Related Courses

GLBL 308/ECON 424

Introduction to the different roles and responsibilities of modern central banks, including the operation of payments systems, monetary policy, supervision and regulation, and financial stability. Discussion of different ways to structure central banks to best manage their responsibilities.

Fall 2024

MW 1pm-2:15pm

GLBL 394/EVST 422/ANTH 409/ER&M 394/F&ES 422

Discussion of the major currents of thought regarding climate and climate change; focusing on equity, collapse, folk knowledge, historic and contemporary visions, western and non-western perspectives, drawing on the social sciences and humanities.

Fall 2024

Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CLSS 847/HIST 508

An overview of recent work in paleoclimatology with an emphasis on new climate proxy records and how they are or can be used in historical analysis. We examine in detail several recent case studies at the nexus of climate and history. Attention is paid to critiques of recent work as well as trends in the field.

Fall 2024

T 9:25am-11:15am

HIST 244/HSHM 321

A survey of Western medicine and its global encounters, encompassing medical theory, practice, institutions, and healers from antiquity to the present. Changing concepts of health, disease, and the body in Europe and America explored in their social, cultural, economic, scientific, technological, and ethical contexts.

Fall 2024

W 7pm-7:50pm

HSHM 429

This seminar explores the effects of colonialism and post-colonial power relations on the production of scientific, medical, and embodied knowledge about psychiatry. First, we read debates over the geographies of power and distrust in medicine. How have colonialism and post-colonial power relations defined the tasks of non-European psychiatry? What does it mean to decolonize psychiatric practice or culture? Second, we examine the nature of rationality. Is reason singular, plural, or culturally bound or universal? To what extent is spirit possession a rational experience? Third, we explore the relationship between scientific representations, social practices, and local culture. What relationship exists between social practices and culturally shared categories of knowledge? Is psychiatry universalizable? Students learn to analyze and debate these questions by drawing on films, letters, photography, and monographs produced in and about Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China, Cuba, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Fall 2024

M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ANTH 621

This is the first course of a yearlong sequence for doctoral students in Anthropology and combined programs. Students are introduced to the discipline through theoretical, historical, and experimental approaches. In addition to gaining an expansive view of the field, students have the opportunity to hone foundational scholarly skills.

Fall 2024

W 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 130/HUMS 132/LITR 169

The epic tradition traced from its foundations in ancient Greece and Rome to the modern novel. The creation of cultural values and identities; exile and homecoming; the heroic in times of war and of peace; the role of the individual within society; memory and history; politics of gender, race, and religion. Works include Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing.

ANTH 530

This seminar for first- and second-year Ph.D. students in Anthropology runs in tandem with the department’s reinvigorated EST Colloquium. The colloquium consists of public presentations by cutting-edge speakers—four or five each term—selected and invited by students enrolled in the seminar. In the seminar, students and the instructor discuss selected works (generally no longer than article-length) related to the topics presented by the colloquium speakers and engage in planning activities associated with organizing the EST Colloquium, including but not limited to developing readings lists, creating a viable calendar, curating the list of speakers, securing co-sponsorships, writing invitations, and introducing and hosting the speakers.

Fall 2024

M 3:30pm-5:20pm

ITAL 337/ER&M 236/LITR 395/WGSS 364

Antifeminist critics charge the feminist movement with having forgotten “real women” in favor of inaccessible theories rejecting the supposedly incontrovertible fact that there are only two sexes and genders. This seminar turns the charge on its head by exploring a theoretical and literary canon that - by questioning the ontological status of the male/female binary - has transformed feminism into a capacious, radically inclusive, revolutionary 21st Century movement. The texts and the theories that we discuss put pressure on the very category of “woman” as they strive to rethink feminism as a non-identitarian world-making project. The class focuses on two movements that employ art and literature to push back against the idea of “women” as the monolithic subject of feminism: Italian vanguard modernism and Italophone literary postcolonialism. We discuss modernist and postcolonial novels, poems, essays, and performative art pieces together with classics of feminist, queer and postcolonial theory. We push our own political imagination further by asking ever more sophisticated questions about gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and the way these intersecting social formations mediate the way we see, experience, and represent our material and social reality. The course is taught entirely in English.

Fall 2024

HTBA

ANTH 753

This seminar explores the impact of feminist theory on anthropology and interdisciplinary ethnography, charting its influence from the decline of structural functionalism to the embrace of poststructuralist and post-colonial perspectives. It engages feminist contributions on pivotal debates over the universality of women’s subordination, the denaturalization of kinship, and the reframing of gender and sexuality as performative, highlighting the intersection of the “sex/gender system” with other analytical categories on a global scale. Through the feminist reevaluation of kinship studies, once the bedrock of anthropology, the course takes up how traditional analyses of biological, social, and societal reproduction that treat politics, economy, kinship, and religion as distinct cultural domains naturalize power and inequality. This paradigm shift inspired empirically informed interdisciplinary analyses across the social sciences and humanities—including in women’s studies, Black and Latina studies, queer studies, masculinity studies, affect theory, and science and technology studies. As such, the seminar is also an invitation to participate in both hopeful and skeptical new visions of anthropology—to dream of an “otherwise” future for our and other fields.

Fall 2024

W 1:30pm-3:20pm

GLBL 203/PLSC 186

Examination of the political and institutional conditions that explain why some politicians and interest groups (e.g. lobbies, unions, voters, NGOs) prevail over others in crafting foreign policy. Consideration of traditional global economic exchange (trade, monetary policy and finance) as well as new topics in the international political economy (IPE), such as migration and environmental policy.

CLSS 811/HIST 523/HSHM 758

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the history and study of ancient Greek and Graeco-Roman medicine, beginning with the development of “Hippocratic” medical texts in Classical Greece; these writings are set in dialogue with earlier Babylonian and Egyptian medical traditions. In addition to Hellenistic Alexandria, where anatomical research on the human body flourished, the seminar examines the works of the doctor and philosopher Galen of Pergamon. We conclude in Late Antique Alexandria, where traditions of Graeco-Roman medicine, repackaged as “Galenism,” begin a multi-century, cross-cultural journey into the medieval world. Throughout the course we consider: medical theories of human difference, regimen, gynecology and reproductive labor, pulse science, temple medicine and healing cults, anatomy and dissection, zoology, theories of contagion and epidemic, and natural philosophy. Classics students enrolled in the course are asked to read some texts in ancient Greek. However, knowledge of ancient Greek is not required for enrollment, and we welcome and encourage students with interests in the history of medicine and science beyond the Graeco-Roman world.

Fall 2024

M 3:30pm-5:20pm