Preserving the Past

It is fashionable today to speak of "sustainability," but how do we understand the term in its broadest sense? Historic preservation plays a key role in researching our history, building civic identity, and creating sustainable communities. Once associated primarily with saving the elegant buildings of the elite, historic preservation today involves vernacular as well as distinguished architecture, landscapes as well as the built environment, and the stories of all social groups. Preservation and adaptive reuse of old buildings play a key role in both economic and environmental policy.

Who Owns Culture?

This is an anthropology course on intellectual property (IP) and heritage. While IP regimes claim to balance an incentive for creators with the needs of society at large, expanding realms of IP protection have some people decrying an endless process of commodification, a closing down of the creative commons, and a transnational arrangement that favors the global North and disadvantages the global South.

The Contested Amer Countryside

Rural America is the site of much that defines American life and culture. Our national myths are rooted in rural experience from frontier settlement to rugged individualism to escape from the decadent city and back to the land. Our economy is built on exploitation of rural resources: soil, water, minerals, trees. Our cities continue to sprawl into the countryside, sparking dramatic change in rural populations, politics, economics, and landscapes.

Cuba/Revolution/Discontents

How do we study a reality as complex and contested as that of contemporary Cuba? What intellectual, political and affective frameworks do we have available? What images of Cuba circulating in US popular and official culture do we have to recognize and perhaps displace to even begin? What are and have been the competing lenses for examining Cuban history? The Cuban Revolution? The post-1989 period?

Dreaming East, Dreaming West

This course traces the ways Chinese and Americans have perceived and portrayed each other over the last century through the writings of those whose dreams and aspirations led them to travel, study, and work across the Pacific: missionaries and diplomats, students and scholars, journalists and businessmen. Drawing on both Chinese and English language sources, we will read first person accounts-memoir, essay, letters, blogs-of Chinese sojourners in America and American travelers in China, asking: What is the place of "China" in the American dream and "America" in the Chinese imaginary?

Work, Gender/Development

Advanced Readings in Work, Gender and Development: This is a research seminar on women, work, gender and development. We will read both classic and current readings on these topics from scholars from around the globe, and about men and women around the globe. Questions including gender and the economic crisis, the global assembly line, commodity chains, the informal economy, the care economy, migration, and the transformation of work within the household will be addressed. We will specifically address efforts to organize at many locations.

Producing Youth Culture

This course will examine youth culture and performance. We will explore these topics through an integrated approach, focusing on the dynamics between educational, socio-cultural, and developmental perspectives. This course will emphasize field methodology, requiring students to conduct an independent, ethnographic project that researches some aspect of youth and performance. Readings will explore the intersections of scholarship across identity, popular culture, music, youth studies, educational studies, and ethnography.

Div III Seminar

This Division III seminar will be organized around students' Division III Independent Study Projects. The primary reading for the course will be one another's chapters. Students will be responsible for presenting their Division III's in progress several times during the semester and for providing serious, thoughtful written feedback on one another's work. We will read a few classic texts that will be selected depending on the focus of students' work to provide a common vocabulary. these texts will be selected by the professor, with suggestions from students welcome.

Humanities Research Seminar

This course is an upper level Division III research seminar, geared towards students in the initial stages of the Division III process. The primary purpose of the seminar is to provide a supportive and stimulating intellectual community in which students will create their Division III proposal. Working closely with our librarians, we will develop research strategies, learn how to find and use primary and secondary sources, refine our research questions, and learn how to structure an argument.
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