Courses
The courses listed below are provided by Student Information Services (SIS). This listing provides a snapshot of immediately available courses within this department and may not be complete. Course registration information can be found at sis.jhu.edu/classes.
Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
- AS.070.135 - Freshman Seminar: Human Nature Under Capitalism
Think about the wide range of lives people lead today. Financial traders, stay-at-home parents, tech entrepreneurs, slum dwellers, corporate office drones, migrant workers, indebted college students. Our identities, aspirations, and anxieties are reflections of a capitalist system that has always relied on claims to what it means to be human. In this course we treat capitalism not as an abstraction for political debate but as a social force shaping the human lives and the planet. Departing from a conception of human nature not as fixed and universal but as formed by the totality of social relations, we explore how capital shapes human needs, desires, and relations to each other and the world.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.145 - Freshman Seminar: The Idea of America
This course takes an anthropological look at the idea of America and everyday American life. Relying on ethnographic studies, selected works of popular writing, as well as films and fiction, we will explore themes such as settlement and displacement, aspiration and advancement, racial and cultural difference.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Pandian, Anand
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.299 - From Palestine to the Pipeline: Land, Property, and Indigenous Politics
What are the ideas, histories, and forces that set the conditions of possibility and foreclosure of indigenous politics today? We will explore this question through then lens of property through readings from anthropology, political theory, history, and geography. As is well known, control over land (and its resources) has historically constituted the core of the struggle between settler and native. Within settler colonies, however, land is governed and regulated as property by the settler state. As such, the imagining, making, regulating, and exchanging of property all have important implications for indigenous territory and sovereignty. Focusing on North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine, this course considers the following questions: how did ideas about rights and ownership develop in settler colonies in relation to the native inhabitants? How did these ideas shape market relations, regulations, and property law? And how does indigenous land struggle navigate the constraints and possibilities of property in the struggle for territory?
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Kohlbry, Paul Andrew
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.317 - Methods
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
Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro, Haeri, Niloofar
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.070.209 - Urban CItizenship in Latin America
Latin American cities are among the largest in the world, but also among the most unequal. Significant proportions of the urban populations reside informally on the fringes of metropolitan areas without access to services or amenities, secure tenure, or adequate sanitary conditions. This course will study several ethnographies to examine the intricacies of the notion of "urban citizenship” and how the "right to the city" has been imagined, demanded and struggled for in Latin American cities. Cases will include Sao Paulo in Brazil, El Alto in Bolivia, or Bogota in Colombia.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.210 - Trauma: institutions, violence, and everyday life
How are catastrophe and forms of everyday violence responded to in the clinic, law, in publicity, and in the domestic? In this course, we ask how trauma discourse has transformed institutional responses to violence. We will engage such issues as humanitarian intervention, rape and the law, the use of trigger warnings on college campuses, the clinical description of trauma and its treatment. Through ethnography, fiction, and film, we explore how the subjective experience of violence moves beyond and pushes the limits of institutional discourses on trauma.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 12:00PM - 1:15PM, Th 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.210 - Trauma: institutions, violence, and everyday life
How are catastrophe and forms of everyday violence responded to in the clinic, law, in publicity, and in the domestic? In this course, we ask how trauma discourse has transformed institutional responses to violence. We will engage such issues as humanitarian intervention, rape and the law, the use of trigger warnings on college campuses, the clinical description of trauma and its treatment. Through ethnography, fiction, and film, we explore how the subjective experience of violence moves beyond and pushes the limits of institutional discourses on trauma.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 12:00PM - 1:15PM, Th 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.214 - Politics and Poetics of Mobility in Africa
This course considers a broad survey of contemporary themes in African mobility, displacement, and re-settlement. Drawing on historical, anthropological, and literary texts and film, the course uses mobility as a window into a range of topics that are of scholarly interest in contemporary African studies: from urbanization and labor, to violence, political subjectivity and the changing nature of the state, formal and informal economy, gender and domesticity, and religious movements.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: McGlennen, Emma Elizabeth
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Open - AS.070.113 - Freshman Seminar: Human Nature Under Captialism
Think about the wide range of lives people lead today. Financial traders, stay-at-home parents, tech entrepreneurs, slum dwellers, corporate office drones, migrant workers, indebted college students. Our identities, aspirations, and anxieties are reflections of a capitalist system that has always relied on claims to what it means to be human. In this course we treat capitalism not as an abstraction for political debate but as a social force shaping the human lives and the planet. Departing from a conception of human nature not as fixed and universal but as formed by the totality of social relations, we explore how capital shapes human needs, desires, and relations to each other and the world.
Credits: 2.00
Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Canceled - AS.070.207 - Resilience and its Critics: Change in Environment and Society
Resilience – the idea that environmental systems and social forms can be designed to “bounce back” from disasters and other disruptive changes – has influenced a rapidly growing range of sustainability policies, urban planning strategies, and academic disciplines. In some areas, though, the term signifies neoliberal reform and a shrinking state. This course will trace debates over the many practical and theoretical meanings of resilience, from its origins in military planning and security to its ambivalent connotations for climate change science and disaster preparedness.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ozden-schilling, Thomas
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.070.334 - Contemporary Anthropology
Students are invited to attend, for credit, the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester. Students are expected to attend and listen, encouraged to ask questions when they wish, and to write one brief reflection on contemporary trends in the field, based on what they have observed during these sessions.
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Pandian, Anand
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 4:00PM - 6:00PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.373 - Housing Matters
This course will collectively craft an anthropological critique of housing, both as a social concern and as an object of public policy and urban planning. As a key component of the structure and functioning of cities, housing is instrumental to urban governance, segregation, and citizenship, as well as to cultures of consumption and class formation, identities, solidarities and the imagination of alternative social orders. We will study several ethnographies to examine how the material and social effects of housing shape the politics of difference, rights, markets and property relations, consumption and activism in the US urban context.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.388 - Social Studies of the Biosciences
What is life? How do scientists shape and define this crucial concept, and for what uses? This course uses historical and anthropological accounts of the biological sciences to ask how the study of life is changing interactions with the world around and within us. In it, we will examine studies of synthetic biology, genetic engineering, genomics, biotechnology, biodiversity conservation, bioprospecting, medical biology, and artificial life. Guiding themes explore fundamental questions about biopower, biocapital, planetary change, bodies, and the nature of “life.” The course takes a global approach to the study of biology, including studies of bioscience and technology from the global South.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Staff
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.100.365 - Culture & Society in the High Middle Ages
This course will treat the flourishing of culture and society in the High Middle Ages (11-14th centuries). Topics covered include the emergence of feudal society and literature, the economic, social and cultural revival of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the growth of scholasticism and the University, and the development of feudal monarchies in England and France..
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Spiegel, Gabrielle M
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
Status: Open - AS.070.508 - Directed Readings
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Degani, Michael
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.562 - Senior Essay - Spring
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.504 - Independent Study
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.504 - Independent Study
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Guyer, Jane
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.508 - Directed Readings
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.465 - Concepts: How to Read Hindu and Islamic Texts
What is the nature of anthropological concepts and what relations do they bear to concepts internal to a society? We invite students to think with key ideas from Hindu and Islamic traditions, asking if anthropological concepts are best seen as abstractions from the particular or as intertwined with ongoing lines of inquiry, say into the nature of the real and continual efforts to test it? Topics in ritual theory, grammar, aesthetics, translation, revelation, luminosity, figuration and the mythological among those to be considered.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena, Khan, Naveeda
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: F 2:00PM - 4:30PM
Status: Open - AS.070.506 - Directed Research
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.562 - Senior Essay - Spring
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.552 - Internship - Spring
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.506 - Directed Research
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Degani, Michael
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.389.303 - World of Things
The course introduces and applies new concepts about materials, and materiality to museum objects. It treats the museum as a site for investigating the relationship between people and things.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.100.421 - Sex, Law and Islam
ISIS, “virgins” in paradise, the sexual slavery of Yazidi women…. This course will use anthropological and historical studies to examine the long history of how rules and understandings about sex, sexuality, and gender have mattered in how people think about Islam.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Khan, Naveeda, Shepard, Todd
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.100.365 - Culture & Society in the High Middle Ages
This course will treat the flourishing of culture and society in the High Middle Ages (11-14th centuries). Topics covered include the emergence of feudal society and literature, the economic, social and cultural revival of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the growth of scholasticism and the University, and the development of feudal monarchies in England and France..
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Spiegel, Gabrielle M
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
Status: Open - AS.070.552 - Internship - Spring
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Approval Required - AS.070.374 - What Does it Mean to be Religious?
What do we mean when we say that something or someone is “religious?” We unpack this question in a comparative approach, and pay special attention to the ways in which this term has been applied to the study of Islamic cultures and Muslim experience. Through an exploration of the categories of experience, creativity and the individual, we offer a more capacious way of imagining what it means to be religious.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar, Ziad, Homayra
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.070.419 - Logic of Anthropological Inquiry
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
Instructor: Poole, Deborah
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.070.126 - Photography in Anthropology
We will examine historical uses of photographs, critiques of them and more recent creative uptakes of photography in anthropology. We will learn from the use of photographs by anthropologists in the Hopkins department. We will also undertake independent projects. Students will learn to critically engage and mobilize images through the history of its use in anthropology.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Khan, Naveeda, Poole, Deborah
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.070.132 - Invitation to Anthropology
Click. The screen that brings you last night’s Instagrams and celebrity gossip also flashes glimpses of melting icecaps and burning rubble. These are complex times for human beings, both exciting and unsettling. This course introduces anthropology as a way of reflecting on the challenges of contemporary life around the globe, focusing on themes such as migration, warfare, ecology, inequality, and addiction.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Pandian, Anand
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: W 12:00PM - 1:15PM, F 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.070.267 - Culture, Religion and Politics in Iran
This is an introductory course for those interseted in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. The focus will be on culture and religion and the ways they in which they become interwoven into different kinds of political stakes.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: T 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.237 - Conflict and Environment
How do conflicts in and over environments shape our understandings of identity and belonging? Violence, resource loss, and resettlement may shape landscapes through physical infrastructures or sites of extraction, but they also live on in memory, art, and other social practices. From the fencing of the American west to attempts to save Andean glaciers through the legal recognition of “earth beings,” this course examines the many ways environments and conflict co-shape one another.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ozden-schilling, Thomas
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 3:00PM - 5:20PM
Status: Open - AS.070.295 - Conflict and Security in a Global World
Students will be introduced to problems of global governance in the context of transnational conflicts, changing nature of war, new epidemics and pandemics, and the threats of planetary extinction. What are the ways security is imagined and what kinds of political passions are mobilized for security of people versus security of states.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.070.143 - Anthropology of Markets
Capitalism is built on social and cultural processes. In this course, we explore the culture of capitalism across diverse settings — a fish market in Tokyo, an investment bank in Wall Street, and the organ donation economy in China, among many others. We ask what motivates the makers of markets today, as well as their critics.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ozden-schilling, Canay
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
Status: Open - AS.070.251 - Aliens, iPads, and Neurotribes: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Autism
This course is an overview of the emerging anthropology of autism. It surveys the history of the autism diagnosis -- from its original formulation at Johns Hopkins in 1943 to its rapid expansion into a "spectrum" condition in the late 1990s -- and the ways in which social scientists of different disciplines have tried to analyze the role of social and cultural factors in its evolution. The course also looks at a range of ethnographic studies that have asked what it means be autistic in today's world.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Platzer, David Lawrence
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MWF 9:00AM - 9:50AM
Status: Open - AS.070.273 - Ethnographies
What does it mean to translate the field onto the page? This course explores the craft of ethnography and its relationship to anthropological knowledge. Reading a series of classic and contemporary works, and engaging in our own writing experiments, we attend to the knotty problem of rendering lived experience, attending to narrative, voice, structure, and the relationship between description and analysis.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ozden-schilling, Thomas
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.070.281 - Home and Belonging
In this course we will examine different conceptions and experiences of "home" through studies of domesticity, kinship and household in diverse cultural settings. Reading anthropological analysis of urban built environment and locality, we will explore the notions of home and homeland, as realms of care, intimacy and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination and gender/racial inequality.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
Status: Open - AS.070.132 - Invitation to Anthropology
Click. The screen that brings you last night’s Instagrams and celebrity gossip also flashes glimpses of melting icecaps and burning rubble. These are complex times for human beings, both exciting and unsettling. This course introduces anthropology as a way of reflecting on the challenges of contemporary life around the globe, focusing on themes such as migration, warfare, ecology, inequality, and addiction.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Pandian, Anand
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: W 12:00PM - 1:15PM, F 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.070.359 - Korean War
This course takes the Korean War as a site to both explore: 1) contemporary historical and political transformations in East Asia and globally and 2) the ways in which violence, catastrophic loss, and separation are woven into everyday life. It will explore the Korean War through film, fiction, historiography, and draw on comparative materials in anthropology
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.070.372 - Religion and Media
This course examines the ways in which conventional and non-conventional media recreate or transform religious experience in modern life. Increasingly, religion is experienced not only in sacred spaces and as ritual prescriptions, but also through the information that is disseminated through radio, TV, and the Internet, as well as in consumer culture and political speeches. Beginning with this proposition that our ideas about religion are shaped not only by historical and scriptural legacies, but as well as by material practices and other sundry conditions of mediation, of which our present times supply many, we will reexamines how questions of revelation, belief, spirituality, ethereality, and ritual practice are constituted by these irreducible ways, thus complicating the neat separation of religion and secularism, or, for that matter, religion and culture.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Bagaria, Swayam
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.070.380 - Slumworld: Life in informal Settlements
One quarter of the planet's urban population lives today in slums, shantytowns, favelas, chawls, colonias and other forms of rudimentary settlements (according to UN Habitat). Despite their prevalence throughout the world, these places are still depicted as spaces of informality and abjection, rather than as sites of emergence of innovative -even if disadvantaged-, makeshift ways of producing the city. This course will combine ethnographic and geographical literature, as well as works of fiction and film to explore the lives of squatters and slum-dwellers in many regions of the world and examine in what way their practices, forms of dwelling, sociality, conflict and cooperation are constitutive of the urban experience.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Open - AS.070.436 - Vulnerability
Many in the contemporary world live in states of acute vulnerability. In this course, we will look closely at situations like forced displacement, experience of poverty and injury, environmental devastation, and the politics of social protest. Thinking with ethnography, feminist philosophy, fiction, and film, we will explore whether vulnerability may be taken as a condition to live with rather than one to overcome at any cost.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Pandian, Anand
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: Th 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Waitlist Only - AS.070.505 - Directed Research-Fall
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.561 - Senior Essay-Fall
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Guyer, Jane
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.136.101 - Introduction To Archaeology
An introduction to archaeology and to archaeological method and theory, exploring how archaeologists excavate, analyze, and interpret ancient remains in order to reconstruct how ancient societies functioned. Specific examples from a variety of archaeological projects in different parts of the world will be used to illustrate techniques and principles discussed.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Schwartz, Glenn M
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
Status: Open - AS.070.507 - Directed Readings
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Guyer, Jane
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.507 - Directed Readings
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.551 - Internship - Fall
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Guyer, Jane
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.561 - Senior Essay-Fall
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.503 - Independent Study
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.465 - Concepts and the Real in Hindu & Islamic Studies
We will examine historical uses of photographs, critiques of them and more recent creative uptakes of photography in anthropology. We will learn from the use of photographs by anthropologists in the Hopkins department. We will also undertake independent projects. Students will learn to critically engage and mobilize images through the history of its use in anthropology.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena, Khan, Naveeda
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: W 1:30PM - 3:50PM
Status: Canceled - AS.070.503 - Independent Study
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Guyer, Jane
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.561 - Senior Essay-Fall
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Goodfellow, Aaron
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.505 - Directed Research-Fall
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Cervone, Emma
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.215.406 - Novelist Intellectuals
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Seguin, Becquer D
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Status: Open - AS.070.551 - Internship-Fall
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
Term: Fall 2018
Meetings:
Status: Closed