Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Pandian, anand
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Das, Veena
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: F 2:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/4
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: MacLochlainn, Scott
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research for doctoral students

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: T 4:00PM - 6:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/7
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 2/3
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: M 11:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR

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.

• Days/Times: T 1:00PM - 3:00PM
• Instructor: Han, Clara; Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Pandian, anand
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course will consist of close reading of anthropological and philosophical texts to trace some 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.

• Days/Times: F 11:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: T 9:30AM - 11:30AM
• Instructor: MacLochlainn, Scott
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: M 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: T 2:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Pandian, anand
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in wider cultural, economic, and political processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. In Fall 2024 we will take up the themes of aesthetics, epistemic pluralism, and the question of reality.

• Days/Times: W 2:00PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro; Nogueira, Marcelo
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: MacLochlainn, Scott
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is open to anthropology graduate students only and is to be run on a workshop model. It is to help those students writing their regional essay for the comprehensive exams to acquire 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.

• Days/Times: T 12:00PM - 2:00PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro; Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Kim, Sujung
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Arnette, Marie-Lys
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study/Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a