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.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 5:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/10
• 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: M 9:30AM - 11:30AM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/4
• 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 12:00PM - 1:30PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda; Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• 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: T 2:00PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: MacLochlainn, Scott
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: F 10:30AM - 12:30PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: W 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Das, Veena
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: T 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• 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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• 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; MacLochlainn, Scott
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• 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 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.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Kim, Sujung; Noor, Rao Mohsin Ali
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times: T 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Lurtz, Casey Marina
• Room: Gilman 490
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): n/a