2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

ANTH 101 Intro to Cultural Anthropology
This course is a comprehensive introduction to how cultural anthropologists study culture and society in diverse contexts. We will use ethnographic case studies from across the world to examine the ways people experience and transform social relationships and culture in areas including families, gender, ethnicity, health, religion, exchange, science, and even what it means to be a person. We will examine how culture and society are embedded within, shape, and are shaped by forces of economics, politics, and environment. Offered every semester.

AFST 220 Global Eastern Africa
Cross-listed with ANTH 255-01. This course examines global connections in the intersections of culture and power that underlie contemporary issues in eastern Africa. The globally marketed indigenous cultures and exotic landscapes of eastern Africa, like current dilemmas of disease and economic development, are products of complex local and transnational processes (gendered, cultural, social, economic, and political) that developed over time. To understand ethnicity, the success or failure of development projects, the social and economic contexts of tourism, responses to the AIDS crisis, the increasing presence of multinational corporations, and other contemporary issues, we will develop an ethnographic perspective that situates cultural knowledge and practice in colonial and postcolonial contexts. While our focus is on eastern Africa, the course will offer students ways to think about research and processes in other contexts.

ANTH 255 Global Eastern Africa
Cross-listed with AFST 220-03.

ANTH 345 The Future in Ruins
Distress in our world raises pressing questions about the future. What will it be like? Is it singular? Who gets to shape futures? How do futures relate to what came before, and to what exists now? Possible futures permeate people's world-building efforts. Crafted in relational presents, futures also reside amid the ruins of varied pasts. We will examine how future-making embodies hoped for futures across cultures in the present and past and in our own lives. Our pursuit will include architecture, built environments, landscapes, art, and social networks. We will explore how various agents collaborate in future-worlds, including other forms of life, materials, technologies, and milieus. We will also study temporal dimensions of future-making, and how the things humans help create constantly experience unmaking. From these lessons we will collaborate to imagine new world-building possibilities and implications for ethnographies of the future.

Spring 2026

ANTH 101 Intro to Cultural Anthropology
This course is a comprehensive introduction to how cultural anthropologists study culture and society in diverse contexts. We will use ethnographic case studies from across the world to examine the ways people experience and transform social relationships and culture in areas including families, gender, ethnicity, health, religion, exchange, science, and even what it means to be a person. We will examine how culture and society are embedded within, shape, and are shaped by forces of economics, politics, and environment. Offered every semester.

AFST 256 Health & Healing in Africa
Cross-listed with ANTH 256-01.

ANTH 256 Health & Healing in Africa
Cross-listed with AFST 256-01.

ANTH 345 Life and the Anthropocene
Cross-listed with ARCH 345-02. Increased attention to human influences on Earth's climates and geology has given rise to a much-discussed Anthropocene epoch. Whether we locate the start of the epoch thousands of years ago with the origins of agriculture, with the industrial revolution, or more recently with nuclear bomb technologies, we can understand the label through rapid successions of record high temperatures and severe weather events, polar ice melts and rising sea levels, and astonishing numbers of extinctions, all of which play out in disparate ways across the globe. These changes call for new ways to understand how humans live in the world. In this course we examine what it means to be human in these times, and how people live in mutual and dynamic relationships with technologies, environments, and other species in ways that shape these processes and that are shaped by them. Our organizing frame will be ethnography, with examples drawn from throughout the world. Sustainability will be a persistent question during the semester.

ARCH 345 Life and the Anthropocene
Cross-listed with ANTH 345-02. Increased attention to human influences on Earth's climates and geology has given rise to a much-discussed Anthropocene epoch. Whether we locate the start of the epoch thousands of years ago with the origins of agriculture, with the industrial revolution, or more recently with nuclear bomb technologies, we can understand the label through rapid successions of record high temperatures and severe weather events, polar ice melts and rising sea levels, and astonishing numbers of extinctions, all of which play out in disparate ways across the globe. These changes call for new ways to understand how humans live in the world. In this course we examine what it means to be human in these times, and how people live in mutual and dynamic relationships with technologies, environments, and other species in ways that shape these processes and that are shaped by them. Our organizing frame will be ethnography, with examples drawn from throughout the world. Sustainability will be a persistent question during the semester.

ANTH 495 Senior Thesis
Senior anthropology majors who qualify with a cumulative GPA of 3.7 or higher by the end of the junior year and are approved by the department as honors candidates can take this course during the spring semester of their senior year. This course involves writing a senior thesis based on original research such as fieldwork or laboratory research substantively beyond what students complete in ANTH 400, and the thesis is the primary consideration for departmental honors.Prerequisite: ANTH 400.

ARCH 495 Senior Thesis
Senior archaeology majors who qualify with a cumulative GPA of 3.7 or higher by the end of the junior year and are approved by the department as honors candidates can take this course during the spring semester of their senior year. This course involves writing a senior thesis based on original research such as fieldwork or laboratory research substantively beyond what students complete in ARCH 400, and the thesis is the primary consideration for departmental honors.Prerequisite: 400.