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 385: American Buildings and Landscapes
  An introductory analytic survey of American buildings and landscapes within their historical and cultural contexts. Students examine forces that have shaped the American built environment. Topics range from Indian mounds to commercial strips, Spanish missions to skyscrapers. Also offered as CAS AH 385.
• CAS AM 501: Special Topics in American Studies
  Topic for Fall 2016: Gilded Age Boston. Explores the Gilded Age in America through studying Boston and its people, politics, and cultures. Students use a wide variety of approaches of historical study and conduct original archival research. Some weeks are spent visiting and interpreting sites across Boston.
• CAS AM 502: Special Topics in American Studies
  Topic for Spring 2017: 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 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. Also offered as CAS AH 546 and CAS HI 546.
• CAS AM 555: Boston Architectural and Community History Workshop
  This course focuses on class readings, lectures, and research on a single neighborhood or community in Boston (or Greater Boston). Greatest emphasis is on using primary sources-- land titles and deeds, building permits, fire insurance atlases and other maps. There are both group and individual research projects. Also offered as CAS AH 554 and CAS HI 569.
• 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. (Equivalent to CAS AN 101.) 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. (Required for Medical Anthropology minors.)
• 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 234: Evolutionary Psychology
  Critical analysis of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Emphasis placed on viewing humans as products of biological evolution. Topics include evolution of language and intelligence, cultural evolution, sex and reproduction, kinship and family dynamics, cooperation, aggression, warfare, and status. Cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course with this title previously numbered CAS AN 334.
• 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. (Counts towards African Studies minor.) Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• 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. (Counts towards the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies minor.) 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. (Counts towards the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies minor.)
• 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. (Counts towards the Women's Gender & Sexuality Studies minor; required for SED's BS in Early Childhood Education program.)
• 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.
• CAS AN 308: Food, Culture, and Society
  Study of foodways, culinary social history, and diet and food ecology with special attention to Asian societies and Boston's food culture. Examines the use of food and cuisine as a focus for identity, national development, and social change.
• CAS AN 309: Boston: An Ethnographic Approach (area)
  An anthropological study of Boston using the city as a site of recovery and discovery as students develop ethnographic skills and an understanding of the interplay between geography, history, and demography in the social mapping of urban spaces.

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