4 Credits.  

The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.

Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.070.603.  Public Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.604.  The Idea of Africa.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.606.  Governing Health: Care, Inequality, and the State.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.607.  Schelling and Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.610.  Households and Crisis.  3 Credits.  

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.070.616.  Proseminar.  3 Credits.  

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.

AS.070.617.  Methods.  3 Credits.  

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.

AS.070.619.  Logic of Anthropological Inquiry.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.620.  Naming and Namelessness.  3 Credits.  

What’s in a name? In this course, we will explore how naming has long been an essential cultural practice, and yet one that has been increasingly highlighted as a site of contestation, revealing naming as an often unsettled and fraught space. From copyright and branding, to the politics of Latinx, deadnaming and doxing, as well classic spaces of kinship and the religious, this course will move among different ethnographic and conceptual spaces in order to understand the histories and lived worlds of naming. We will examine how naming practices allow us to better think about a number of underlying concerns in language itself, from erasure, topic avoidance, and silence, and will consider how naming is bound to category making, of making people and things animate and inanimate. In attending to the deep asymmetries in the power to designate, we also discuss the practice of refusal of names and the force and violence of anonymity and namelessness.

AS.070.621.  Repair.  3 Credits.  

Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.

AS.070.629.  Play, Performance, And Personhood.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.631.  Politics of Language.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.633.  Development without Displacement: Sustainable Design Practicum.  4 Credits.  

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

AS.070.634.  Contemporary Anthropology.  2 Credits.  

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

AS.070.635.  New War/ Civil Conflicts/ Policing.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.636.  Ethnographic Perspectives on Brazil.  3 Credits.  

Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes. We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.070.336, are not eligible to take AS.070.636.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.070.640.  Invisible Cities.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.645.  Violence, Race and the Unruly Body.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.646.  Pollution.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.648.  Wittgenstein and Austin in Anthropological thought.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.656.  Anthropology of Religion.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.657.  First Year Syllabus.  2 Credits.  

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

AS.070.659.  Proposal Writing.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.661.  The Future of Here: An Art and Anthropology Studio.  3 Credits.  

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.070.666.  Persons and Things in Ethnography and Fiction.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.672.  Rumors, Conspiracy Theories And Disinformation.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.673.  Readings of Foucault.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.674.  Readings in Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.676.  Semiotics and its Discontents.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.678.  Ecologies and Economies.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.682.  Readings in Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

In this course we will engage classical and contemporary texts from the anthropological archives and explore conversations and keywords that maintain enduring importance for the discipline. We will approach the history of anthropological thought and practice in a contrapuntal method, dispensing with the notion of texts being connected merely as matters of influence or the competition of ideas. Rather than approach materials as occupying fixed and ossified places in the “canon,” we will invite other habits of reading, of inhabiting texts as sources of intellectual recreation. Writing exercises will encourage playful and creative modes of engagement with older and newer texts.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.070.683.  Readings in Anthropology: Kinship Re-Visited.  3 Credits.  

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.

AS.070.689.  Subject, subjectivity, and the Self: Reading Foucault.  3 Credits.  

This course will focus on how Foucault makes the subject appear in his readings of the archive and the relation between the subject, subjectivity and self-formation. Restrictions: Open to upper level undergraduates with permission of the instructor - please write to veenadas@jhu.edu

Writing Intensive

AS.070.697.  Black Feminist Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

Anthropologist Irma McLaurin explains that Black feminist anthropologists are “Black women (first) who do anthropology (second).” Broadly, Black feminism is based on the notion that Black women and their knowledge matter. Being Black and female within a patriarchal white supremacist society subjects Black women to unique experiences that give insight into the many forms that oppression can take. But Black feminisms and Black feminists are not homogenous. There are various political views and disciplinary approaches. Of course, not all Black feminists are academics—there are artists, organizers, and mothers. There are different gender identities and sexualities. What is shared among Black feminists is an emphasis on retrieving and (re)producing Black women’s knowledge, doing activist work, and a commitment to humanism. In this course, we focus on engagements with Black feminism in all subfields of anthropology.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.070.698.  Defining Region.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.070.801.  Dissertation Research.  5 - 10 Credits.  
AS.070.802.  Dissertation Research.  5 - 10 Credits.  
AS.070.803.  Summer Research.  9 Credits.  

Summer Research for doctoral students

AS.070.810.  TA Practicum Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

Course for Anthropology graduate students who are TAing as part of their academic training.

AS.070.852.  Readings in Political Theology.  3 Credits.  

Secularization theory has entrenched itself in our usual theorizing about the state, naturalizing the separation of religion and state and consigning religion to the private. However, as writings on political theology (theory, commentary, ethnography) show, such a separation doesn’t hold in actuality. The religious makes its presence known through notions such as the Church eternal, the king’s mystical body, the theological underpinnings of concepts of the political, the incitement of revelation, the mythological underpinnings of authority and so on. This course will delve into these readings so as to grow our attentiveness towards these aspects of power and governance as well as to understand their presence within the everyday.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.070.866.  Directed Readings and Research.  4 Credits.  
AS.070.867.  Directed Reading and Research.  3 Credits.  
AS.070.874.  Directed Readings and Research.  3 Credits.  

Independent Study/Research

AS.070.886.  Dir Readings & Research.  3 Credits.  
AS.070.892.  Directed Readings and Research.  4 Credits.  

Cross Listed Courses

Comparative Thought and Literature

AS.300.405.  Illness across Cultures: The Ethics of Pain in Literature and Film.  3 Credits.  

Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

AS.300.412.  Indigenous Ecologies: Thinking with Indigenous Worldviews.  3 Credits.  

There are almost 500 million Indigenous people in the world. They speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich indigenous cultural production and their worldviews remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. The students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach knowledge production, climate change, and many other pressing questions.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

East Asian Studies

AS.310.331.  Islam in Asia.  3 Credits.  

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, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.310.332.  Ethnicity in China.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.310.336.  Rebellion and Its Enemies in China Today.  3 Credits.  

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: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

First Year Seminars

AS.001.131.  FYS: Techno - Anthropology.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.001.183.  FYS: What Does It Mean to Be Religious? Creativity, Experience, and the Individual.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.001.218.  FYS Means of Persuasion:The Communication of Climate Change.  3 Credits.  

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.

AS.001.221.  FYS: Music, Religion and Healing.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.001.237.  FYS: Calling Home.  3 Credits.  

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.

AS.001.266.  FYS: Cycles of Life and Death: Exploring Buddhist Death and Ritual.  3 Credits.  

This First-Year Seminar examines how Buddhist traditions understand and navigate death, dying, and the afterlife. More specifically, drawing on case studies from South, East, and Southeast Asia, the course investigates historical practices and contemporary adaptations, offering insights into how Buddhist communities confront mortality, support the dying, and honor the dead. Engaging with sacred texts, ethnographic accounts, visual media, and field trips (Buddhist temples, museums, parks, and cemeteries) students will gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between ritual, mythology, material culture, and cultural context in shaping Buddhist responses to life's ultimate transition.

AS.001.278.  FYS: Games People Play.  3 Credits.  

What is play? How does play form part of our social being and innermost sense of self? What importance do particular games hold not only in players’ intimate lives but also in social formations, from quirky subcultures to nations and empires? Historians of play contend that games precede formal philosophy and religion and are arguably the forgotten basis on which societies took shape. As a way of being in the world, play may be understood as a mode of symbolic action and of engagement with the object world. But playfulness is also something more than behavior and meaning alone; it is also that tacit context surrounding activity and signaling “this is play.” When we play today, we may be training or distracting our minds, creating or destroying entire worlds, teaching or transgressing ways of being in the world. Anytime we play a game we enter into it by free volition, yet we surrender our autonomy to its rules and constraints. Play is deeply paradoxical and paradoxically deep! This First_year Seminar will explore the bounding of time and space, the shaping of identities, the cultivation of skill, and the construction of social reality through play. Through ethnographic studies of virtual worlds, simulations, casinos, sports, and war games we will encounter new approaches to understanding imagination, labor, competition, hierarchy, and other key cultural ideas. In addition to outings to observe leisure spaces and film screenings, we will also play selected games, examine their mechanics, and reflect on their worlds of possibility. Finally, you will draw on course materials to design a game of your own and play-test it with classmates.

AS.001.282.  FYS: Explorations in Biological Anthropology: What it Means to be Human.  3 Credits.  

"This First-Year Seminar is an introduction to the field of biological anthropology, which is broadly a mixture of social studies and biological studies that focus on human evolution and human biosocial variation. We will explore evolutionary theory and mechanisms of inheritance, the diversity of living primates, the fossil record, human evolution, and modern human biological variation. We will begin the semester by learning the basic principles of evolution and natural selection as proposed by Charles Darwin. We will then move on to consider the primate condition across species and through time. This involves examining the taxonomy of extant monkeys and apes as well as the fossil and archaeological record of our hominin ancestors that begins some 7 million years ago. This will involve excursions to local zoos and museums, as well as visits to labs right here at Hopkins. Following a survey of human biocultural evolution, we will consider how this history has influenced contemporary human biological variation.

History

AS.100.144.  Shopaholics: Consumer Revolution and the Material World, 1600-1850.  3 Credits.  

We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.100.662.  Inter Asia Research Seminar.  3 Credits.  

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

AS.100.663.  Religion and the Senses.  3 Credits.  

This graduate seminar delves into the intricate relationship between religion and the senses, critically examining how sensory experience and perception have been theorized, cultivated, and contested within religious traditions (broadly conceived). Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from history, anthropology, religious studies, and art history, we will interrogate the senses as epistemological tools, vehicles of discipline, metaphors for doctrinal and ethical concepts, and markers of sacred presence. This seminar engages with the multiple boundaries of sensory experience and its sociocultural implications through close readings of theoretical texts and case studies of ritual, material culture, and sacred spaces drawn from various religious traditions, such as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

History of Art

AS.010.339.  Sex, Death, and Gender: The Body in Premodern Art, Medicine, and Culture, c. 1300-1600.  3 Credits.  

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

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)

Writing Intensive

AS.010.469.  Quarried, Sculpted, Carved: Lifecycles of Mesoamerican Sculpture.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

AS.010.480.  Indigenous Materialities of the Americas.  3 Credits.  

The American continent and its islands are home to a diverse and delicate ecosystem, and for millennia, Indigenous communities have tended to and shaped these rich landscapes. This seminar journeys across the Americas to understand how Indigenous makers cultivated materials from these ecologies and transformed them into impressive arrays of art and architecture. Each week, students will explore a different medium—bark, shell, rubber, feathers, reed, stone, clay, etc.—that makers shaped into visual and spatial forms. Although this course focuses on the ancestral and early modern periods, it will also explore continued and shifting practices with these materials among contemporary artists. Readings will include material analyses, art historical and archaeological interpretations, as well as early colonial writings by Indigenous authors. There will also be opportunities for students to engage with materials in class. Course material will cover issues of technical skill and ecological knowledge; ephemerality and (im)permanence; animacy and relationality as it pertains to the relationships formed between makers and their works; and the role of Indigenous materialities in reconfiguring canons and categories that continue to scaffold the field of art history. For their final assignment, students will select a multimedia work from the Indigenous Americas and unpack its materiality in both presentation and essay format.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Interdepartmental

AS.360.623.  Latin America in a Globalizing World.  3 Credits.  

An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in wider cultural, economic, and political processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Please see class search for semester topic description.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Islamic Studies

AS.194.202.  Never Forget: Muslims, Islamophobia, and Dissent after 9/11.  3 Credits.  

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)

Medicine, Science and the Humanities

AS.145.219.  Science Studies and Medical Humanities: Theory and Methods.  3 Credits.  

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), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.145.220.  Health, Medicine, Gender, and Sexuality.  3 Credits.  

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)

AS.145.307.  Making Medicines: Cultures of Therapeutic Preparation and Production.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.145.325.  Magic/Medicine: Healing, Protection, and Transformation in African and Indian Ocean Worlds.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.145.360.  Incarceration and Health: Critical Perspectives.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Modern Languages and Literatures

AS.211.323.  Bees, Bugs, and other Beasties: Insects in Literature.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.215.406.  Novelist Intellectuals.  3 Credits.  

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)

AS.215.718.  Public Humanities Writing Workshop.  3 Credits.  

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

Music

AS.376.347.  Popular Music in the Arab World.  3 Credits.  

This class provides an introduction to the popular musics of the Arab world from the 1920s through the early 2000s. The goals of this course will be twofold: first, we will consider the ways that technology, global and regional politics, class, and gender shaped musical aesthetics. Second, we will interrogate the role that popular music played in shaping understandings of national character and regional boundaries. Through close listening and reading assignments, students will develop listening and analytical skills specific to the music of the Arab world, and learn techniques for analyzing this popular music’s entanglement with its social, historical, and cultural context. What, for example, do the radio and music industries have to do with the rise of Arab Nationalism? What can the development of Lebanese indie-rock since the 1990s tell us about contemporary Lebanese sociopolitics? Through weekly reading and listening assignments, students will work towards a final project that traces the history of one genre of Arab pop music over the course of the 20th century.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Near Eastern Studies

AS.130.126.  Gods and Monsters in Ancient Egypt.  3 Credits.  

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)

AS.130.154.  Giving Birth and Coming to Life in Ancient Egypt: The Tree and the Fruit.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.130.214.  The Origins of Civilization: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.  3 Credits.  

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.133.304.  Let's Play! Games from Ancient Egypt and Beyond.  3 Credits.  

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 (or contradict) 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 BCE, 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. 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. The course will consist mainly of lectures given by the professor, with several guest researchers. Examinations will be divided into three parts: two knowledge quizzes during the semester; at the end of the semester, an essay on an Egyptian game of the student's choice.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.133.616.  Let's Play! Games from Ancient Egypt and Beyond.  3 Credits.  

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 (or contradict) 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 BCE, 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. 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. The course will consist mainly of lectures given by the professor, with several guest researchers. Examinations will be divided into three parts: two knowledge quizzes during the semester; at the end of the semester, an essay on an Egyptian game of the student's choice.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Program in Museums and Society

AS.389.233.  Exhibiting Cultures.  3 Credits.  

This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

AS.389.260.  Cultural Heritage in Crisis.  3 Credits.  

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)

AS.389.305.  Oral History: Recording Voices Today for the Archives of Tomorrow.  3 Credits.  

Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable, but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the ideas, theoretical framework and methods of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Sociology

AS.230.367.  Islamic Finance.  3 Credits.  

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)

Writing Intensive

AS.230.387.  Global Migration and Refugees: Applied Research and Practice Seminar.  3 Credits.  

This course will introduce students to the cutting-edge debates on global migration and refugees and give them a first-hand look at the complicated interactions between research, politics, and policy-making. Each week, students will read the work of a featured scholar who will visit the class as a guest lecture, giving students the unique opportunity to directly engage with the scholar. In addition, policy makers, community groups, and activists dealing with migration will visit the class for guest lectures, and students will have the opportunity to learn exactly how, when, and why research is (and is not) applied on the ground. To highlight the global nature of the theme, the course will highlight issues of immigration and emigration, receiving and sending countries, in the global North and South. This course is offered in Washington DC and is available to students accepted to the Spring 2025 Hopkins Semester DC only.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality

AS.363.253.  Disease, Illness and Medicine from the Perspective of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.  3 Credits.  

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

AS.363.254.  Trans Studies.  3 Credits.  

This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to key issues in Trans Studies. Topics may include: contemporary trans politics, trans medicalization, indigenous and non-Western forms of gender variance, US trans history across class and race, and trans global governance. We will focus on how institutions, such as policing and medicine, and world-historical forces, such as capitalism, colonialism, and Atlantic slavery, have shaped trans history and politics.

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

AS.363.330.  Ecofeminist Debates: Gender and Sexuality Beyond the Global West.  3 Credits.  

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)

AS.363.406.  Feminist and Queer Theory: Marxism.  3 Credits.  

Famously, Karl Marx had little to say about gender, sexuality, or race. Yet, scholars have developed Marxist theory to account for how a capitalist political economy generates racial divisions, gender inequalities, and queer and trans subcultures. This course will introduce students to feminist, queer, trans, and Black Marxist theory. Key concepts will include: social reproduction, racial capitalism, and sexual hegemony. Students will consider how Marxist theorists envision the place of race, gender, family, and sexuality in a utopian post-capitalist future.

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

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