Courses

ANTH 30417 Gender Archaeology. Instr.: Yao/Kearn, M/W 9:30 – 10:50am
How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.

ANTH 32910 Feminism(s) and Anthropology. Instru.: Julie Chu/Jennifer Cole, T 2:00 – 4:50pm
This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).

ANTH 38800 "Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology: Approaches to the Past and Present”. Instru.: Maria Lozada, T/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm
This course is intended to provide students with a thorough understanding of bioanthropological, osteological and forensic methods used in the interpretation of past and present behavior by introducing osteological methods and anthropological theory. In particular, lab instruction stresses hands-on experience in analyzing human remains, whereas seminar classes integrate bioanthropological theory and its application to specific archaeological and forensic cases throughout the world. At the end of this course, students will be able to identify, document, and interpret human remains from archaeological and forensic contexts. Lab and seminar-format classes each meet weekly.

ANTH 30401 Anthropology of Healing. Instru.: Nida Paracha, W 3:30 – 6:20pm
In our world marked by pandemics, stress, chronic illness, and cancers, healing is a primary concern, with people around the world experimenting with disparate techniques, from psychotherapy to psychedelics, to energy therapies and others. In this course we will rethink what it means to heal and to disease, reimagining healing as a practice that is deeply implicated in the ways in which we come to know, inhabit, and story the world. If we imagine our contemporary forms of life, entangled as they are, in legacies of colonial violence, capitalism, and ecological disaster, as ongoing sources of collective disease; how then do we re-entangle our ways of being, in anthropology and in the world, that encourage possibilities for healing? What would it mean to think our conceptual and sensorial practices as crucial to the ways in which we heal and disease? 

While the course design introduces students to anthropology and its methods, it pierces its confines and shifts the canon, or the story of anthropology, from its roots in colonializations or whiteness (and its myriad burdens) to the intimacies and desires of queer, sub-altern, black, and indigenous life-worlds. What are the ways in which disease is written into contemporary ways of being and how do we refuse to partake in it? How do we articulate stories that can not only bear lives on the margin but bear health? How can we story self and world differently? And how then, can we collectively live in more joyful and healing ways?

ANTH 32316 Dissertation Writing for Anthropologists. Instru.: Shannon Dawdy, TBA

"This course is designed to structure dissertation writing for those candidates with a significant writing goal to meet, such as defending in the Spring term. A writing goal will be set by each participant, who will be evaluated based on fulfilling their contract. In weekly meetings (in person or on Zoom), we will discuss strategies for effective writing, time-management as well as workshopping brief writing samples."

ANTH 37202 Language in Culture II. Instru: Kamala Russell, T 12:30 – 3:20pm
This is the second part of a two-quarter sequence on the role of language in social life. Building on the first quarter's focus on the interaction order, this quarter explores how ideologies regiment and reflexively mediate between discursive/expressive practices of the interaction order and the wider organization of social life. How are people's ideas about ways of speaking and modes of expression shaped by their social positions and values? And how do their ideas shape interaction and vice versa? How is difference, in language and in social life, made – and unmade? How and why are some differences persuasive as the basis for action, while other differences are ignored or erased? The course proposes that ideologies are neither true nor false, they are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features – linguistic and otherwise – to construct convincing images of people, spaces and activities in sociopolitical processes.

ANTH 40000 Adventures in Speculative Environments - Reading in Anthropology and Environment. Instru: Michael Fisch, T/TH 12:30am – 1:50pm
This graduate seminar explores topics in environmental anthropology and science and technology studies through instances of ecological experimentation. By reading ethnographic accounts of experimentation alongside speculative ecosophies and climate fiction, it will consider the ways in which such ecological experimentations pose conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges that help us develop an anthropological engagement adequate to an era dominated by concerns with the constant threat of pandemics and the declining condition of our global ecology. It will aim, as well, to elaborate the implicit possibilities born of thinking not only in terms of relation but also in relation to a politics and ethics of process. Of particular concern will be a number of questions, such as: how to (re)imagine the conceptual currency of nature as an analytic category or even object of inquiry; how ethnography might reshape technologies of nature; and what sort of social transformations might this reshaping render imaginable.

ANTH 40101 Graduate Proseminar in Race, Diaspora, NEW COURSE. Instru.: Jobson / Green. T 3:30 - 6:20pm
This graduate proseminar serves as an introduction to the concepts and categories that orient the study of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. This includes repertoires of Black and Indigenous worldmaking alongside histories of plantation slavery, settler colonialism, and their afterlives in the Americas; circuits of racialized labor in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; and the construction of race and Indigeneity as categories of scientific and occult origins. Students will consult the works of Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Audra Simpson, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Tallbear, Audre Lorde, and Frantz Fanon, among others.                              

ANTH 46100 Archaeology and the Politics of the Past. Instru: Michael Dietler, F 1:30 – 4:20pm
This seminar explores the use of the ancient past as a symbolic resource by modern communities and the social situation and responsibilities of archae­ologists in this process. Case studies from a variety of contexts are used to show how archaeology has been implicated in the politically charged con­struction of ethnic and regional identities and nationalist and colonialist mythologies in modern history. Current debates about the authority of competing interpretations of archaeological evidence, the right to control public representations of the past, and the contested ownership of archaeo­logical materials and sites are also discussed.

ANTH 50522 Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ Essay. Instru: William Mazzarella, W 2:00 – 5:20pm
Seldom has a canonical essay been at once so widely and so carelessly read as Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.’ This seminar takes a deep dive into the text, reading it alongside writings by Benjamin’s contemporaries as well as more recent analyses. We will discuss themes including the technological transformation of the conditions of experience amid the rise of fascism, the significance of Benjamin’s highly complex conception of aura, the indexicality of the photographic image, the political potentialities of innervation, the psychoanalytic implications of the notion of the optical unconscious, the redemption of distraction and mimesis (including Benjamin’s mimetic theory of language), and Benjamin’s productively ambivalent relation to right-wing cultural theorists.

ANTH 50541 Reconstruction for Reconstitution NEW COURSE. Instru.: Kaushik Rajan, TH 3:30 – 6:20pm
This class will think about transitional moments in the "aftermath" of long histories of oppression by asking about the meanings, potentials and challenges of reconstruction and reconstitution. It will do so by thinking comparatively across the different historical and situated experiences of Reconstruction in the United States, independence from British rule in India, and the transition from apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, it will focus on a close reading of W.E.B. DuBois' "Black Reconstruction", set against the constitutionalist and anti-casteist writings of B.R. Ambedkar (one of the architects of the Indian Constitution), and the writings of South African historian, educator and anti-apartheid revolutionary Neville Alexander. The attempt here is to think about what emancipatory thought means when systems of oppression are formally "overturned", but the social formations that structured them are very much still in place. How do we understand the relationships between the struggle to repudiate injustice and the struggle to build just institutions in such conjunctures? Is transition from oppression always doomed to disappointment and failure? Can something be learned by thinking across time and historical experience? Through a finite and close reading of these three thinkers, the hope is to think rigorously and imaginatively about the promises and pitfalls of transitional histories in ways that keep open their insistent optimism of the will.

ANTH 52200 Proposal Preparation. Instru: Takabvirwa/Gal, W 1:30 – 4:20pm
This is a required course for (primarily third-year) Anthropology graduate students who are preparing field work grant applications and dissertation proposals during the current academic year. The course is taken pass/fail and provides each student the opportunity to present a pre-circulated draft research proposal for discussion and critique. The course focuses on preparation and discussion of students' draft proposals.

ANTH 52510 Violence Trauma Repair. Instru: Natacha Nsabimana, T 2:00 – 4:20pm
This course offers an interdisciplinary encounter with three rich concepts of abiding interest to scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences: violence, trauma, and repair. A central goal for the seminar is to think through the relationships between these concepts and their effects in our contemporary world. The course readings comprise several kinds of primary objects: literary texts, ethnographies, psychoanalytic case studies, memoirs, and journalism. These are drawn from the four historical contexts that will serve as touchstones throughout the course: the Holocaust, the legacies of the slave trade, the Rwandan genocide, and the South African TRC. My intention is that the works we cover in this course will give you the tools to think comparatively across these cases, and that you’ll be able to bring the insights of the class to bear on your own projects. By the end of the course, my hope is that you will be familiar with some of the central questions regarding political violence and its ramifications; be able to theorize trauma in light of scholarly attempts to complicate and historicize the concept and have developed a critical account of how trauma has been harnessed to varying contexts, including social justice demands for individual and societal repair.

ANTH 58515 Style. Instru.: Alice Yao, F 10:30 am – 12:20pm
Style is a paradoxical concept that seemingly defies description and interpretation. It is shared and individual, timeless yet impossibly mutable. Style also inspires and limits, defining traditional and novel forms of human expression. This course considers how the different stakes of representation are worked through the analytic of style. Surveying theoretical perspectives across several disciplines -- anthropology, art history, architecture, and technology studies -- this course reconsiders the conceptual basis of style and its applications to ethnographic and archaeological cases while attempting an exploration of its cognitive and affective dimensions.

ANTH 33342 Material Correlates: Archaeological Evidence and Interpretation. Instru.: Newman/Osborne, W 9:30am – 12:20pm
This graduate seminar is a comparative exploration of archaeological evidence and the interpretative frameworks used to investigate it. We will examine how archaeologists from different disciplinary and regional traditions identify and explain the past, highlighting shared tools and techniques alongside points of departure and contestation. Drawing primarily from the instructors' regions of expertise in the Near East and Mesoamerica, the course is structured around a series of thematic comparisons. Each week we will ask what archaeologists working in different parts of the world consider the material evidence for, for example, a “site,” a “monument,” “art,” or “religion.” At the same time, we will ask what factors influence how archaeologists categorize, analyze, and explain that evidence. Do archaeologists working in different regions approach bones, stones, metals, and ceramics in the same ways? How does an approach rooted in anthropological analogies differ from one grounded in historical sources? What traditional explanations and tropes might be accepted in one archaeological context, but seem entirely out of place in another? Fundamentally, this course examines how archaeological knowledge of the past is a reflection of both the physical traces of former times and the epistemic and institutional traditions by which it is understood.

ANTH 52421 Somatic Material Culture. Instru.: Michael Dietler, F 1:30 – 4:20pm
This seminar explores forms of material culture that go into or onto the human body and practices that treat the body itself as material culture. In other words, it focuses on: (1) what I call "embodied material culture", meaning substances that are made to be ingested into the body (food, alcohol, and drugs) and become part of the person; (2) objects worn on the body (clothing, jewelry, armor, etc.) that constitute what Terry Turner called "the social skin"; and (3) forms of body modification (tattooing, painting, piercing, scarification, plastic surgery, head shaping, foot binding, neck stretching, body building, fasting, prosthetic enhancement, etc.) through which people treat their physical being as a material object for creative expression or augmented utilitarian performance. All of these forms of somatic material culture and their associated practices have a prominent role in the inculcation and expression of identity, although they operate in different ways. The class will examine the comparative history/prehistory and ethnography of these forms of somatic material culture, looking at them through the lens of semiotics, practice theory, phenomenology, consumption, and other approaches as a way of assessing their cultural, social, and economic significance.

ANTH 54101 Professionalization Seminar: From PhD to Job. Instru.: Kathryn Takabvirwa, F 11:30am – 2:20pm
This course helps PhD students prepare for and navigate the job market. It focuses primarily on academic jobs, though it also devotes some time to non-academic jobs. Doctoral training equips students for a variety of careers. The class will help students identify those careers, and communicate the skills and expertise they have and can offer to potential employers. It also offers students a better understanding of what different kinds of positions entail, how to identify career opportunities that are a good fit, how to represent themselves on paper through their written materials, and prepare for interviews, campus visits, job talks, etc. Students will write and revise application materials like cover letters, CVs, writing samples, teaching statements, research statements, etc. We will discuss how to negotiate a job offer, and how to navigate the transition from graduate student to gainfully employed professional. Space is limited. Students who enroll must attend all nine sessions. Enrollment priority will be given to Anthropology PhD students, though PhD students in other departments are welcome, space permitting.

ANTH 54520 Political Exile: Past and Future. Instru: Natacha Nsabimana, T  TBA
This seminar examines relationships between the condition of exile and collective belonging. We ask: 1) Are there particular historical-political formations forged in the wake of exile? 2) What is nationhood, collective belonging under conditions of anticipated flight? 3) How may we think the temporality of political subjectivity in exile? 

We begin with a focus on forced movements from a ‘home’ and narratives of loss, longing and return. The second part of the course moves to historical narratives that emerge out of the experience of collective displacement. We end by gesturing toward the aesthetics of exilic belonging and diasporic imaginations.

ANTH 56315 Time and Temporality. Instru.: Dawdy/Agrama, M 12:30 – 3:20pm
What is time? How is it experienced? How do ruins, heirlooms, technology, origin stories, science fiction, ritual, landscape, climate change, astronomy, geology, myth, and millenarianism create human time? How do social, political, and cultural structures and figurations affect temporality (speed, duration, units, rhythm, acceleration, deceleration, suspension)? How do non-human temporalities intersect with human ones? How do imagined futures structure practice? Does modernity represent a rent in the fabric of time? Or the Anthropocene? We will explore a subset of questions such as these through a select reading of philosophical, anthropological, and other disciplinary texts. This course is intended for doctoral graduate students who have a strong background in social theory or phenomenology.

ANTH 57301 Interaction. Instru: Kamala Russell, T 11:00am – 1:50pm
Interaction -- communicative contact -- is an unavoidable part of both social existence and the activities of social scientists who study such existences. Linguistic anthropology has operationalized the study of interaction to describe both the interpenetration of linguistic systems and context, and the dynamic interrelation between macro-social processes and micro-interactional moves: language-in-use is consequential social action. Yet, such events of communicative contact remain in excess of both what is said in them and what is said about them. The many dimensions of interactions include and exceed the study of grammar, pragmatics, gesture, health, embodied action, trauma, perception, surveillance, ethics, vulnerability, affect, space and urbanism, platforms and media channels, power and violence, identification, eros, and the list goes on. In this course, we will consider what affordances of interaction linguists and anthropologists have exploited, sought to record, and ignored. How can we (and should we?) constitute interaction as a particular domain of study? 

In this course we will survey key theories and importantly also methodologies in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics for understanding, scribing, and participating (ethnographically) in interaction. We will consider the political, epistemological, ontological, and ethical stakes of how we understand interaction as a dynamic event.

ANTH 58370 Divination. Instru: William Mazzarella, W 2:30 – 5:20pm
This seminar is an opportunity to explore divination across historical and social contexts from the ancient world, through the sorts of sites examined by classic anthropological works and the uptake of divinatory strategies by psychoanalysis, and on to present-day engagements with tarot, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Going far beyond the banal popular notion of ‘fortune telling,’ we will consider divination as a question of the arts of attention and interpretation with profound truth-disclosing and world-making implications.