Featured Courses

Freshmen interested in Anthropology are encouraged to enroll in a GE Seminar taught by Anthropology faculty.

Spring 2025

Discourses of development seem to be all around us, saturating many of our shared commonsense conceptions of time, history, identity and change. Yet, while ideas of development are fairly ubiquitous, inflecting both large-scale political discussions as well as mundane understandings of what seems to be just or necessary, they are rarely ever defined.

Spring 2025

What is an archive? What gets archived by and for whom? What does it mean to preserve a collection of photographs, songs, recipes, audio, video, or any other kind of media? In this class, students take these questions as starting points for inquiries that bring ethnographic methods into conversation with arts-based research in two video projects—one group, one individual—addressed to alternative histories of topics they choose and develop over the semester. 

Spring 2025

This course’s focus on African American Anthropology is, in many ways, an outgrowth of these transitions. In this course, we will map out the parameters of “African American Anthropology,” beginning with early constructions of race and pioneering ethnographic studies of African Americans in the U.S. Later, we will explore how ongoing research on race and African American culture, as well as contributions by African American/feminist scholars, helped to both shape and shift the scope of anthropological inquiry over time. Finally, we will review new directions in the study of race and African American culture in anthropology.

Spring 2025

Throughout the course we will explore issues such as current threats to cultural heritage, the roles of public opinion and tourism in the protection and interpretation of cultural heritage, impacts of development, questions of authenticity and identity, international law, ethics, and emerging and non-traditional areas of the field.

Spring 2025

ANTH 470 is a course in applying media— text, photography, sound recording, video, drawing, animation—in ethnographic research and representation.

Spring 2025

Throughout the course we will explore issues such as current threats to cultural heritage, the roles of public opinion and tourism in the protection and interpretation of cultural heritage, impacts of development, questions of authenticity and identity, international law, ethics, and emerging and non-traditional areas of the field.

Spring 2025

This course will look at personal narratives—the stories people tell about their own lives and experiences—as objects of artistic expression and sites for the formation of individual and social identity. As new technologies allow artfully told firsthand experiences to reach ever more remote publics, how do personal narratives operate on a more-than-personal scale, influencing journalism, law, medicine, and global politics?

Spring 2025

This course investigates the folklore of Europe, viewing European cultures and societies through an anthropological lens with a focus on shared, expressive cultural traditions.  While noting the important political history of this subject, the course will emphasize the contemporary study of ongoing, and revitalized, traditions, among the various linguistic and cultural groups of Europe today.