Courses

• CAS AM 369: American Folk Art
  Explores the objects that collectors and museums identify as "American Folk Art." Examines how this label developed throughout the twentieth century; familiarizes students with major collections and genres including painting, sculpture, textiles, and other media. Also offered as CAS AH 369.
• CAS AM 376: Housing America
  What do dwellings say about the diversity of American experience? For over four centuries and across a continent, wealth and poverty, family and community, taste and technology have all shaped the meaning of home. Illustrated lecturers supplemented by field trips. Also offered as CAS AH 376.
• CAS AM 501: Special Topics in American Studies
  Topic for Fall 2014: Reading Boston: Conversations about the Real and Imagined City. Team-taught by English (Howell) and History of Art & Architecture (Morgan) professors. Multidisciplinary examination of Boston from Wampanoag settlement to the present. Explores how specific neighborhoods have developed and how they have been presented in literature. Includes frequent site visits around Boston. Serves as AM capstone.
• CAS AM 502: Special Topics in American Studies
  Topic for Spring 2015: American Baseball. This interdisciplinary research seminar examines the history, culture, and science of the game from its shadowy origins in the early days of the nineteenth century, explosive growth in popularity during the Jazz Age, to the controversy-ridden Steroid Era.
• CAS AM 524: New England Cultural Landscapes
  Examines the historic forces that have shaped the distinctive regional landscapes of New England and catalogues the changing forms that make up those landscapes. Also offered as CAS AH 525.
• CAS AM 546: Places of Memory: Historic Preservation Theory and Practice
  Covers key aspects of the history, theory, and practice of historic preservation. Preservation will be discussed in the context of cultural history and the changing relationship between existing buildings and landscapes and attitudes toward history, memory, invented tradition, and place.
• CAS AM 553: Documenting Historic Buildings and Landscapes
  A seminar designed to train students in architectural research techniques through supervised reading, fieldwork, and writing. Students are introduced to the skills needed to conduct research on both individual resources and groups of resources, clustered within an area or scattered throughout a community. Also offered as CAS AH 553.
• CAS AN 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  An introduction to the basic concepts, principles, and problems of cultural anthropology, emphasizing study of both traditional and complex societies. Special attention to the evolution of human societies and culture; the changing organization and meaning of religion, economic life, kinship, and political order; and the problem of cultural variation in the modern world. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AN 102: Human Biology, Behavior, and Evolution
  Biology relevant to the behavioral sciences. Introduces basic principles of evolutionary biology, animal social behavior, primate adaptions, human origins, genetic/hormonal/neural bases of behavior, and issues of human socioecology and adaptions. Discussions highlight nature-vs-nurture issues. Carries natural science divisional credit (with lab) in CAS.
• CAS AN 103: Anthropology Through Ethnography
  Examines the diversity of human lifeways and cultures across a variety of societies and through time, as well as the social processes that shape individuals. Seminar-style introduction to social anthropology through reading of ethnography, with discussion and debate. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AN 210: Medical Anthropology
  Examines the influence of culture on health care beliefs, practices, and institutions. Special topics include cross-cultural approaches to birth, aging, and death; drug use and abuse; health care in developing countries; and socialist models of health-care service.
• CAS AN 220: Urban Anthropology
  Survey of urban phenomena in evolutionary perspective using illustrative materials from records of the past and from current description in all world areas; contrasting social processes under different historical, geographical, political, and economic circumstances.
• CAS AN 240: Legal Anthropology
  An introduction to the anthropologist's approaches to law. Investigation of the relationship among society, culture, and law focuses on how different societies generate and structure competition and conflict. Examines the range of social and symbolic mechanisms for regulating dispute. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AN 250: Understanding Folklore and Folklife
  The ways individuals, families, and communities express themselves, their beliefs, and their values within their own culture. Emphasis on meaning carried by oral literature, folk arts and crafts, social customs and festivals, and family folklore.
• CAS AN 252: Ethnicity and Identity
  Political and cultural factors underlying ethnic and nationalist sentiments examined through case studies drawn from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Discusses factors underlying ethnic boundaries, as well as such boundary-transcending influences as the media. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AN 260: Sex and Gender in Anthropological Perspective
  Cross-cultural examination of changing gender roles, expectations, and activities. Focuses on economic, social, political, and ideological determinants that structure the hierarchy of power and privileges accorded the thoughts, activities, and experiences of women and men in various societies. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AN 263: The Behavioral Biology of Women
  An exploration of female behavioral biology focusing on evolutionary, physiological, and biosocial aspects of women's lives from puberty through pregnancy, birth, lactation, menopause, and aging. Examples are drawn from traditional and industrialized societies, and data from nonhuman primates are considered.
• CAS AN 285: Coping with Crisis in Contemporary Africa (area)
  Explores the ways ordinary Africans are coping with problems of security, environmental degradation, forced migration, economic decline, and disease. Readings and lectures contrast outsiders' interpretations of these "crises" with the way they are experienced by those they affect.
• CAS AN 290: Children and Culture
  Explores the way various cultures shape the lives and social development of children. Topics include cultural concepts of childhood; the acquisition of culture; socialization and moral development; cognition, emotion, and behavior in childhood; children's language and play; and the cultural shaping of personality.
• CAS AN 307: Turkey and Middle East in Comparative Perspective (area)
  Social and cultural diversity of the modern Middle East with particular attention to Turkey. Focus on the interplay of tradition and socio-economic changes that have occured during the twentieth century and their implications for the future.

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