Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

View courses in

  • CAS AM 502: Special Topics in American Studies
    Topic for Spring 2021: Crafting Identities: Material Cultures of Textiles in the US. How has production and consumption of fabric goods shaped American cultural categories like race, gender, and nationality? Focusing on history of dress, we use material culture theory and practice to investigate the lives of textiles, from early America to present.
  • CAS AM 505: The American South in History, Literature, and Film
    Explores the American South through literature, film, and other sources. Considers what, if anything, has been distinctive about the Southern experience and how a variety of Americans have imagined the region over time. Also offered as CAS HI 505.
  • CAS AM 546: Places of Memory: Historic Preservation Theory and Practice
    Covers key aspects of the history, theory, and practice of historic preservation. Preservation is 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 554: Preservation Planning
    Introduces students to local, state, and national government policies and practices intended to protect historically and aesthetically significant structures. In addition, the course covers planning approaches aimed at managing redevelopment in established neighborhoods, to create livable and sustainable communities.
  • CAS AM 555: Boston Architectural and Community History Workshop
    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. Topic for Fall 2020: Somerville Project. Explores the architectural and urban transformation of Somerville from agricultural fields, country estates, to an area of dense urban settlement and industrial development. Explores places and sources that help assess and narrate the rich history of architectural and urban development.
  • CAS AN 505: Women and Social Change in Asia (area)
    Examines how women have affected andbeen affected by economic and cultural changes in China, Japan, and India. Particular attention paid to women's education, health, child rearing, and labor force participation. (Counts towards the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies minor and the Asian Studies minor.)
  • CAS AN 510: Proposal Writing for Social Science Research
    Intended for PhD students in the social sciences or humanites and undergraduates already admitted to the Anthropology Honors Program. Workshop-based course designed to turn students' intellectual interests into answerable, field-based research questions. Goal is the production of an honors or doctoral level research project proposal and/or dissertation prospectus.
  • CAS AN 521: Sociolinguistics
    Introduction to language in its social context. Methodological and theoretical approaches to sociolinguistics. Linguistic variation in relation to situation, gender, socioeconomic class, linguistic context, and ethnicity. Integrating micro- and macro-analysis from conversation to societal language planning.
  • CAS AN 524: Seminar: Language and Culture Contacts in Contemporary Africa
    Focuses on language variation and change in Africa. Provides students with a foundation in the scholarship on contact linguistics, language variation and change, and the relationships between language variation and gender, ethnicity, religion, and youth culture.
  • CAS AN 530: Global Intimacies: Sex, Gender, and Contemporary Sexualities
    Explores theoretical and ethnographic approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality as linked to globalizing discourses and transnational mobilities. Readings and discussion emphasize intersections of sex, gender, labor, love, and marriage in a globalized world.
  • CAS AN 532: Literacy and Islam in Africa
    Examines the Islamization of Africa and literary traditions. Students learn about African texts written in the Arabic script (Ajami) and the spread of Islam and its Africanization throughout the continent. Texts written by enslaved Africans in the Americas are examined.
  • CAS AN 533: Exploring Ethnographic Genres: The Poetics and Politics of Writing Culture
    Asks what distinguishes ethnography from other disciplinary traditions of writing about culture and human behavior? How are changes in anthropology's theoretical interests reflected (or not) in ethnographic writing? What are the writing techniques used by authors considered to be master ethnographers?
  • CAS AN 534: Advanced Topics in Human Behavioral Evolution
    Topics in the behavioral evolution of Homo sapiens including social and sexual behavior, tool traditions, diet and hunting, language and intelligence, and locomotion. This course considers (inferred) behavioral traditions that characterized the origin of our genus and of our species.
  • CAS AN 548: Muslim Societies: An Interdisciplinary History (area)
    An introduction to the main themes, states, empires, faiths, and ideologies of the Muslim world.
  • CAS AN 550: Human Skeleton
    Function, development, variation, and pathologies of the human musculoskeletal system, emphasizing issues of human evolution. Basic processes of bone biology and how they are affected by use, age, sex, diet, and disease. Meetings are predominantly lab oriented. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Scientific Inquiry I.
    • Scientific Inquiry I
  • CAS AN 551: Anthropology and Human Heredity
    What can our genes say about who we are? This course surveys the theory and methods of evolutionary genetics and genomics as applied to human diversity, and their intersection with social issues such as racism, bioethics, and eugenics.
  • CAS AN 552: Primate Evolution and Anatomy
    The evolutionary history of the primate radiation--particularly that of monkeys, apes, and humans--is examined through investigation of the musculoskeletal anatomy of living and fossil primates. Comparative and biomechanical approaches are used to reconstruct the behavior of extinct species. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Scientific Inquiry I, Critical Thinking.
    • Scientific Inquiry I
    • Critical Thinking
  • CAS AN 553: Human Uniquness
    Language, labor, culture, self-awareness, symboling, and other traits have been called uniquely human. But if these things have no animal antecedents, how could they have evolved? Course participants examine this "continuity paradox" and its proposed solutions from Darwin onward. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Scientific Inquiry I, Critical Thinking.
    • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
    • Scientific Inquiry I
    • Critical Thinking
  • CAS AN 555: Evolutionary Medicine
    Why do we get sick? Evolutionary medicine seeks to answer this question by applying modern evolutionary theory to understanding health and disease among contemporary human populations. Topics include chronic and infectious disease, mental illness, allergies, autoimmunity, and drug addiction. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Oral and/or Signed Communication, Scientific Inquiry II, Teamwork/Collaboration.
    • Scientific Inquiry II
    • Oral and/or Signed Communication
    • Teamwork/Collaboration
  • CAS AN 556: The Evolution of the Human Diet
    An investigation of human dietary evolution including primate and human dietary adaptations, nutritional requirements, optimal foraging, digestive physiology, maternal and infant nutrition, hunting and cooking in human evolution, and impacts of food processing and agriculture on modern diets and health. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Scientific Inquiry II, Research and Information Literacy.
    • Scientific Inquiry II
    • Research and Information Literacy
    • Writing-Intensive Course

Back to full list of Graduate School of Arts & Sciences