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.

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  • 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
    This course offers close readings of classic and recent ethnographic texts to ask: what distinguishes ethnography from other disciplinary traditions of writing about culture and human behavior? How do we see changes in anthropology's theoretical interests reflected (or not) in ethnographic writing? What are the different structural conventions, rhetorical tropes, allegorical patterns, and stylistic strategies used by authors considered to be master ethnographers? Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Social Inquiry II.
    • Social Inquiry II
  • 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 Uniqueness
    Language, labor, culture, self-awareness, symbolizing, 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
  • CAS AN 558: The Evolutionary Biology of Human Sex Differences
    Are sex and gender instantiated in the body? This seminar explores evolutionary approaches to investigating sex differences in human behavior and physiology from phylogenetic, mechanistic, and developmental perspectives. Topics include gender expression, non-binary sex/gender, aggression, mate choice, cognition, and more.
  • CAS AN 559: Evolutionary Endocrinology
    Focuses on current research in the field of evolutionary endocrinology. Examines how hormones act as mediators of a variety of fundamental evolutionary phenomena from circadian rhythms to sexuality. Explores how and why natural selection shaped the "inputs" and "outputs" of the endocrine system. Effective Fall 2021, 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 563: Religion and Politics across Cultures
    Examines the role of religion, religious movements, and secularism in modern politics, citizenship, and public life. Devotes special attention to the implications of the global religious resurgence for democracy, multicultural tolerance, and gender equality, both in Western liberal democracies and the global south. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II.
    • Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy
    • Social Inquiry II
  • CAS AN 565: Memory in 3-D: Memorials, Then and Now
    Memorials and the spaces around them are charged zones, time portals where past and present co-exist. In this course we focus on the development of memorial culture in America, along with a comparative examination of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. The distance afforded by stepping outside our own time and place provides perspectives on aspects of form and message, as well as on how the meanings of memorial can change. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Historical Consciousness, Creativity/Innovation.
    • Historical Consciousness
    • Digital/Multimedia Expression
    • Creativity/Innovation
  • CAS AN 571: Anthropology of Emotion
    Advanced seminar on the study of emotion as culturally and historically specific experience, cognition and symbolic system. Focus on specific emotions including shame, anger, melancholy, hope, hate and love. Special attention to affect and the politics of emotion. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II, Creativity/Innovation.
    • Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy
    • Social Inquiry II
    • Creativity/Innovation
  • CAS AN 573: The Ethnography of China and Taiwan (area)
    Reading of major ethnographies and modern histories as a basis for examining changing Taiwanese and Chinese culture and society. Attention to ethnography as a genre, as well as to the dramatic changes of the past century. (Counts towards the East Asian Studies minor.) Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II.
    • Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy
    • Social Inquiry II
    • Writing-Intensive Course
  • CAS AN 588: Project Design and Statistics in Biological Anthropology
    This seminar teaches students project design and statistics using R and Rstudio. Students will become competent in coding, version control, data reports and commenting code, and implement both basic and advanced statistics to be used in student research projects. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Quantitative Reasoning II, Scientific Inquiry II, Teamwork/Collaboration.
    • Scientific Inquiry II
    • Quantitative Reasoning II
    • Teamwork/Collaboration
  • CAS AN 590: Theory, Method, and Techniques in Fieldwork
    Traditional and modern methods of ethnographic field research: data collection, research design, and analyses.

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