Undergraduate Courses

The courses listed below are provided by the JHU Public Course Search. This listing provides a snapshot of immediately available courses and may not be complete. Course registration information can be found on the Student Information Services (SIS) website.

Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.

Freshman Seminar

Each year, the Anthropology Department offers a freshman seminar. This seminar aims to introduce a small group of freshman students to anthropology through discussion and research on a particular issue or topic. As an inaugural journey into the world of contemporary anthropology, the freshman seminar encourages class participation, student cooperation, group projects, and active research.

Course # (Section)	Title	Day/Times	Instructor	Location	Term	Additional Details
AS.070.131 (01)	Language, Media, and AI Lab (LAMA Lab)	T 4:00PM - 6:00PM	MacLochlainn, Scott	Mergenthaler 439	Spring 2026	Description: LAMA Lab is a space in which students and faculty address the different technologies of language and media. Encompassing in its approach and design, this lab emphasizes an up-close, ethnographic, and qualitative approach, and with an eye to AI and its influences and effects on media. With a particular attention to shifting technological developments, LAMA Lab is open-ended and exploratory in nature. Centered around reading groups, workshops, guest speakers, and experimentation with different interfaces and software, as well as providing small grants, this laboratory provides a space of convergence for those who are engaging in questions related to language, media, and AI. It is accessible to students and faculty at different stages of research, from planning to post-research analysis. This laboratory also provides a wider space for ethnographic engagements with language and media, from translation and oral history to audio and visual archives. For students enrolling for 1-credit course, the lab will meet throughout the semester, approximately every three weeks. Credit hours will be accrued through attendance to guest speakers, workshops and reading groups. Credits: 1.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/10 Tags: n/a
AS.070.205 (01)	Gods and Ancestors: East Asian Religions in Everyday Life	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Kim, Sujung	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: This course offers an introduction to the religious traditions of East Asia, including Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Shinto. Moving chronologically from ancient foundations to modern developments, we will explore how religious ideas and practices have shaped—and been shaped by—East Asian societies over time. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in these traditions, with readings drawn from a wide range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature, and ethnographic accounts. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/20 Tags: n/a
AS.070.211 (01)	Baltimore's Solidarity Ecosystem	TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM	Procupez, Valeria	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: Baltimore is replete with economic experimentation, organizing, and transformation. Learning from/with these experiences and contributing to them is the main aim of this course. It involves a combination of engaged service, collaborative research, reading, and reflection to understand and inform place-based efforts to build equitable urban futures in the city. Sponsored by the JHU Center for Social Concern, the course is co-taught with community organizers to give first-hand exposure to economic conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts. Students will work closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for social justice and urban regeneration. Schedule is flexible to facilitate visits to on-site work and conversations. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 6/18 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, CES-CC, CES-LE
AS.070.302 (01)	AI: Utopias, Dystopias, and Everything in Between	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	MacLochlainn, Scott	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: In this course, we will explore the social worlds of AI. Given how AI is and promises to be increasingly interwoven into multiple aspects of our lives, we will examine different ways of thinking and ethnographically engaging in these emergent technologies. We will think about how people are encountering and designing AI in different ways, from the ubiquity of AI slop on social media and ChatGPT to the predictive use of AI in healthcare, to the internal culture of start-ups. Throughout the semester, we will move between spaces of media, the uses of large language models and their relationship to the speaking subject, ethnographies on technology and labor rights, surveillance, and state and corporate uses of AI. We will also consider fundamental questions concerning the relationship between technology and life, the utopias of automation, the ethics of human exceptionalism, and the potential legal frameworks in which to situate and guardrail AI. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/13 Tags: CES-TI, CES-LC
AS.070.304 (01)	Are We What We Eat?: Food, Ethics, and Religion	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Kim, Sujung	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: From Buddhist almsgiving and Christian fasting to Islamic halal laws and contemporary movements toward vegetarianism and veganism, this course examines how certain food practices articulate broader concerns about purity, taboo, hierarchy, sacrifice, ecology, and embodiment. Drawing on a wide range of religious texts, ethnographic case studies, and critical theory, students will engage with questions of religious identity and ethics to better understand the complex entanglement of food and morality in religious life. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/18 Tags: n/a
AS.070.308 (01)	Cancer Care: Inequality, Ethnography, Poetics	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Roth, Sarah	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: Cancer, the ‘emperor of all maladies,’ is a leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer is, seemingly, everywhere: it brings to mind screening programs, pinkwashed fundraisers, promises of a cure, and myriad memoirs and fictions, lending cancer an abundance of meaning in our contemporary world. With developments in genetic testing and early detection, many aspects of contemporary cancer care have transformed—and with them, questions around risk and responsibility. In the clinic, cancer outcomes are increasingly understood in terms of individualized risk. Yet, these developments and ways of understanding cancer are limited to urban centers of the world, largely in the U.S. and Europe, with access to costly medical technologies. Further, experiences and outcomes of cancer care, from surveillance to treatment, refract along lines of race, gender, and geography, and the disease is a frame through which the politics of healthcare can be starkly seen and traced. In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, students are invited to explore cancer care—inequalities, experiences, and poetics—through literary and ethnographic analysis. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/15 Tags: n/a
AS.070.311 (01)	Argot Workshop: Student Publishing from Start to Finish	M 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Maddox, Perry	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: Are you interested in learning how to design and run a student journal? Do you have a piece of writing you would like to prepare for a public-facing platform? If so, then join us for the Argot workshop. We will revitalize the JHU undergraduate anthropology journal, featuring work from students in the humanities and social sciences at Hopkins and beyond. In the workshop, students will engage with every aspect of the publication process, including soliciting submissions, reviewing and editing articles, and creating and designing the online platform. Students enrolled in the workshop will also submit one piece of work to be published in the journal. With that in mind, we ask that each student enter the workshop with a piece of writing they would like to see through to publication. This could be an essay from another course, a research project, or a visual or multimedia work (with a writing component). During the semester, students will work on their own submissions, provide editorial guidance for others, and design, create, and publicize the journal. The journal will be published online at the end of the semester, creating a concrete opportunity for student work to reach a wider audience. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/18 Tags: n/a
AS.070.317 (01)	Methods	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Procupez, Valeria	Mergenthaler 439	Spring 2026	Description: This course aims to teach basic fieldwork skills: Choosing and entering a community; establishing contacts; learning to listen and to ask questions and locating archival material that might be relevant. It is a hands-on course that increases student familiarity with various neighborhoods such as the Arts District in Baltimore. Recommended Course Background: two or more prior courses in anthropology (not cross-listed courses). Course is a requirement for anthropology major. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/12 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.318 (01)	Black Atlantic Worlds	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Angelini, Alessandro; White, Alexandre Ilani Rein	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: This seminar explores the formation of Black Atlantic worlds through a selection of historical and ethnographic texts, material artifacts, and films. We will encounter familiar themes of slavery, revolution, commodity production, and imperial power recast in the minor key of the Black experience. Exploring major works by anthropologists, particularly key figures from Johns Hopkins, the course also examines how studies of transatlantic movements have reshaped our very understanding of history and culture, not simply as static or official forms but as fields of contention. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/18 Tags: INST-GLOBAL, CES-RI, CES-BM
AS.070.329 (01)	An Introduction to Reality	F 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Angelini, Alessandro	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: Do you get the feeling that reality ain’t what it used to be? Reality is one of those Big Concepts that we often think with yet seldom think about. Taking up the notion that reality is never a self-evident thing, this seminar explores a central paradox: reality is conceived as a given totality—an ‘everything’—nonetheless produced and maintained from a partial and situated practice of making. The course begins with historical examinations of reality-making and –undoing. We look critically at the role of scientific knowledge, technological development, and capitalist and socialist ideological regimes in consolidating a sense of reality. The course puts forth the case that anthropology is uniquely situated to grasp how systems of knowledge and collectively held feeling come into being and stabilize a social order, while also investigating the inherent contestability and fragility of those systems. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/18 Tags: n/a
AS.070.416 (01)	Proseminar	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Khan, Naveeda	Mergenthaler 439	Spring 2026	Description: 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. This course is only available to Anthropology majors and graduate students. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 8/8 Tags: n/a
AS.070.419 (01)	Logic of Anthropological Inquiry	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Lans, Aja Marie	Mergenthaler 439	Spring 2026	Description: Anthropology is an endeavor to think with the empirical richness of the world at hand, a field science with both literary and philosophical pretensions. This course grapples with the nature of anthropological inquiry, reading classic works in the discipline as well as contemporary efforts to reimagine its foundations. Required for anthropology majors. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/12 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.432 (01)	Psychic Life and its Vicissitudes	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Han, Clara	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: In his war memoirs, Wilfred Bion attempts to find a form by which to describe psychic life amidst death, “I died there.” Here, questions of form, genre, subjectivity and the precariousness of reality are knotted together. In this seminar, we will seek to move our thinking outside of the hard and fast boundaries between “extreme violence” and “chronic violence”, or between catastrophic events and everyday life to instead explore the interconnections of voice, intelligibility, and volatility in selected anthropological texts, ethnography, paired with specific philosophical and psychoanalytic texts. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/8 Tags: n/a
AS.070.504 (01)	Independent Study		Lans, Aja Marie		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.504 (02)	Independent Study		Han, Clara		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.504 (04)	Independent Study		Procupez, Valeria		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.504 (06)	Independent Study		Angelini, Alessandro		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.504 (07)	Independent Study		Khan, Naveeda		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.504 (09)	Independent Study		Pandian, Anand		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (01)	Senior Essay - Spring		Khan, Naveeda		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (03)	Senior Essay - Spring		Angelini, Alessandro		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (04)	Senior Essay - Spring		Lans, Aja Marie		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (05)	Senior Essay - Spring		Han, Clara		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/10 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (06)	Senior Essay - Spring		Kim, Sujung		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (07)	Senior Essay - Spring		Procupez, Valeria		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (09)	Senior Essay - Spring		Pandian, Anand		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.070.562 (10)	Senior Essay - Spring		Haeri, Niloofar		Spring 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.130.126 (01)	Gods and Monsters in Ancient Egypt	TTh 12:30PM - 2:00PM	Jasnow, Richard	Gilman 130G	Spring 2026	Description: A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 6/25 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.130.214 (01)	The Origins of Civilization: A Cross-Cultural Perspective	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Schwartz, Glenn M	Krieger Laverty	Spring 2026	Description: One of the most significant transformations in human history was the “urban revolution” in which cities, writing, kingdoms, and social classes formed for the first time. In this course, we compare five areas where this development occurred: China, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, and Mesoamerica (Mexico/Guatemala/Honduras/Belize). In each region, we review the archaeological and textual evidence and consider how and why these complex societies emerged – and, often, failed. We will also consider the concept of “civilization” and how it has been used (and abused) in the contemporary world. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/15 Tags: ARCH-ARCH, CES-CC, CES-PD
AS.145.219 (01)	Science Studies and Medical Humanities: Theory and Methods	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Vado, Karina A	Gilman 300	Spring 2026	Description: The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/18 Tags: MSCH-HUM, CES-TI
AS.300.412 (01)	Indigenous Ecologies: Thinking with Indigenous Worldviews	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	El Guabli, Brahim	Mergenthaler 431	Spring 2026	Description: Indigenous people represent an important share of planet Earth’s inhabitants. Totaling almost 500 million people in the entire world, Indigenous people speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. However, neither their demographic significance nor their long histories spared them the tragedies of settler colonialism and its aftermaths of dispossession, exclusion, and segregation. Since the early twentieth century, Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich histories of indigenous activism, environmental practices, and cultural production as well as the worldviews they sustain remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to activism, literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. Students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach pressing issues that face Indigenous peoples from myriad perspectives and positionalities. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/12 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM, ENVS-MINOR, CTAL-TEXT
AS.310.331 (01)	Islam in Asia	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Henning, Stefan	Gilman 381	Spring 2026	Description: You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/15 Tags: CES-ELECT, INST-CP, ISLM-ISLMST
AS.360.406 (01)	ERL: Composing Research: Collaborating with Elephants/People/Rivers/Kidneys/Soil	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Ludden, Jason	Gilman 77	Spring 2026	Description: This course focuses on writing with/for/about natural resource issues and scientific research. This writing class prepares students for travel to Sri Lanka, in the summer of 2026, to study Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) while learning about the health of communities around Wasgamuwa National Park. During the spring of 2026, we’ll work with community collaborators in the Baltimore area to address their content production needs and identify spaces and places for text production/revision while also learning about HEC and Sri Lanka. Additionally, we’ll explore ethical representations of data and synthesize complex arguments into public facing documents. In late May of 2026, we will travel to Sri Lanka for two weeks to work alongside the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (SLWCS) – a non-governmental organization committed to saving elephants by helping people – in the Mahaweli Development Project (MDP): a key agricultural region, which has a high rate of both HEC and chronic kidney disease. Students will spend their mornings mapping elephant movements and surveying farmers about elephant related incidences. We’ll also meet with faculty and researchers from the University of Colombo, University of Peradeniya, American Institute for Sri Lanka Studies, and other organizations; these hosted workshops will expose students to new research networks, contemporary scholarship, and help them develop an understanding of collaboration and global scholarship. Additionally, we’ll visit sites of ecological and historical importance. By the end of the trip, students will have worked with GIS databases and technology, sociology and anthropology field methods, and the process of community and public engaged research. After our return from Sri Lanka, students will propose their own research project. Enrollment by permission only. Application required; email [email protected]. Commitment to 2 credit-course in Summer 2026 required. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/10 Tags: MSCH-HUM, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR
AS.363.367 (01)	Learning Sex and Gender: AI, Algorithms, Automatons	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Islam, Heba Zainab	Mergenthaler 426	Spring 2026	Description: This course explores the interactions between sex, gender, and cyber-technologies, old and new. How do the internet, smart devices, robots and generative AI shape sex and gender? In turn, how do discourses of sex and gender shape technologies? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to debates within feminist theory, the historical development of gendered and sexed technologies, the embedding of these technologies in our everyday life and the aesthetics and ethics of such technologies as seen in film and media. We will explore how AI, algorithms, and machines raise complex questions around the ethics, politics, and epistemologies of sex and gender. Through readings of key academic texts, films, and ethnographies, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of what a gendered cyberscape looks like and how it might come to look otherwise. By understanding such technologies as instruments of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. Further, we will consider how technologies enter our intimate spaces and reshape our desires and pleasures. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/12 Tags: n/a
AS.376.347 (01)	Popular Music in the Arab World	MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM	El Rayes, Nour	Shriver Hall 028G	Spring 2026	Description: This class provides an introduction to the popular musics of the Arab world from the 1920s through the early 2000s. The goals of this course will be twofold: first, we will consider the ways that technology, global and regional politics, class, and gender shaped musical aesthetics. Second, we will interrogate the role that popular music played in shaping understandings of national character and regional boundaries. Through close listening and reading assignments, students will develop listening and analytical skills specific to the music of the Arab world, and learn techniques for analyzing this popular music’s entanglement with its social, historical, and cultural context. What, for example, do the radio and music industries have to do with the rise of Arab Nationalism? What can the development of Lebanese indie-rock since the 1990s tell us about contemporary Lebanese sociopolitics? Through weekly reading and listening assignments, students will work towards a final project that traces the history of one genre of Arab pop music over the course of the 20th century. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/15 Tags: n/a
AS.389.303 (01)	A World of Things	T 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Kingsley, Jennifer P	Mergenthaler 431	Spring 2026	Description: This course aims to make the object a focus point for understanding museums and what they do, and to consider the museum as a site for investigating the interaction between humans and things. At the center of the course is a tension between the idea that things are subject to human will, on the one hand, and indications that things can and do evade human attempts to control them, on the other. Readings from scholars across many disciplines, from anthropology to political science, will stimulate our looking, thinking, and discussion. Every session includes hands-on activities to help us think through the key concepts of the readings. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/10 Tags: ARCH-ARCH
AS.389.305 (01)	Oral History: Recording Voices Today for the Archives of Tomorrow	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Roome, Kristine	Gilman 10	Spring 2026	Description: Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the theoretical framework, methods and an awareness of the ethics of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/10 Tags: MSCH-HUM, CDS-SSMC, ARCH-RELATE
AS.389.445 (01)	The Political Lives of Dead Bodies	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Hester, Jessica Leigh; Lans, Aja Marie	Gilman 55	Spring 2026	Description: Taking its name from the work of scholar Katherine Verdery, who investigates why and how certain corpses took on a political life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, this course examines ways that human bodies have been collected, displayed, concealed and disappeared across cemeteries, museums, universities and other sites. We will trace various valuations (and devaluations) imposed on bodies across the life course and examine how some bodies are made to matter more than others in both life and death. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives across anthropology, Black studies, history of medicine and more, we will engage with case studies from across the globe, from the 18th century to the present day. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/12 Tags: HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, CDS-SSMC, ARCH-ARCH, MSCH-HUM
AS.360.430 (30)	ERL Fieldwork: Collaborating with Elephants/People/Rivers/Kidneys/Soil in Sri Lanka		Ludden, Jason		Summer 2026	Description: This travel course is the second part of a writing-intensive Experiential Research Lab focused on Human-Elephant Conflict and community health in Sri Lanka. Students will work alongside the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society in the Mahaweli Development Project, mapping elephant movements, surveying farmers, and using GIS, field methods, and community-engaged research. They will meet with faculty and researchers from Sri Lankan and international organizations, visit sites of ecological and historical importance, and develop proposals for their own research projects after returning. Enrollment by permission only. Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 1/6 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR
AS.001.218 (01)	FYS: Means of Persuasion - The Communication of Climate Change	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Haeri, Niloofar	Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: How do we use language to persuade each other of our views? How do people bring others to their side so that they can see matters from a different angle? At times, it seems like language is not (or is no longer?) doing its job—that somehow it is failing in its main function. One of the biggest disagreements these days seems to be about the reality and causes of climate change. This seminar focuses on learning about the basics of climate change and how these are communicated. We will analyze the ways in which law, science, politics, and the media use stories, metaphors, and analogies to convey ideas about climate change. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.001.266 (01)	FYS: Cycles of Life and Death - Exploring Buddhist Death and Ritual	F 12:30PM - 3:00PM	Kim, Sujung	Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: This First-Year Seminar examines how Buddhist traditions understand and navigate death, dying, and the afterlife. More specifically, drawing on case studies from South, East, and Southeast Asia, the course investigates historical practices and contemporary adaptations, offering insights into how Buddhist communities confront mortality, support the dying, and honor the dead. Engaging with sacred texts, ethnographic accounts, visual media, and field trips (Buddhist temples, museums, parks, and cemeteries) students will gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between ritual, mythology, material culture, and cultural context in shaping Buddhist responses to life's ultimate transition. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.061.201 (01)	Intermediate Digital Production: Mitigation Video	Th 10:00AM - 1:00PM	Bae, Wonjung	The Centre 218	Fall 2026	Description: In this course, you will produce a 7–10 minute mitigation video to be used in a Maryland resentencing hearing as part of the state’s Decarceration Initiative. Working in a two-person Maysles-style camera/mic unit ideally one film student and one social science student as a team, you will collaborate with Maryland Office of the Public Defender attorneys and social workers to interview an incarcerated client inside a correctional facility, document the lives of their family and community members, and craft a character-driven narrative grounded in care, accuracy, and ethical responsibility. The class is designed to conduct an intensive 10-day production outside of class consisting of: 1 day Orientation at the Baltimore City Office of the Public Defender + 2 days on-site pre-production + 4 days Primary filming + 2 days Pick-up shoots + 1 day Community screening for fact-checking and final consent. Throughout the semester, you will complete weekly production assignments, maintain professional communication with stakeholders, and develop a legal, sociological, and human understanding of how individual life histories are shaped by structural forces such as race, class, policing, and incarceration. Students who have completed at least one of the following will be given priority: AS.061.150, AS.061.152, AS.100.423, AS.220.213, AS.362.204, AS.362.127, AS.191.365, AS.145.360, AS.360.111, AS.060.315, AS.362.115, AS.362.335, AS.190.300. Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 2/8 Tags: FILM-PROD, CDS-EWC
AS.070.132 (01)	Invitation to Anthropology	T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Procupez, Valeria	Gilman 50; Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism. Credits: 3.00 Status: Reserved Open Seats Available: 5/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.132 (02)	Invitation to Anthropology	T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Procupez, Valeria	Gilman 50; Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism. Credits: 3.00 Status: Reserved Open Seats Available: 6/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.132 (03)	Invitation to Anthropology	T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Procupez, Valeria	Gilman 50; Bloomberg 168	Fall 2026	Description: The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism. Credits: 3.00 Status: Reserved Open Seats Available: 8/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.132 (04)	Invitation to Anthropology	T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Procupez, Valeria	Gilman 50; Shriver Hall 104	Fall 2026	Description: The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism. Credits: 3.00 Status: Reserved Open Seats Available: 9/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.132 (05)	Invitation to Anthropology	T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Procupez, Valeria	Gilman 50; Gilman 50	Fall 2026	Description: The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism. Credits: 3.00 Status: Reserved Open Seats Available: 6/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.202 (01)	Mapping Communities	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Procupez, Valeria	Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: This course examines mapping through an ethnographic lens. We will both study the design of maps as a key technology to survey territories and populations, as well as forms of countermapping: practices that turn this top-down, governmental tool on its head and facilitate a ground-up, collaborative process of representing space. We will survey various forms of data visualization, oral history and narrative cartography, as methods for the generation of local knowledge. Cases include indigenous counter-mapping of communal land, collective cartography in Latin America, anti-eviction mapping projects in American cities, and others. The course involves critical discussions of theoretical and ethnographic texts, as well as the practical exploration of different mapmaking techniques (ArcGIS, hands-on activities on campus and its surroundings), and their importance as possible contributions to anthropological analysis and community engagement. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 5/12 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.253 (01)	Introduction to Medical Anthropology	M 1:30PM - 2:45PM, W 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Han, Clara	Krieger 180; Latrobe 120	Fall 2026	Description: Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 1/15 Tags: n/a
AS.070.253 (02)	Introduction to Medical Anthropology	M 1:30PM - 2:45PM, W 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Han, Clara	Krieger 180; Ames 234	Fall 2026	Description: Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: n/a
AS.070.253 (03)	Introduction to Medical Anthropology	M 1:30PM - 2:45PM, W 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Han, Clara	Krieger 180; Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: n/a
AS.070.267 (01)	Culture, Religion and Politics in Iran	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Haeri, Niloofar	Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: This is an introductory course for those interested in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. It assumes no previous expertise and is open to undergraduates at all levels including Freshmen. The aim is to deepen our understanding of Iran and of the ways in which culture, religion, and politics might get entangled. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 15/15 Tags: n/a
AS.070.273 (01)	Ethnographies	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Pandian, Anand	Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: This course explores the craft of ethnography as a mode of research and writing fundamental to anthropology. Through the close reading of several ethnographic works, we will consider the intertwining of description, local concepts, and analysis. We will undertake several observation and writing exercises to learn how to write in an ethnographic mode and translate field research into lively texts. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/15 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.303 (01)	Loaded Objects: The Anthropology of American Gun Culture	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Johnson, Jonas Stark	Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: There are roughly two firearms owned by civilians for every person living in the United States—a country with by far the highest rate of civilian firearms ownership in the world. Making sense of this fact leads invariably to diagnoses of America’s “gun culture,” a term used to explain both the popularity of firearms and the devastating rate of gun-related injury and death. But what does it mean to think about gun ownership and use as a “cultural” phenomenon? And what happens when we treat firearms not simply as policy problems or public health liabilities, but as objects uniquely embedded within violent histories, vested with symbolic power, and enmeshed within everyday circuits of exchange and use? While historians, social scientists, and cultural theorists have begun to consolidate a new field of Gun Studies, anthropology brings distinctive tools for analyzing how firearms mediate agency, value, symbolism, and identity across individual, communal, and institutional scales of social life. This course invites students to apply those tools by connecting theoretical readings to case studies drawn from both scholarship and media, from tragic headlines to blockbuster films to YouTube productions to video games. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/18 Tags: ARCH-RELATE
AS.070.312 (01)	Global China: Anthropological Perspectives	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Jiao, Yida	Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: This course invites students to critically examine China’s growing engagement and influence on a global scale. Over the past two decades, China’s outbound investments, loans, infrastructure projects, migration, medical, and cultural initiatives have surged dramatically. These sweeping yet variegated footprints have profoundly shaped the international political and economic landscapes. What are the peculiarities of China’s overseas practices, processes, patterns, and policies in a globalized world? This course will guide any undergraduate at Hopkins with an interest in contemporary China to analyze the multifaceted dimensions of “Global China” using ethnographic methods and other social science approaches. The course is designed to attract students from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, international studies, East Asian studies and Africana studies. The course is structured into three units. In the first unit, students will be introduced to the general phenomena, multi-level dynamics, and reflective methodological frameworks of Global China, laying the groundwork for the remainder of the course. In the second unit, students will explore how Global China manifests across various domains, including industry, agriculture, infrastructure, resources, and medicine. In the third unit, students will reflect on the interactions between overseas Chinese entrepreneurs and local populations, Chinese political-economic power and soft power, as well as the relationships among different overseas Chinese communities. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 3/18 Tags: INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL, CES-FT, CES-PD
AS.070.345 (01)	Violence, Race and the Unruly Body	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Mohamed, Sabine	Mergenthaler 439	Fall 2026	Description: What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. How do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? In this course, we will disscuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about it and explore the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to racialized/gendered forms of violence. We will examine a number of different ethnographic spaces, including genocide in Rwanda, conflict resolution among the Nuer, the concept of criminality in Indonesia, largescale massacres in Thailand, and police violence in the United States Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: INST-CP
AS.070.428 (01)	The Body Immortal in Yoga and Ayurveda	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Minkowski, Christopher Zand	Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: This course will trace the history of an idea - how to make the human body physically immortal - in two Indian systems of knowledge, Yoga and Ayurveda. The course will follow the development of this idea in both theory and practice in the ancient and medieval Indian world. Beginning with accounts of immortal humans that are found in early Sanskrit literature, the course will move on to the elaboration of yogic practice in the tantric movements and to the refinements to alchemical theory (rasāyana-śāstra) in Ayurvedic texts. The course will then move to the emergence of postural yoga (haṭha-yoga) as an independent discipline, which marks a new phase in the pursuit of corporeal immortality. Throughout we will keep track of competing theories of the body - its systems, components, processes, subtle dimensions, channels, centers, layers of physicality, and interactions with breath and spirit - as these form the ground on which to apply bespoke, immortality-creating methods. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 2/20 Tags: MSCH-HUM
AS.070.446 (01)	Pollution	F 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Pandian, Anand	Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: In this course, we will grapple with pollution as an existential predicament, a permissible effect, and an organizing problem. We will read ethnographic engagements with waste and waste infrastructure, industrial and chemical toxicity, fossil fuel production, environmental justice, and environmental health. We will consider pollution’s debt to capitalism and colonialism, and relations between environmental and moral pollution. Working in the manner of both a seminar and a collaborative workshop, we will seek to bring into focus the questions and lessons that arise from readings of diverse places and our own emergent field projects. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/8 Tags: ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR
AS.070.503 (01)	Independent Study		Angelini, Alessandro		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.503 (02)	Independent Study		Khan, Naveeda		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.503 (04)	Independent Study		Pandian, Anand		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.503 (05)	Independent Study		Han, Clara		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.503 (06)	Independent Study		Haeri, Niloofar		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.503 (07)	Independent Study		Procupez, Valeria		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.503 (08)	Independent Study		Kim, Sujung		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 4/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (01)	Senior Essay-Fall		Angelini, Alessandro		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (02)	Senior Essay-Fall		Haeri, Niloofar		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (03)	Senior Essay-Fall		Procupez, Valeria		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 4/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (05)	Senior Essay-Fall		Han, Clara		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (06)	Senior Essay-Fall		Pandian, Anand		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (07)	Senior Essay-Fall		Khan, Naveeda		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.070.561 (12)	Senior Essay-Fall		Kim, Sujung		Fall 2026	Description: Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.145.219 (01)	Science Studies and Medical Humanities: Theory and Methods	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Bayoumi, Soha Hassan	Gilman 377	Fall 2026	Description: The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine. Credits: 3.00 Status: Reserved Open Seats Available: 2/19 Tags: MSCH-HUM, CES-TI, ARCH-RELATE
AS.145.360 (01)	Incarceration and Health: Critical Perspectives	Th 1:30PM - 3:50PM	Sufrin, Carolyn	Smokler Center 301	Fall 2026	Description: Can care exist in a space of punishment? Institutions of incarceration are inherently spaces of violence and social control and, in the U.S.’s current context of mass incarceration, racial oppression. Yet prisons, jails, and detention centers are required to provide individuals access to health care. How can we understand this convergence of care for the body and psyche with multiple forms of carceral violence? This course will examine modes of health and health care inside institutions of incarceration as they are situated within broader socio-political contexts that shape society’s over-reliance on incarceration as a means of social and racialized control. Drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, legal theory, critical race studies, and public health, the course will explore the everyday realities inside institutions of incarceration as they relate to suffering and care and how those are connected to policies and processes of subjugation outside the institutions’ walls. Case studies for examining these relationships include pregnancy, COVID-19, addiction, and mental illness behind bars. Students will engage with concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, carceral and anti-carceral feminism, theories of care, medical abolition, and dual loyalty. While the course will primarily focus on the U.S. context, we will also draw comparisons to non-U.S. settings. Throughout the course we will seek to understand how institutions of incarceration are not, as popularly understood, isolated places “elsewhere,” but implicitly porous with so-called free society—and therefore as exemplars for understanding the connections among health, inequality, and state institutions. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: n/a
AS.310.202 (01)	Introduction to Korean Culture	MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Kim, Sujung	Mergenthaler 426	Fall 2026	Description: From North Korea’s nuclear threat to South Korea’s K-pop, Korea is constantly in the US media. But how much do you know about Korea? This introductory course is designed to introduce students to the long and complex cultural history of Korea. While focusing on key aspects in shaping premodern and modern Korean identity, the course also places Korea in a larger cross-national context, particularly its close interactions with China and Japan. Reading primary and secondary sources combined with visual materials, the course chronologically and thematically examines major historical moments, from Korea’s participation in and exit from a Sino-centric premodern world order, Japanese colonialism and its ramifications in Korean society, economic development and democratization, to the global popularity of Korean popular culture. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/18 Tags: INST-CP
AS.310.332 (01)	Ethnicity in China	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Henning, Stefan	Ames 320	Fall 2026	Description: Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China? Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL, CES-RI
AS.310.336 (01)	Rebellion and Its Enemies in China Today	TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM	Henning, Stefan	Gilman 313	Fall 2026	Description: On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide? Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 2/15 Tags: INST-CP, CES-LSO