2025-26 Course Highlights

Examine foundational texts and moments in American culture, society, and politics, from early European incursions into the New World through the early republic of the United States.

For nearly a century, the Department of Anthropology has been home to ethnographers, linguists, archaeologists, and biological anthropologists who have shaped the field of anthropology. This course explores those intellectual traditions, with an emphasis on faculty members' current scholarship: archival and historical silences, notions of kinship, language-in-use, ideas of waste (ancient to nuclear), science and technology studies, and more.

Who owns antiquity? In this seminar, we will interrogate this question by examining ancient cases of antiquities theft and more contemporary appropriations and destructions of cultural heritage in the Greco-Roman world. We will focus predominantly on three interrelated phenomena: 1) state-sanctioned plunder and spoils of war; 2) private collecting, theft, and looting; and 3) "fakes"/"forgeries" and the demands of the antiquities market.

Democracies around the world are under threat, this reasoning goes, in part because of an attack on institutional scientific truth. But what does liberalism - as political culture and as a form of governance - need (or want) from science? This course turns to the historical relationship between science and liberalism in modern Europe to explore how science and political culture have together produced our current ideal of truth and asks what historians in particular can contribute to these fraught contemporary debates.

This class approaches refugees not as a problem to be solved but as people with stories to tell and with a history that goes back centuries. We will consider some of the reasons that compel people to leave their homeland, read narratives that they have produced about what this experience meant, and examine the myriad ways in which they have shaped their host societies as well as the countries that they left behind.

How does one come to comprehend and mediate themselves in a society that does not presuppose their existence as autonomous, dignified subjects? As Europe was transitioning from absolutist monarchies to nation-states, Jewish communities were trying to reinvent themselves in a world where their very existence challenged the new premises about a "proper" society. The course will concentrate on modernized Jewish individuals, predominantly in Central and Eastern Europe, who fashioned new models of modern Jewish existence in the 19th century.

This introductory course is an attempt to think about the theoretical and historical debates around kinship and world-making practices in anthropology. People everywhere across time and space create meaning about the world they live in and their relations in that world. For this reason, anthropology, the study of human societies past and present, has been preoccupied with kinship relations since its inception as a discipline. Co-taught by an archeologist and a socio-cultural anthropologist, the course will explore different forms of making kin from the deep past to the present.

This seminar supports the production of an original, primary-source-based research paper related to the course's broad themes of race, slavery, and nation. We will dedicate time to historiographical debates, conceptual frameworks, a group visit to special collections, and peer review. Specifically, students will formulate a viable research question, develop a research agenda that uses the appropriate qualitative or quantitative methods, conduct independent research, and draft and revise a final paper.

This course examines the topic of materialism in East Asia in its pre-capitalist formations (1000 BC-1500 AD) through the lens of consumption and production in China, Korea, and Japan. In particular we explore how things become goods within the framework of autocratic states, how rituals create consumers and temptations, as well as the conditions which entertain popular panregional forms such as manga, martial arts, and mafia.