Featured Anthropology Courses

This class will review the social systems and behavior of our closest living relatives, the primates. The course will be divided into two parts. Part 1 will introduce the biology and behavior of lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, monkeys, and apes. It will cover important aspects of their life histories, their social systems, and their reproduction, such as dominance and aggression, mating and parenting, predation, feeding strategies, and social relationships. Part 2 will focus on primate cognition, including their communication and problem-solving abilities and their analogs of culture. The class will draw heavily on field studies of primates, and emphasize their behavior in natural environmental and social settings.

Birth in the U.S. is highly medicalized,often surgical, and marked by highrates of infant and maternalmortality—especially for birthingpeople of color.In this class, we’ll look at pregnancyand birth practices in the U.S. andaround the world to understand whatmakes the U.S. system so different,how it came to be the way it is, andhow we might improve birth by learningfrom other communities and birthsystems.

This co-taught seminar brings multiple anthropological perspectives to bear on death as a universal human experience with profound cultural, biological, social, and linguistic dimensions. Through weekly discussions of curated readings, we’ll critically engage diverse theoretical frameworks as we explore topics including mortuary practices, skeletal biology, taphonomy, ancestor veneration, memorialization, grief, and the evolution of death-related behaviors across human societies. Students will also gain practical experience in interdisciplinary collaboration and public scholarship through collaborative planning of our annual Four Field Symposium, designed to showcase cutting-edge research by our own community on death and dying and celebrate the breadth of our department’s scholarship.

Why do monuments matter? Do monuments matter? Why and when are monuments contested, altered, or taken down? In this course, we will examine the politics of history and public memory by analyzing contested monuments, buildings, landscapes, and places. We will question why and how certain pasts are valorized and memorialized while others are silenced, repressed, and forgotten. To answer these questions, we will explore comparative case studies including the debate over US confederate monuments, the fate of socialist monuments after the fall of the USSR, and ongoing conflict over violent histories and repressed memories of minority communities in Turkey, with a focus on the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Students will engage with anthropological and historical scholarship as well as visual material, memoirs, journalism, and documentaries.

Our futures seem increasingly digital. From politics to work, from romance to family, people around the world are grappling with how digital media technologies seep into the nooks and crannies of their everyday lives. The dominance of the digital both provokes panic about the harmful corporate and political forces they are unleashing and inspires hope about the capacity of activists to create better futures. In either case, the emphasis is on the power of technology. But how do communities and social movements around the world think and do about digital media’s promises or perils? This course goes beyond both the hysteria and the hype to examine the global social life and futures of digital technologies.

What assumptions about self and society do technology workers and corporations encode as universally valid and “culture-free”? What role do media play in shaping our collective sense of what is beautiful, true, or just? How are digital technologies implicated in shoring up racist systems or in creating space for resisting them? How is AI enabling ethno-nationalism and state violence against minorities around the world?

Each week, we answer these questions through reading about concrete case studies from a wide array of global contexts, from the Philippines to Iran to India as well as the United States, and by viewing and discussing documentaries about media worlds and experiences. Throughout, we explore what an anthropological, people-centered approach offers to understand our digital futures.