Fall 2025 Undergrad Courses
- Lilly Nelson
ANT 111 M001 - Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Instructor: Kyrstin Mallon Andrews
Time/Location: M/W 2:15-3:10 Watson Theater
Course Description:
This course is designed to introduce you to the field of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists study the diversity of human beliefs and practices across the world. At the heart of anthropological approaches is the question: What does it mean to be human? Cultural anthropology seeks to answer this question across different historical, social, political, and environmental contexts.
ANT 112 M001 - Introduction to African American Studies
Instructor: Joan Bryant
Time/Location: M 12:45-2:05 HBC Hall KITT
Course Description:
The course introduces central themes that comprise the interdisciplinary subject of African American Studies. It places the study of North Americans of African descent in a broader context that considers connections to the African continent and to other people of the African Diaspora. This framework enables students to explore common and divergent experiences and identities among varied Black populations. (Crosslisted with AAS 112. Contact the Department of African American Studies for more info)
ANT 121 M001 - Peoples and Cultures of the World
Instructor: Jok M. Jok
Time/Location: M/W 10:35-11:30 Physics Building STOLK
Course Description:
The course will provide students with an introduction to ethnographic inquiry and a survey of the wide diversity of humanity and human cultures. We will examine the numerous dimensions by which human cultures vary, including economy and subsistence, family formation, religion, language, political structure, gender relations, state formation, and many more. Students will encounter a number of different populations around the world, learning about their unique customs and ways of life.
ANT 141 M001 - Introduction to Archaeology and Prehistory
Instructor: Christopher DeCorse
Time/Location: M/W 12:45-1:40 Grant Auditorium
Course Description:
This course surveys the techniques used by anthropologists to examine the past and some of the major questions that have been the focus of anthropological research, including: human origins, the initial settlement of the Americas, the shift to domestication, and the rise of the state and civilization. It will discuss the evidence for the behavior and lifestyle of early human ancestors, compare and contrast different theories, and discuss the evidence and origins for complex civilizations in different world areas.
ANT 185 M001 - Global Encounters
Instructor: Lauren Woodard
Time/Location: M/W 11:40-12:35 Maxwell Hall Auditorium
Course Description:
Throughout human history, different societies have encountered one another through travel, exchange, war, colonialism, and globalization. This course turns our attention to everyday dynamics of various encounters, including moments of solidarity (connection, friendship, and alliance) and of discord (misunderstanding, conflict, isolation, and even war). We utilize the methods and perspectives of anthropology to address contemporary social problems and understand relationships between culture, power, and identities that influence global encounters.
ANT 200 M001 - Martial Arts in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Selected Topics)
Instructor: Fethi Keles
Time/Location: M 5:15-8:00 Online Synchronous
Course Description:
Cross-cultural examination of martial arts in different societies. Studies of sports, entertainment, spirituality, performance, tradition, innovation, discipline, authority, identity, heritage, and gender in the world of kung fu, karate, taekwondo, wrestling, boxing, and other martial forms.
ANT 273 M001 - Indigenous Religions
Instructor: Phillip J. Arnold
Time/Location: Tu/Th 8:00-9:20 Eggers Hall 018
Course Description:
The connections between material life and religious life in cultures throughout the world. The diverse ways that various cultures inhabit their landscapes. (Crosslisted with NAT 244 & REL 244. Contact the Department of Religion for more info)
ANT 300 M001 - Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the United States
Instructor: Fethi Keles
Time/Location: W 5:15-8:00 Online Synchronous
Course Description:
Explores the experiences of refugees and asylees in the United States in recent times. Surveys refugee resettlement, asylum seeking, transnational practices, adaptation, social networks, citizenship, host-guest relations, family dynamics, subsistence, and identity formation, among other topics.
ANT 300 M002 - Archaeology of Disease and Healing
Instructor: Julia Jong Haines
Time/Location: Tu/Th 8:00-9:20 Maxwell Hall 205A
Course Description:
Archaeology contributes to our understanding of health, disease, healing, and care through two perspectives: 1) archaeologists study the culturally specific healing knowledge and health systems of past societies, and 2) archaeological science, together with Euro-Western medical concepts, is used to understand changes in human and environmental health and disease over time. For examples, archaeologists approach the body and life cycle through human remains, as well as through the archaeology of daily life in the past. This course engages with both methodological perspectives through a range of topics and case studies, with a strong emphasis on the former.
ANT 311 M001 - Anthropological Theory
Instructor: Robert Rubinstein
Time/Location: Tu/Th 2:00-3:20 Life Sciences 200
Course Description:
This course intends to familiarize students with the history of the anthropological thought. Major, often competing, approaches in anthropological theory from the 19th century to the present are reviewed. Our approach is roughly chronological, with two important caveats. First, theoretical traditions overlap and compete. Second, many “older” approaches have current (although modified) expressions. This course is designed to follow theoretical approaches from their origins to their current expressions.
ANT 323 M001 - Peoples and Cultures of North America
Instructor: Heather Law Pezzarossi
Time/Location: Tu/Th 12:30-1:50 Shaffer Art Building 203
Course Description:
This course is an interdisciplinary regional exploration of Indigenous persistence in North America. It celebrates the vast diversity of people, cultures, and languages Indigenous to the continent. The course puts particular emphasis on the complexity of the relationships that Indigenous people have with the unique plants, animals, landscapes, and rhythms of their ancestral homelands. The course emphasizes both changes and continuity in the successful maintenance of those relationships through centuries of settler colonial genocide, ecocide, and devastating land loss. (Crosslisted with NAT 323)
ANT 345 M001 - Cyborgs, Aliens, and Other Worlds
Instructor: Guido Pezzarossi
Time/Location: M/W 3:45-5:05 HBC Hall 213A
Course Description:
This course provides students a rigorous engagement with anthropological and archaeological concepts, ideas, perspectives, and critiques via the medium of science fiction novels, short stories, and film. The intersections of anthropology and science fiction are many, as both investigate and think through issues around the understanding and making sense of cultural difference, and both emerged as products of Western colonial expansion in the early modern period that brought issues of radical difference, definitions of humanity, and expansion of known human (and biological) diversity to the fore of popular and scientific thought.
ANT 346 M001 - Gender in the Past
Instructor: Theresa Singleton
Time/Location: Tu/Th 9:30-10:50 Lyman Hall 115B
Course Description:
Analyzing gender in archaeology is a perplexing problem because of the difficulty of interpreting gender from material culture--the tangible products of human life. How gender is defined varies through time and space. In this course, we examine how gender has been constructed and interpreted in archaeological studies of periods prior to the advent of writing often referred to as “prehistory” and periods or ages after the advent of writing, including the recent past. This course examines how people understand gender intellectually as well as how it was practiced and performed in the construction of identity.
ANT 357 M001 - Health, Healing, and Culture
Instructor: Jok M. Jok
Time/Location: M/W 12:45-2:05 Maxwell Hall 205A
Course Description:
This course provides an introduction to the field of medical anthropology. Medical anthropology examines beliefs, practices, and experiences of illness, health, and healing from a cross-cultural perspective. It explores how illness, health, medicine, and the body are shaped by social relationships and cultural values at the local level of the family and community, at the level of the nation-state, and at global and international levels. The course examines medical/healing knowledge systems and practices--including biomedicine--as socio-cultural phenomena.
ANT 373 M001 - Magic and Religion
Instructor: Amanda Hilton
Time/Location: Tu/Th 11:00-12:20 Life Sciences 105
Course Description:
This course uses anthropological and social scientific scholarship, lectures, discussion, and films to help students explore some of the ways human communities around the world deal with, profess, find meaning in, motivate themselves and others with, and maintain and transmit social order through entanglements with the supernatural world. The course also provides a number of conceptual tools which will help students develop a fine-tuned perspective on spiritual and religious beliefs and practices that may be different from their own, and introduces them to some of the foundational concepts and methodological practices of cultural anthropology.
ANT 400 M001 - Artificial Intelligence
Instructor: Mona Bhan
Time/Location: M/W 12:45-2:05 Hall of Languages 111
Course Description:
Adopts an anthropological approach to the emerging sociotechnological phenomenon of artificial intelligence weaponry. It explores how AI weapons systems are refiguring geopolitical alliances, modes of border and community surveillance, and conceptions of humanity, human rights, and accountability.
ANT 400 M002 - War Ecologies
Instructor: Azra Hromadžić
Time/Location: M 2:15-5:00 Maxwell Hall 205A
Course Description:
Thinking beyond “war itself” to pay attention to forms of war that are often unrecognized as such - in everyday experiences, material effects, and affective resonances of violence that have penetrated and contaminated the environments and ecologies of places.
ANT 400 M003 - Caribbean Mobilities
Instructor: Kyrstin Mallon Andrews
Time/Location: Tu/Th 12:30-1:50 Smith Hall 337
Course Description:
The Caribbean has long been a crossroads of mobility and migration between the Americas, Europe, and Africa. This course examines the cultures, politics, and socio-economics of Caribbean mobilities both within the region and outward-bound through the perspective of anthropological and ethnographic studies. We will explore historical and contemporary mobility through the themes of legal and carceral politics, religion and magic, multispecies encounters, tourism, health, and changing climates.
ANT 424 M001 - Negotiation: Theory and Practice
Instructor: Robert Rubinstein
Time/Location: W 5:15-8:00 Hall of Languages 214
Course Description:
This course is a general introduction to the theory of negotiation and to the skills associated with successful negotiation practices. Each student will have an opportunity to develop their own capacities to be a more proficient and successful negotiator. In this course students examine negotiation theory, learn negotiation skills, and gain experience by practice. They subject that practice to criticism and reflection. The course takes students from simple two-person negotiations through more complex multi-party negotiations. The course considers the fundamental aspects of negotiation, the tension between distributive and integrative negotiation, and the importance of preparation.
ANT 433 M001 - Human Osteology
Instructor: Shannon Novak
Time/Location: Tu/Th 2:00-3:20 Lyman Hall 406
Course Description:
The study of human skeletal remains is a crucial component of biological anthropology that has applications in archaeology, paleontology, and forensics. Remains recovered from these contexts are often incomplete, fragmentary, or commingled, making it necessary to identity elements, or separate individuals, based on minute anatomical details. This course provides an intensive introduction to the human skeleton, emphasizing the identification of fragmentary skeletal elements and their osseous structure. The ability to accurately and precisely identify human remains is the fundamental skill in human osteology, and a prerequisite to all subsequent analyses. To this end, students will need to spend a significant amount of time in the laboratory working with the teaching collection.
ANT 434 M001 - Anthropology of Death
Instructor: Shannon Novak
Time/Location: M/W 12:45-2:05 Maxwell Hall 205A
Course Description:
We will begin with some of the classic works by social anthropologists and compare these to more recent ethnographic studies, gaining a comparative perspective on death and its effects on the living. In the process, we will learn how bodies are especially powerful symbols that elicit a visceral reaction from the living, and about the veneration and violation of bodies and their deployment in political and public arenas. From here we will turn to the materials and materiality of death. Though archaeologists have been especially interested in death because their work involves the excavation of objects from the distant past, social anthropologists have also explored the symbolic connotations of cemeteries, graves, and dead bodies. Whether past or present, anthropologists are increasingly interested in “materiality,” or the complex network of humans, things, and performances involved in embodied memories, social action, and (re)enchantment of wider worlds.
ANT 438 M001 - Beyond the Biological Need to Eat
Instructor: Guido Pezzarossi
Time/Location: Tu/Th 11:00-12:20 Lyman Hall 115B
Course Description:
Food is a critical part of our daily life, one of the most obvious biological demands of our bodies. In turn, our need for food catalyzes innumerable demands of our environments, our communities, and of ourselves. This course focuses on interdisciplinary archaeological and anthropological approaches to the study of food as a critical analytical dimension for holistic explorations of past and present lifeways. In addition to the social aspects of food, this course will also explore the material and technical aspects of food production and preparation techniques and associated archaeological methods of analyzing past foodways.
ANT 444 M001 - Laboratory Analysis in Archaeology
Instructor: Julia Jong Haines
Time/Location: Tu 2:00-4:45, Lyman Hall 411A
Course Description:
This course familiarizes students with work in an archaeological laboratory. A large part of that work is gaining experience working with archaeological materials. For this class, we will focus our attention on the archaeology of/in the modern world (post 1500 AD), with a particular concentration on the emergent entanglements, inequalities, and materialities related to European colonialism. You will learn how to conduct yourself in a laboratory and about theoretical and methodological concerns in archaeological analysis, concerning typology and interpretation. Through a hands-on and careful study of the diagnostic attributes and material properties of common materials and trade items, you will begin to understand how a collection of often broken and fragmentary objects can evidence histories yet untold.
ANT 459 M001 - Contemporary Native North American Issues
Instructor: Heather Law Pezzarossi
Time/Location: Tu/Th 9:30-10:50 Maxwell Hall 108
Course Description:
This course closely examines the Indigenous political landscape and the debates therein. The main objective of this class is to understand the lasting legacies of settler colonial violence on Indigenous lands, communities, and bodies, and the theoretical and practical approaches being taken toward restorative justice, sovereignty, and decolonization in communities across North America. We focus on land by studying the impacts of land dispossession, the role of treaties, the relationship between Indigenous conceptions of land stewardship and extractive industrial capitalism, and the role of TEK and stewardship in healing and sovereignty. We focus on corporeal violence by studying the legacies of scientific racism in the quantification of Indigenous women’s bodies, the physical legacies of that trauma, and the long-term implications of state sponsored food assistance programs on Indigenous health. We focus on decolonization here with discussions of healing, rematriation, Indigenous feminism, and food sovereignty. (Crosslisted with NAT 659)
ANT 481 M001 - Ethnographic Techniques
Instructor: Amanda Hilton
Time/Location: M/W 2:15-3:35 Smith Hall 337
Course Description:
This course will introduce students to the ethnographic approaches and methodologies through focused readings alongside a project where students will apply ethnographic techniques throughout the semester. It provides a foundation for understanding historical and contemporary contexts of ethnographic research, as well as the ethical questions raised in the process of conducting research alongside communities impacted by colonialism, unequal relations of power, environmental injustices, and intergenerational traumas. This course will explore the practice of ethnographic research while simultaneously analyzing ethnography as a form of knowing and representing knowledge.