Graduate Courses

Browse our current semester course offerings.

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Fall 2024 Course Offerings

APY 514SEM: Museum Management

Reg. #20632
Wednesday, 12:30-3:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Edith Gonzalez

This course is designed to provide a foundation in museum management - in both its operations and administrative mechanics and the hierarchies and power structures that shape critical museum discourse. Museums are undergoing tremendous transformations, especially in terms of the use, care, and representation of their collections and in respect to reaching increasingly diverse audiences. What was founded as a place of expert research, selective social access, and local/national significance is evolving into a place of both greater reach and frequent cultural and political frictions. The goal of this course is to give you a sense of the tensions between the museum’s traditional operations and obligations and the needs to adjust these principles to demands for museums as equitable platforms of knowledge exchange. Through lectures, guest speakers, group work, and discussions this course provides foundational knowledge on principles of museum management and applies it to important museum management case studies.

APY 521SEM: Language, Culture, and Power

Reg. #18324
Tuesday, 2:00-4:40pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Deborah Reed-Danahay

This seminar introduces students to the field of anthropological linguistics. The relationship between language, culture, and power will be the major focus. We will explore the importance of language and speech in ethnographic research, including topics such as the ethnography of speaking, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, gender, and issues in the study of dominant and minority languages.

APY 547SEM : Behavioral Research Methods

Reg. #23159
Tuesday/Thursday, 2:00-3:20pm
106 Baldy Hall
Dr. Stephanie Poindexter

Behavioral Research Methods provides students with first-hand experience in all of the steps involved to conduct scientific research: developing a research question, selecting appropriate observation methods, collecting data, and summarizing their findings in a written report and formal scientific presentation. This is a writing intensive course, and students will be expected to submit various sections of their research report throughout the course.

APY 572LEC: Quaternary Paleoenvironments

Reg. #23174
Tuesday, 3:30-6:10pm
109 Baldy Hall
Dr. Albert Fulton

Topic: Quaternary Paleoenvironments and Vegetation Change

This course introduces the techniques used to study past environments and examines records of paleoenvironmental and paleoecological change during the last 2.6 million years of Earth history, the Quaternary Period. A time of profound climatic and environmental dynamism, the Quaternary witnessed the waxing and waning of continental ice sheets, the formation of glacial landscapes, dramatic sea-level changes, mass extinctions, biogeographic shifts, and the evolution and dispersal of Homo sapiens

APY 587SEM: Indigenous Paleoecology

Reg. #21769
Thursday, 3:30-6:10pm
330 Cooke Hall
Dr. Albert Fulton

This course explores the way Indigenous peoples of eastern North America interacted with and were in turn influenced by the ecological systems within which they lived, from the end of the last Ice Age to the present. During this 11,700-year-long period of time known as the Holocene epoch, the ecosystems of eastern North America responded in complex ways to multiple (a)biotic environmental modulators including climate perturbations, species migrations and extinctions, soil genesis and development, natural disturbance agents such as fire and storms, and human land-use impacts related to changing settlement systems and the adoption of novel subsistence economies. Human societies were in turn influenced by the regional diversity of and temporal variability in environmental contexts, which provided multiple dynamic pathways for cultural innovation and adaptation across space and time.

By developing greater awareness of critical interactions among Indigenous Americans, the natural environment, and past climate change, we can develop more nuanced perspectives on how best to respond to current and future climatic and ecological transformations affecting all of humanity. This course will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students with interests in environmental science, physical geography, archaeology, Indigenous studies, biogeography, paleontology, paleoecology, historical ecology, environmental history, and human-environment interactions. Students seeking interdisciplinary perspectives on addressing paleoenvironmental reconstruction in their own research will especially benefit from this course.

APY 593SEM: Loneliness, Health and Resilience

Reg. #23175
Monday, 1:00-3:40pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Meghana Joshi

Topic: Loneliness, Health and Resilience 

The WHO Commission on Social Connection recognizes loneliness as a global public health priority and proposes to measure and address loneliness across ages, regions, and circumstances. The U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in his book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World makes a similar case for how loneliness affects health and our ability to function in various spheres of life. It’s been 5 years since the United Kingdom appointed a loneliness minister to address the “epidemic” of loneliness and connect people to social services. Clearly loneliness is increasingly recognized as a public health concern, not primarily a condition that affects an individual, rather a condition of society. Loneliness then is a diagnostic of interpersonal, social, familial, and institutional relationships, structures, and interactions.

In this course, we will explore multifaceted concepts, expressions, and experiences of loneliness in different parts of the world. Loneliness—what it is, how it is felt, what it is called—is socio-culturally and subjectively shaped. We approach loneliness not only as pathology or as something inherently negative. Rather, it is expected part of life and signals a desire to be recognized. We also distinguish between afflictive and non-afflictive loneliness and make further distinctions between despair, existential angst, suffering and political violence. Thus, some aspects of loneliness are part of the human condition, and all intervention cannot be reduced to medication. Intervention lies in acknowledging social factors and individual attitudes as well as cognition and mental health.

We look at research from across Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, parts of Asia and Africa to explore lack of recognition, being unneeded, disconnection, liminality, and displacement. Simultaneously we also explore emergent forms of care and resilience as well as belonging. While loneliness can mean different things to different people, it is hardly ever expressed using the term loneliness. As social scientists, our aim is to arrive at various experiences and expressions of loneliness inductively to provide a commentary on prevailing political and economic conditions of discrimination.   

APY 604SEM: Culture and Disability

Reg. #23173
Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:50pm
354 Academic Center
Dr. Frederick Klaits

This course is an introduction to disability studies, an integrative subfield representing research by medical anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and historians, as well as clinical and social interventions by social workers, occupational and physical therapists, and public health agents. What unifies these disciplines is the search for understanding of societal and cross-cultural attitudes and policies regarding impairment, illness, and difference, especially those whose physical or behavioral differences have been stigmatized through negative social or medical labels.

Among the topics to be considered are the meanings and perceptions of impairment in various cultures and how these perceptions influence the rights and status of people living with disability. We will look at how individuals and their families experience disability, severe injury, stigmatized illnesses, and severe trauma and come to develop new identities through these experiences. And we will consider community support systems and government policies that positively or negatively affect traumatized and disabled individuals and their families.

APY 614LEC: Hominin Behavior

Reg. #21723
Wednesday, 4:30-7:10pm
354 Academic Center
Dr. Stephen Lycett

There can be few greater challenges to science than studying the behavior of a long-dead animal. This is especially the case with studying hominin behavior. Yet, this challenge must be met if we are to understand our behavioral origins and heritage. Today, only one species of hominin exists: Homo sapiens. An absence of closely related hominin taxa leaves us with a limited range of potential models that we might look to for inspiration. For instance, do chimpanzees provide clues or should we look to modern hunter-gatherers? Does psychology provide an answer? Do we need to look to evolutionary theory? Can experiments be of assistance in a fundamentally historical science?With stone tools and the debris of their manufacture comprising much of our basic primary data, what hope is there for a rigorous science of hominin behavior?

History shows that the field is subject to wild speculations. For instance, Neanderthals are sometimes portrayed as close brethren who would not evoke response if encountered on the New York subway (at least if dressed in a business suit, so the story goes). At other times they have been portrayed as fundamentally different in behavior and intelligence from our own species. Which is it?

APY 651LEC: Graduate Survey of Physical Anthropology

Reg. #15141
Monday, 12:30-3:10pm
158 Spaulding Quad
Dr. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel

This course is designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field of biological anthropology. Here we will review topics such as evolutionary theory, basic genetics, the evolution of the primates, human evolution, modern human diversity, the evolution of cognition and language, human social behavior, and the impacts of health and disease. The course will be taught via a mixture of lectures, class discussions and practical exercises.

APY 652LEC: Graduate Survey of Archaeology

Reg. #12398
Thursday, 9:30am-12:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Timothy Chevral

The purpose of this course is to highlight multiple regions in the “Old World” – Africa, Eurasia, and the Pacific. We will spend some time looking at early ancestors, and then move into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, as well as other parallel eras that have different names in different regions.

APY 655LEC: Graduate Survey of Social Anthropology

Reg. #15431
Tuesday, 9:30am-12:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Jaume Franquesa

This seminar is designed to give first year graduate students a basic grounding in classic social theory developed in Britain and the United States between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. APY 655 is the first in a two-part survey of theory in socio-cultural anthropology. The second half (APY654), taught in the spring semester, covers subsequent developments. Our emphasis will be on the ways in which classic social theory can be used as a tool to help illuminate contemporary issues in anthropology.

APY 733SEM: Analytical Methods in Archaeology

Reg. #23176
Wednesday, 9:00-11:40am
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Colin Quinn

Topic: Geospatial Archaeology

This course examines the importance of place and space in human societies. We will explore the deep histories of economic, social, political, and ritual landscapes, and the tools that archaeologists use to study them. In this course, we will emphasize (1) how archaeologists account for spatial dimensions of the archaeological record as they design research projects and (2) a range of methodological techniques for analyzing geospatial data to understand human behavior in the past. Students will learn the analytical process by which archaeologists design and conduct research to test hypotheses about the spatial dimensions of human behavior developed from anthropological archaeological theory. Along the way, students will be taught a range of geospatial analytical techniques, such as how to collect and process geophysical data, and critique archaeological applications of GIS, network analyses, catchment analyses, drone surveys, and LiDAR. Throughout the semester, students will design and execute geospatial research using data from case studies from across the globe. The final project will require students to conduct an independent geospatial analysis research project, drawing upon the theory and methods discussed in the course.