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.070.113 - 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.070.145 - 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.070.210 - 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: 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: Open - 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.070.210 - 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: Open - 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: Open - 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.070.214 - 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.070.334 - 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: Open - 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: Open - 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.070.508 - Directed Readings
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Degani, Michael
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.552 - Internship - Spring
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - 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.070.552 - Internship - Spring
Credits: 1.00
Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.271.405 - Energy and Politics
In the 21st century, energy supply and consumption are critical subjects for international politics, social development, and the future of the environment. Policies that determine energy supply and consumption come to being in complex institutional, national, and international contexts. This course will equip students with the necessary background to analyze energy policy issues and contribute to them in a meaningful manner. It also involves examination of wide-ranging debates over the switch to renewables, the use of unconventional energy sources, and the environmental consequences of energy choices.
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Ozden-Schilling, Canay
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
Status: Open - AS.070.562 - Senior Essay - Spring
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.504 - Independent Study
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Guyer, Jane
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.506 - Directed Research
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Degani, Michael
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - 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: Closed - 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.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.100.365 - 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.070.388 - Anthropology 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: Labruto, Nicole
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
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.070.504 - Independent Study
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.508 - Directed Readings
Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Instructor: Han, Clara
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed - AS.070.562 - Senior Essay - Spring
Credits: 3.00
Instructor: Das, Veena
Term: Spring 2019
Meetings:
Status: Closed