Spring 2027 Course Offerings
For information on class days and times, enrollment limits, enrollment status, course fees, and classroom locations, visit the Online Directory of Classes at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/
COURSES IN SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
Anthropology UN1002y THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE. 3 pts. Instructor: Naor Ben-Yehoyada. The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.
Anthropology UN2000y POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 3 pts. Instructor: Radhika Govindrajan. This lecture course introduces students to key concepts and questions in the anthropological study of power and politics. What is power? How and when is it concentrated? What is authority? What are its sources? By what forms and means has rule and rulership been conceived in diverse societies? How do anthropologists think about the nation and the state distinctly from the ways in which these categories have been conceptualized in political science and political theory, or by historians of exclusively Western (post-Westphalian) polities? The course materials include anthropological texts and classic works from those adjacent disciplinary traditions, as well as texts from literary and other fields.
Anthropology UN2005y THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION. 3 pts. Instructor: Rosalind Morris. Introduction to the theory and practice of “ethnography”— the intensive study of peoples’ lives as shaped by social relations, cultural images, and historical forces. Considers through critical reading of various kinds of texts (classic ethnographies, histories, journalism, novels, films) the ways in which understanding, interpreting, and representing the lived words of people—at home or abroad, in one place or transnationally, in the past or the present—can be accomplished. Discussion section required.
Anthropology UN2200y CERAMIC ANALYSIS: LECTURE. 3 pts. Instructor: Camilla Sturm. Pottery is one of the most enduring products of the ancient world and among the most ubiquitous classes of artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. In many cases, pottery sherds are all that remain of past societies, making them a critical source of evidence for reconstructing ancient lifeways. Archaeologists use ceramics to investigate a wide range of questions, from the transmission of craft knowledge to cooking practices, political economies, social identities, and human responses to environmental change. This course introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze archaeological ceramics, with an emphasis on how these artifacts are evaluated and used to build evidence-based interpretations of the past. Students who wish to enroll in this course must also register for the accompanying laboratory course.
Anthropology UN3052y THE CITY JAIL. 4 pts. Instructor: Kaya Williams. Municipal jails are one of the most impactful institutions of criminal justice in the United States; and yet many Americans do not even know the difference between a prison and a jail. This course will investigate the conditions of mass incarceration in America by centering the municipal jail. Taking as objects of study both the jail itself and the practice of incarcerating people in local jails, this course will combine scholarly work on U.S. criminal justice with a variety of non-academic texts including legal decisions, contemporary journalism, and documentary film. The course is focused on jails writ large, but as we are living in New York City, we will pay particular attention throughout the semester to our own municipal jail system.
Anthropology UN3091y DISABILITY. 4 pts. Instructor: Mara Green. This course centers disability in its many manifestations and meanings – as an embodied, social, and cultural experience, as an organizing discourse in local and global contexts, as an analytic framework, and as a position from which to approach, think about, and engage in the world. Together, we will seek to understand disability in diverse settings and contexts through ethnographic texts, autobiography, documentary film, and essays, drawing primarily from works in anthropology but also more broadly from the interdisciplinary traditions known as (Critical) Disability Studies. Throughout the semester, we will move between considering disability in more and less specific and categorical terms. We will ask what the stakes are – intellectually, socially, politically - for different ways of doing, thinking, and representing disability. What becomes apparent when we consider, say, the experiences of deaf young adults in India working together to learn Indian Sign Language, or physically disabled adults in the United States whose disabilities must be situated within histories of racialized poverty and urban neglect? What happens – what are the resonances and the tensions – when we put these settings into conversation? Through our engagements with materials analyzing these and many other instances, we will think together about what it means to study and think with disability from different disciplinary perspectives, different methods, and different media.
Anthropology UN3160y THE BODY AND SOCIETY. 4 pts. Instructor: Paloma Rodrigo Gonzales. As an introduction to the field of medical anthropology, this seminar addresses themes of health, affliction, and healing across sociocultural domains. Concerns include critiques of biomedical, epidemiological and other models of disease and suffering; the entwinement of religion and healing; technocratic interventions in healthcare; and the sociomoral underpinnings of human life, death, and survival. A 1000-LEVEL course in Anthropology is recommended as a prerequisite, although not required.
Anthropology UN3404y RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN THE MODERN MEDITERRANENEAN. 4 pts. Instructor: Jacob Bessen. From the rise of Italian Fascism to the Siege of Sarajevo to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, politicians, media figures, and other public voices have framed the Mediterranean as a place of senseless religiosity and an inability to embrace secular rationality — often to argue for the inevitability or necessity of violent intervention. This course tells a different story. Through primary sources and close secondary commentary, we trace how the categories of religion and secularism took shape in the region, and how those who live with these categories think, reflect, inhabit, and struggle over them — not as a simple conflict between tradition and modernity, but as part of larger, shared questions about what it means to be human. Each week poses a foundational question and offers responses through both primary sources and foundational texts in anthropology, history, and religious studies.
Anthropology UN3604y AS IF: ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE. 4 pts. Instructor: Marilyn Ivy. From the rise of Italian Fascism to the Siege of Sarajevo to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, politicians, media figures, and other public voices have framed the Mediterranean as a place of senseless religiosity and an inability to embrace secular rationality — often to argue for the inevitability or necessity of violent intervention. This course tells a different story. Through primary sources and close secondary commentary, we trace how the categories of religion and secularism took shape in the region, and how those who live with these categories think, reflect, inhabit, and struggle over them — not as a simple conflict between tradition and modernity, but as part of larger, shared questions about what it means to be human. Each week poses a foundational question and offers responses through both primary sources and foundational texts in anthropology, history, and religious studies. Although the course draws on specialized scholarship, no previous coursework in anthropology, religious studies, or the languages of the region is required or presumed; all readings are in English or English translation, and necessary background will be provided in class.
Anthropology UN3710y THE SECRET LIVES OF PLANTS. 4 pts. Instructor: Vanessa Agard-Jones. Although the course draws on specialized scholarship, no previous coursework in anthropology, religious studies, or the languages of the region is required or presumed; all readings are in English or English translation, and necessary background will be provided in class. $25 Lab Fee.
Anthropology BC3872y SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR II. 4 pts. Instructors: Camilla Sturm, Paige West, J.C. Salyer, and Mara Green. Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.
Anthropology UN3880y LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND. 4 pts. Instructor: John Pemberton. We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions. From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects. How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?
Anthropology UN3939y ANIME EFFECT: JAPANESE MEDIA. 4 pts. Instructor Marilyn Ivy. Culture, technology, and media in contemporary Japan. Theoretical and ethnographic engagements with forms of mass mediation, including anime, manga, video, and cell-phone novels. Considers larger global economic and political contexts, including post-Fukushima transformations. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
Anthropology UN3947y TEXT, MAGIC, PERFORMANCE. 4 pts. John Pemberton. Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular I - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject --within ritual contexts and within everyday life.
Anthropology UN3976y ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE. 4 pts. Instructor: Gina Jae. This course examines specific debates in the history and philosophy of science, and in science and technology studies (STS), with a view towards exploring the relationships among science, technology and society. The first half of the course engages methodological questions and theoretical debates concerning the nature of epistemology, and the significance of social interests, material agency, laboratory and social practices, and “culture(s)” in the making of scientific knowledge. The second half delves more specifically into the ways in which sciences and technologies are both embedded in and shape contemporary social and political practices and imaginaries
Anthropology UN3983y IDEAS/SOCIETY IN THE CARIBBEAN. 4 pts. Instructor: David Scott.
Anthropology UN3998y SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. 3-6 pts. Instructor: (Please refer to the Directory of classes). Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.
Anthropology UN3999y SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR IN ANTHROPOLOGY. 4 pts. Instructor: Audra Simpson. Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the Fall term, whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only. It requires the instructor’s permission for registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students should communicate with the thesis instructor and the director of undergraduate study in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. Enrollment limit is 15. Requirements: Students must have completed the requirements of the first semester of the sequence and seek instructor approval to enroll in the second.
COURSES IN ARCHAEOLOGY:
Anthropology UN1008y THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION. 3 pts. Instructor: Terence D’Altroy. Corequisites: ANTH UN1108 The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE.
Anthropology UN2028y THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST. 3 pts. Instructor: Hannah Chazin. This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past.
Anthropology UN2105y ARCHAEOLOGIES OF MAKING. 3 pts. Instructor: Amanda Althoff. Archaeology has often been described as the discipline of 'things' or of the material traces of the past. This course seeks to enhance students' engagement with the material world as a means of complementing text-based instruction in the tradition of experimental archaeology and hands-on history. Through weekly activities, students will create and engage with ‘things’, reflect critically on differences in reading about and making things, and gain a critical understanding of material culture studies in archaeology and beyond. $25 Lab Fee.
Anthropology UN2200y CERAMIC ANALYSIS: LECTURE. 3 pts. Pottery is one of the most enduring products of the ancient world and among the most ubiquitous classes of artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. In many cases, pottery sherds are all that remain of past societies, making them a critical source of evidence for reconstructing ancient lifeways. Archaeologists use ceramics to investigate a wide range of questions, from the transmission of craft knowledge to cooking practices, political economies, social identities, and human responses to environmental change. This course introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze archaeological ceramics, with an emphasis on how these artifacts are evaluated and used to build evidence-based interpretations of the past. Students who wish to enroll in this course must also register for the accompanying laboratory course.
Anthropology UN3723y AMERICAN MATERIAL CULTURE. 4 pts. Instructor: Severin Fowles.
For information on class days and times, enrollment limits, enrollment status, course fees, and classroom locations, visit the online directory of classes at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/
COURSES IN SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
Anthropology GR5556y Vegetalities. 4 pts. Instructor: Vanessa Agard-Jones. This seminar examines the "vegetal turn" in the humanities through the lens of Black studies, Indigenous studies, and feminist/queer studies approaches to science and technology. Beginning with Suzanne Césaire's 1942 definition of Caribbean being as fundamentally vegetal, the course reads across plant science, multispecies ethnography, critical race theory, queer ecologies, and plantation studies to ask what plants know, who knows them, and what vegetality offers as an analytic for thinking about racialized and gendered life in the Anthropocene. Students produce an annotated bibliography, a vegetal fieldwork exercise, and a seminar paper suitable for development toward publication. They also maintain a living plant throughout the semester.
Anthropology GR6155y RIGHTING WRONGS. 3 pts. Instructor: David Scott. This course critically examines some of the moral and historical arguments for the justification of reparations for New World slavery. We explore the state of the debate about such historical injustices -- inquiring into questions of cultural trauma, memory, and generations. Our main concern will be to connect a moral claim about repair to an understanding of the injury of slavery in the Americas. Open to graduate students only.
Anthropology GR6212y PRIN/APPL-SOC & CULTRL ANTHROPOLOGY. 3 pts. Instructor: Ellen Marakowitz. Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the instructor’s permission. Focus on research and writing for the master’s level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing. Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Open to Anthropology MA students only.
Anthropology GR6227y Ethnographies at the End of the World. 3 pts. Nicholas Glastonbury. What can we learn from anthropological and ethnographic research in and about a damaged world, a world confronted by the violence and effects of war, climate change, transnational migration, post-industrial abandonment, and the lives and afterlives of colonialism and slavery? What are the ethnographic debates that address the catastrophes produced by capitalism and the lifeforms that emerge out of its ruins? What types of anthropological critique emerge in times enunciated as ‘the end of the world’? And what comes after this end? Ethnographies at the End of the World addresses these questions by paying close attention to some of the most relevant debates in contemporary anthropological theory and anthropological critique. These debates include, among others, discussions on violence and trauma, the politics of life and death, the work of memory and oblivion, and the material entanglements between human and non-human forms of existence. The aim of this seminar is to generate a discussion around the multiple implications of these theoretical arrangements and how anthropologists deploy them in their ethnographic understandings of the world we live in. In doing so, this course provides students with a fundamental understanding and conceptual knowledge about how anthropologists use and produce theory, and how this theoretical production is mobilized as a social critique. This course is reading intensive and operates in the form of a seminar. It is intended, primarily, for MA students in the department of anthropology and graduate students in other departments. Priority given to master’s students in Anthropology.
Anthropology GR6293y SPECTERS OF ORGANIZED SUBVERSION. 3 pts. Instructor: Naor Ben-Yehoyada. Ruling powers of various shapes and sizes tend to prosecute those people whom they fear because of their identity, class, craft, or convictions. Often, the object of accusation, inquiry, prosecution, and persecution includes not just one (or more) individual persons, but a set of relationships that these ruling powers see as anathema to the social order they seek to establish or maintain, and on which their power depends. Specters can personify residuals of antediluvian political or cosmological order (heretics and witches, officers of toppled regime, Catholics after the reformation, idolatry trials in the new world, mafiosi after their criminalization, Bundists in Soviet Russia) or emergent forms (emancipated Jews, dissidents, or anarchists). All share that role in social dramas that cast them as enemies of The State, The Church, The People, or Humanity. In this seminar we will begin to explore the array of social rituals, routinized practices (like rumors and media-oriented lynching) and institutions that have been developed specifically in order to name such specters and summon them publicly. We will examine, among others: trials, conspiracy theories (as a mode of recounting a presence that is constantly putting the specter back in), investigative committees, inquisitorial tribunals. We will examine how such social rituals and routinized practices and institutions give us unique opportunities to examine what conceptions of society, of relationships good and evil, and of justice underlie political orders, how they codify and pursue them, and what historical processes these enactments trigger or shape. We’ll focus on cases from early modern and modern societies, with an eye towards the emergence and stabilization of republican order.
Anthropology GR6412y MAJOR DEBATES IN THE STUDY-AFRICA. 3 pts. Instructor: Mahmood Mamdani.
Anthropology GR6702y Theory From And With South Asia. 4 pts. Instructors: Mara Green and Radhika Govindrajan. This course asks what thinking from and with South Asia can offer anthropological theory and what an anthropological approach can offer the study of South Asia. Keeping the troubled history of area studies in focus, we attend to how the “region” has been formed as a distinct object of study. In other words, this course simultaneously takes South Asia as its subject and its vantage point, while also problematizing what, where, and to whom this phrase refers. We consider a series of texts and films - largely but not exclusively within the tradition of contemporary anthropology - that explore people and places in and across the nation-states known as South Asia. Our aim is two-fold: One, we hope to moor anthropological theory in geopolitics. By this, we mean that we are interested in how “regions” come to be exemplary sites of particular theories instead of points of grounded departure for disciplinary-wide conversations. On a related note, we want to understand the conditions under which “region” can be productively invoked in anthropological conversations and when we are advised to leave it behind. Second, we aim to attend to the specificities of the places and people imperfectly referenced by the phrase South Asia. We will touch on classic themes associated with the anthropology of South Asia, including criss-crossing formations of caste, class and gender, and we will put them in conversation with contemporary work on disability, Indigeneity, queerness, and race.
Spring 2027 Anthropology GR8500y ETHNOGRAPHY STUDIO. 4 pts. Instructor: Paige West. Ethnography is often taught as a method of observation. This course begins from a different premise: ethnography is a political technology of knowledge production shaped by empire, race, capital, gender, and disciplinary power. It is also a fragile and unfinished writing practice that scholars continually remake. This seminar treats ethnography as a site of struggle over these questions: Who can produce knowledge? Whose worlds become legible? Which archives endure? What research should refuse to know? And, how writing itself organizes relations of power?
Anthropology GR9999y WEDNESDAY SEMINAR. 0 pts. Instructor: Audra Simpson. All anthropology graduate students are required to attend. Reports of ongoing research are presented by staff members, students, and special guests.
COURSES IN ARCHAEOLOGY:
Anthropology GR5555y From Ruins to Remains: Palestine & Archaeology. 4 pts. Instructor: Brian Boyd. This new course aims to provide advanced undergraduate and graduate students with a critical history of Palestine-related archaeology from the mid-19th century to the present, and (b) an examination of how archaeological narratives relating to Palestine have been impacted by state nationalism, colonialism and conflicting local, regional and global religious interests from the "Classical World" to the 21st century.
Anthropology GR6162y Contemporary Archaeological Theory. 3 pts. Instructor: Hannah Chazin. Archaeology is a sprawling, messy discipline and the role that theory does, should, and might play in the process of archaeological data collection, analysis, and interpretation has been highly contested. Archaeologists argue over whether there is such a thing as a stand-alone ‘archaeological theory’ and what kinds of theory from other disciplines should (or should not!) be imported. This course explores a range of recent theoretical conversations, orientations, and interventions within archaeology, with an eye to understanding what is currently at stake – and what is contested – in how archaeologists think about making archaeological knowledge in the contemporary moment. In doing so, this course encourages students to think about theory in archaeology as an important form of “practical knowledge” or “know how” for archaeologists (cf. Lucas 2018).
COURSES IN MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY:
Anthropology GR6192y EXHIBITION PRAC-GLOBAL CONTEXT. 3pts. Instructor: Eleanor Kung. Prerequisites: ANTH G6352 Museum Anthropology: history and theory / ANTH G6353 Politics and Practice of Museum Exhibitions; G9110, G9111 and the instructors permission. Corequisites: ANTH G6353. This course addresses the practical challenges entailed in the process of creating a successful exhibition. Developing an actual curatorial project, students will get an opportunity to apply the museum anthropology theory they are exposed to throughout the program. They will be given a hands-on approach to the different stages involved in the curation of a show, from the in-depth researching of a topic to the writing, editing and design of an exhibition that will be effective for specific audiences. Please be advised that the course will be held off-campus at the Museum of Natural History.
Anthropology GR6365y EXHIBITION CULTURES. 3 pts. Instructor: Laurel Kendall. This course is a continuation of Museum Anthropology G6352 (not a prerequisite). Through the study of museum exhibitions, this course explores a series of debates about the representation of culture in museums, the politics of identity, and the significance of objects. We will consider the museum as a contemporary and variable form, as a site for the expression of national, group, and individual identity and as a site of performance and consumption. We will consider how exhibits are developed, what they aim to convey, what makes them effective (or not), and how they sometimes become flashpoints of controversy. Because the work of museums is visual, enacted through the display of material forms, we will also consider the transformation of objects into artifacts and as part of exhibitions, addressing questions of meaning, ownership, value, and magic. We will look at this range of issues from the point of view of practitioners, critics, and audiences. G6365 works in tandem with the exhibition project that will be developed in “Exhibition Practice in Global Culture” to produce a small exhibit at AMNH. Please be advised that the course will be held off-campus at the Museum of Natural History.
Anthropology GR9110y MUSEUM ANTHROPOL INTERNSHIP I. 3-9 pts. Instructor: Brian Boyd. An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10 hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6). Involves meaningful work, requires keeping a journal and writing a paper at the completion of the semester. Not to be taken without permission of the program directors, usually after completing the Museum Anthropology core courses.