ANTHR 2468

Medicine, Culture, and Society

This introductory lecture course serves both Anthropology and Biology & Society majors and typically enrolls about 100 students each year. Drawing a wide range of students interested in medicine and the biological sciences, the course examines philosophical, political, historical, and ethical questions raised by medicine. Many students describe the class as one that helped them think more critically about why they want to pursue careers in medicine.

ANTHR 3465 / 6465

Anthropology of the Body

This course contributes to the medicine and healing concentration in anthropology but also regularly attracts students from art, architecture, engineering, history, and other disciplines across campus. Students investigate ethnographic and historical materials concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire. The course explores how bodies and embodied experiences are shaped by culture, history, biology, technology, and ecology, and how concepts of bodily sovereignty shape contemporary politics.

ANTHR 4682 / 7682

Medicine and Healing in Africa

This course explores struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. Students examine the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and transformations of traditional medicine, and the changing relationships between medicine, science, and law. Readings trace how colonialism, nationalism, international development, environmental change, and globalization shape experiences of illness, care, debility, and death.

ANTHR 4435 / 7435

Postcolonial Science

This course examines how scientific knowledge and practice have shaped colonial dispossession and postcolonial development while also enabling diverse struggles to live otherwise. Students explore how scientists, policymakers, activists, and others mobilize science in service of different agendas. Discussions focus on the politics of knowledge production and challenge geopolitical divisions rooted in colonial imaginaries.

ANTHR 4442 / 7442

Toxicity

This course examines toxicity as a field of expertise, an object of knowledge, and an ethical substance shaping contemporary life. Students explore how medical and environmental sciences identify and manage toxic substances and how toxicity also informs activism and public policy. Readings investigate the historical development of toxicity as both a mechanism of governance and a catalyst for critique and resistance.

ANTHR 6465

Bodies and Bodiliness

This graduate seminar examines the body and bodiliness as sites of ethnographic engagement and theoretical inquiry. Students consider how “the body” as an epistemological and ontological object is shaped through scientific, economic, political, and theoretical projects. The course invites reflection on sensory experience, bodily capacity, and the broader anthropological questions of knowledge, authority, sovereignty, and material life.

ANTHR 6403

Ethnographic Research Design and Field Methods

This workshop-style seminar supports doctoral students as they design ethnographic research projects. Through discussions of ethnographic methods, epistemological questions, and ethical challenges, students develop research questions and methodological strategies for their dissertation projects. The course prepares second-year sociocultural anthropology students to write their first major research funding proposals.