Timetable subject to change or modification. Anthropology graduate students will be able to enrol into Fall & Winter session graduate courses starting August 6, 2025. Students from other departments should follow instructions for enrolment on the Graduate Course Description and Timetable page.
*Last updated: June 13 2025
(*) : denotes a CORE COURSE – see the Anthropology Graduate Handbook for program specific course requirements.
(1): strongly recommended for SCL doctoral students in year 2.
(*) : denotes a CORE COURSE – see the Anthropology Graduate Handbook for program specific course requirements.
(1): strongly recommended for SCL doctoral students in year 2.
(2): this course is cross listed between EVO and SCL and is offered jointly.
2025-26 Graduate Course Descriptions
ANT6150HY - Proposing Ethnographic Research (Alejandro I. Paz & Sarah Hillewaert)
This seminar aims to assist doctoral students in the socio-cultural and linguistic field to develop thesis and research grant proposals. Throughout the seminar, the participants will be guided step by step to produce effective proposals for anthropological fieldwork. The seminar is designed as an intensive writing workshop that is based on timely sharing of work and peer-discussion. Run in workshop style, the seminar will help participants to develop skills of giving and receiving constructive comments on each other’s writing.
ANT6006HF - Genealogies of Anthropological Thought (Francis Cody & Naisargi Davé)
This course introduces graduate students to some of the major thinkers and traditions in, and for, the discipline of anthropology. While this course establishes strong familiarity with canonical texts, it also demands a critical reflexivity about discipline formation itself and the normalization of ideas. As such, this course aims to situate contemporary anthropological thought within past and ongoing debates among a range of social and political theorists.
ANT6065HF - Anthropology in/of Troubled Times (Todd Sanders)
Climate emergencies, forced migration, energy finitude, poverty, racism, mediated mass-surveillance, conspiracies, alternative facts, populism, pandemics – all provide unsettling markers of our times. As chroniclers and theorists of the moment, anthropologists are providing key insights into some of today’s most pressing problems as well as new analytic tools with which to examine them. This advanced seminar surveys a range of contemporary concerns and explores some of the ways current anthropologists are engaging – methodologically, analytically, theoretically – with them. It should thus be of interest to students who have yet to choose a research topic, and/or who wish to expand their knowledge of the discipline today. The seminar’s second concern is less with an anthropology of troubled times than with an anthropology in them. This concern arises from the observation that anthropology is part of the world it seeks to apprehend: a world that enables and constrains, invites and inhibits particular modes of anthropological thinking, theorising and practice. The seminar thus interrogates anthropology’s own grounds of knowledge, dwelling on some of the epistemological, ethical and political conundrums that anthropology’s real-world entanglements unavoidably entail. This will take us well beyond “troubled times,” inviting students to interrogate that curious set of Euro-American knowledge practices we call “Anthropology.”
ANT6005F - Ethnographic Methods Proseminar (Sumayya Kassamali)
This course is offered to students in anthropology as a credit/not-for-credit supplement to the curriculum in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology (as well as to interested students from other departments). Each week will feature a presentation by a current faculty member focusing on a method that they have used in their own research or on, a broadly speaking, set of methodological problems they have encountered. Some of the topics covered during the course of the term might include: interviews; fieldnotes; participant observation; performance ethnography; land defense; community advocacy; community partnership; confidentiality and secrecy; photography, film and video; archives and historical records; reading fiction; digital ethnography. Each week, students will be expected to complete a short exercise relating to the presentation. A student who attends and completes the exercises for eight of the ten seminars will receive an annotation of course completion in their transcript.
ANT7001HF - Medical Anthropology I (Krista Maxwell)
This advanced introduction to the anthropological study of health as socio-cultural phenomenon is suitable for those with and without prior training in medical anthropology (upper-year undergraduate training in socio-cultural anthropology is recommended preparation). Alongside conventional ethnographies of experiences of health, illness, disability, and the workings of health care systems, we’ll consider how medical anthropological research is enhanced through engagement with complementary disciplinary and methodological approaches, such as the history of medicine; critical Indigenous, race and disability studies; literary studies; and auto-ethnographic/ auto-biographical work. Substantive topics addressed by assigned readings may include food sovereignty, autism and neurodiversity, Black health in North America, global health and humanitarianism, and Indigenous health and settler colonialism, while our theoretical engagements will span political economy of health, biopolitics, subjectivity and intersectionality, and the social production and construction of biomedical knowledge. Discussions in and between classes will include demystifying theory and methodology in medical anthropology research, intended to support students’ future independent research. In winter 2025 the course will run entirely online and designed to maximize participation by neurodivergent students/ those with cognitive disabilities.
ANT3031HF - Advanced Research Seminar I: Sleep and Primate Evolution (David Samson)
This course is an overview of our current understanding of primate sleep ecology and function with particular focus on how these elements drove the evolution of human sleep. Specifically, the aim of the class will be to provide students with a strong, theoretical background of the function of sleep in the animal kingdom with particular attention paid to primate lineages. This will serve as a springboard for the application of several innovative methods measuring the spectrum of behaviors on the inactive-active continuum.
As an overview, the course will be presented in four sections: (i) Sleep: descriptions, functions, and mechanisms from eukaryotes to humans, (ii) The evolution of primate sleep, (iii) Methods: measuring sleep and activity in primates, and (iv) Evolution’s legacy on human sleep. The first section provides students with an overview of the mechanisms and functions of sleep and circadian rhythms, as well as a historical approach that fills in the context for which most of these fundamental discoveries were made. The second section presents a phylogenetic perspective on how sleep is expressed in extant species, in both human and non-human primates. The third section, departs from presenting background information and will focus on the application of the current scientific methods used to measure sleep-wake behavior throughout mammals. Finally, the fourth section provides the most up to date evolutionary narrative of the major transitions of human sleep and the consequences of these derived characteristics to our understanding of modern sleep disorders within an evolutionary mismatch framework. The course will conclude with a forward thinking series of predictions on how science and technology will fundamentally alter the way humans sleep in the 21st century and beyond.
ANT3010HF - Human Osteology: Theory and Practice (Madeleine Mant)
This course is directed towards people who already have some knowledge of human osteology and will provide a comprehensive overview of how researchers analyze human skeletal remains. The methods and tools used to study human skeletal remains will be critically examined and the ethical implications of osteological research across the history of the discipline will be discussed in depth. This course will explore diverse theoretical challenges in the field, as well as the limitations and advantages of newly emerging lines of research.
ANT7002HF - Medical Anthropology II: Applied Biocultural Perspectives on Global Child Health (Daniel Sellen)
Humans are exquisitely social animals and shared care of young is crucial to survival and adult functioning. In this class we sample, explore and discuss the variety of forms of human infant and young childcare across space and time, of which “parenting” is just one.
Specifically, we explore perspectives generated by anthropologists, international public health practitioners and others interested in variation in childcare practices and its social determinants and health effects. We review the variety of forms of infant and young child care across space and time, and consider the complex, bi-directional and biocultural relationships between care and health in different social and ecological settings. Students can:
- expand their understanding of patterns of human caregiving, and theories offered to explain them
- think about the design, techniques and goals of anthropological and interdisciplinary research
- consider the evolutionary history of childcare and its potential contemporary relevance
- identify differences and commonalities in cross-cultural patterns of childcare
- reflect on the salient care needs of human young
- discuss variation in practice through the alternative “lenses” of diversity, disparity, and inequity
- understand the relation between childcare contexts and global health indicators
- address implications for future policy
Approach: The main learning strategy is to review information about the possible patterns of evolution of child care and its influence on human biology, the evolution of the human life history, relations between parents and the organization of families, households and whole societies. We compare perspectives from anthropology, zoology, nutrition, global health and related disciplines to try to understand the evolved needs of children and their parents. We ask how such information and perspectives are generated and used by anthropologists, international public health practitioners and others interested in variation in childcare practices and its social determinants and health effects? We consider the complex, bi-directional and biocultural relationships between care and health in different social and ecological settings.
ANT1096HF - Quantitative Methods I (Lauren Schroeder)
This course will provide students with the basic analytic background necessary to evaluate quantitative data in biological anthropology and archaeology. Students will be introduced to foundational statistical concepts and research methods suitable for anthropological exploration. The focus will be on analysing univariate and bivariate data using both nonparametric and parametric statistical techniques, hypothesis testing, and methods of data collection. The goal of this course is for students to learn how to manipulate simple datasets, ask and answer theoretically relevant questions, and choose the appropriate statistical test for a given research problem. Students will have access to a number of biological anthropology and archaeology datasets for class assignments. No prior knowledge of statistics and mathematics is required.
ANT1100HF - Biocultural Methods Seminar (Delaney Glass)
Throughout this advanced methods seminar, students will critically analyze past and current approaches to mixed methods research in anthropology, with a focus on biocultural anthropology. Students will interact with scholarly literature and other media and use seminar time to deliberate about what biocultural anthropology is, how to “do” biocultural anthropology, and how biocultural approaches or perspectives can be implemented. Students will learn about qualitative and quantitative methods and evaluate past scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines that attempt to cross boundaries between qualitative and quantitative. Students will have opportunities to practice mixed methods approaches using methods exercises and study design practice. In addition, students will be expected to demonstrate application of biocultural methods by writing a research proposal that is biocultural and mixed methods focused. Themes will vary according to student interests and seminar composition.
ANT3005HF - Advanced Topics in Paleoanthropology: Brains, babies, and bipedalism: Evolutionary origins of the attributes that define us (David Begun)
The first humans (hominins) are often defined by attributes that distinguish us from living great apes, including a reduction in canine size, an extension of life history, bipedalism, and encephalization. These human attributes have their precursors in the fossil record of Miocene apes. In this seminar we will explore the development of the defining attributes of humans from their precursors in the Miocene to their appearance in the earliest hominins (australopithecines and Homo). Our extensive collection of Miocene and Plio-Pleistocene casts will be used to illustrate and visualize many of the attributes discussed in the readings. Students will take turns leading the discussion each week, based on readings to be determined together with the instructor. They will also prepare an abstract of a presentation on a topic to be decided in consultation with the instructor, in AABA format, and a presentation, also following AABA format.
ANT4065HF - Specific Problems II: Geoarchaeology (Don Butler)
Geoarchaeologists have raised several issues concerning our understandings of human-environment interactions. These include the contextual integrity and interfacing of bleeding-edge biomolecular and geochemical proxies, scale mismatching among environmental and behavioral evidence, and the challenges with leveraging the past to anticipate future socio-ecological resilience. In this seminar, we integrate theory and method crosscutting the social and geosciences to address these and other problems in contemporary geoarchaeology. We will collaborate on addressing geoarchaeological questions relevant to each student’s research interests through weekly thematic discussions and explorations of tri-campus analytical capabilities. The class will actively engage with the collection, critical evaluation, and interpretive possibilities of geoarchaeological evidence such as geochemistry, biomolecules, micromorphology, and micro-sedimentary archives. Each student will complete a project that contributes to their thesis research or adjacent research interests.
ANT4020HF - Archaeological Theory (Genevieve Dewar)
This seminar offers an in-depth examination of the history of archaeological theory and the major theoretical approaches defining the discipline today. Students will explore changing schools of archaeological thought concerned with the study of material culture, past social formations, and historical process throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, employing a diverse set of perspectives. Emphasis is placed on how shifting positions on fundamental aspects of the practice and foci of archaeological thought directly shape archaeological reconstructions and representations of the past. Ultimately, the seminar should provide students with a rich understanding of the theoretical frameworks that underpin contemporary archaeological research and the unique problems inherent in archaeological efforts to represent and interpret the material record.
ANT6003H - Critical Issues in Ethnography 1 (Bianca Dahl)
Ethnography’ is at once a (relatively disciplined) practice of interpersonal engagement, a way of thinking about the world, and the results of such practices conveyed and transformed through writing. In this reading intensive course we examine books published over the past few decades (skewed towards more recent years) that are all variously understood as ‘ethnography’ in an effort to become more familiar with the scope and elasticity of the genre. The selected texts are diverse but thematically linked by concerns for place, time, subject/person, power, and subordination. Each provides a point of departure for exploring a range of research methods and theoretical models. We examine issues such as research design, collaboration and sole-authorship, authorial positioning and voice, narrative style, use of ‘plot’, characterization, and representation, all the while attending to how each ethnography was produced within its historical and intellectual context.
ANT4010HF - Archaeology in Contemporary Society (Justin Jennings)
This course will explore the role of archaeology in modern society. Its primary goal is to get students to think about how their research affects, and is affected by, the world around them. For both ethical and practical reasons, it is critical that archaeology graduate students (and faculty!) understand the relationship between their research and the broader society with which it articulates. Seminars will draw papers from diverse regions of the globe based around weekly themes, and will attempt to keep discussions at a "practical" level — how can archaeology actually work "on the ground" in relation to a range of contemporary issues and interest groups? This course will offer a broad-ranging overview of relevant topics, intended to be useful as students frame their research questions, apply for funding, pursue fieldwork, interpret data, contribute to policy discussions, and interact with the public.
ANT6100H - History of Anthropological Thought (Omer Ozcan)
As an introduction to the history of anthropological thought, this MA-level course will familiarize students with key thinkers, theoretical approaches, and ethnographic innovations that shaped the discipline between the late 1800s and the 1980s. As a core course, HAT seeks to provide students with an understanding of how the subjects and objects of anthropological study have been defined. It likewise considers the kinds of knowledge, ethics, and modes of analysis these different approaches might demand. An understanding of the historically situated character of our discipline is a crucial component of our contemporary practice, and this includes taking seriously the intellectual genealogies out of which–and often against which—contemporary thought has emerged. Rather than offering a comprehensive history, the selection of topics and readings of this course, therefore, aims to facilitate a critical understanding of key scholarly traditions that determined the discipline of anthropology today.
ANT3034HS & ANT6031HS - Applied Anthropology (Tracey Galloway & Janelle Taylor)
This course aims to fill an important and growing need for anthropologists to contribute to interdisciplinary research. Increasingly, employers in both academic and non-academic institutions see high value and complementarity in anthropological approaches to community engagement, research design, data analysis and knowledge sharing. This course will bring together a community of learners from across anthropological subdisciplines to engage with applied anthropological theory and practice. We will also emphasize professionalization relevant to applied research. Learners will explore the ethics and praxis of applied anthropology as it pertains to their subdiscipline and develop confidence with basic tools and processes of interdisciplinary and applied scholarly communication. The goal of this course is to prepare anthropologists for careers in a broad range of academic and non-academic settings including government and non-governmental agencies, the non-profit sector, municipal and community-based organizations and the private sector.
ANT6027HS - Anthropology of Violence (Christopher Krupa)
This course examines anthropological approaches to the study of violence. Violence has long been a central focus for anthropological research. One of the overarching ambitions in much of this research has been to make violence meaningful in some respect. Violence can be given meaning in any number of ways. For example, it can be analyzed as being part of a system of exchange, a system of sacrifice, a system of debt, a system of law-making, or a system of signs. More recently, however, studies of violence have started to emphasize the importance of failures in meaning. In this regard, it could be argued that violence describes the limits of the human capacity to give meaning to events.
This course provides an overview of anthropological and related theories of violence. Some of the central theorists considered in the course are Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben. The course then situates these theories within the context of ethnographic cases. The varieties of violence considered in these ethnographies range from forms of violence normally associated with small-scale societies (circumcision, tribal warfare, headhunting, witchcraft killings, etc.) to the forms of violence perpetrated by modern states and their citizens (modern warfare, torture, incarceration, rape, police violence, vigilantism, etc.)
ANT3042HS - Advanced Topics in Primate Ecology (Shawn Lehman)
TBA
ANT3047HS* - Evolutionary Anthropology Theory (Michael Schillaci)
This course is an intensive exploration of the ideas that form the foundation of evolutionary anthropology. We will read historically important theoretical texts and critically examine leading concepts in the field. Through guest lectures by scholars in our department we will discuss topics such as molecular clocks, species concepts, signatures of selection, niche construction, genetic drift, sexual selection, human behavioural ecology, epigenetics, and population genetics. We will actively engage with historical and current issues of diversity and decolonization in the discipline of Evolutionary Anthropology throughout each weekly discussion.
ANT3439HS - Graduate Forensic Anthropology (Tracy Rogers)
Students will address advanced theory and method in Forensic Anthropology. Topics include: theory in forensic anthropology; professional practice, e.g. safety, ethics, liability, billing, case management, media training, managing an online presence, being an expert witness, etc.; search logistics and management; scene management and documentation; recovery and collection of evidence (including excavation of graves); forensic significance; sex determination; age estimation; ancestry; identification theory; peri- vs. post-mortem damage (including trauma analysis); and deliberate post-mortem destruction of a body.
ANT 4043HS - Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Ideology (Edward Swenson)
This course offers an intensive study of archaeological approaches to ritual, religion, and ideology within a comparative historical framework. Students will examine key theoretical paradigms in the anthropology of religion while assessing the ways in which inferences on social process, identity politics, and prehistoric worldviews can be derived from ritual contexts preserved in the material record. We will critically evaluate archaeological methods employed to identify the physical traces of ritual practice and will scrutinize in turn competing theories of past ceremonialism. Other themes to be addressed in the course include: a critique of functionalist interpretations of religion popular in archaeological research; the materiality of ritual performance and the aesthetics of religious spectacles; and archaeological analyses of ritual deposits/landscapes to reconstruct past ontologies, power relations, historical change, and culturally specific structures of practice.
ANT4060HS - Specific Problems: Chinese Archaeology (Liye Xie)
This seminar critically examines archaeological practices in China, focusing on intellectual traditions, theoretical frameworks, methods, and contemporary debates. We will situate Chinese archaeology within its historical and institutional contexts while emphasizing its interactions with global archaeological thought and the increasing influence of international scholarship.
Possible topics include historiographic and Marxist archaeology, interregional interactions, origins of agriculture, state formation, and urbanization. Through foundational literature and recent case studies, students will engage in discussions and presentations, developing a nuanced appreciation of Chinese archaeology’s achievements, challenges, and future directions.
ANT4039HS - Origin and Nature of Food Producing Societies (Monica Ramsey)
This course covers both substantive and theoretical aspects of the transition from foraging to resource production. Regional case studies of primary and secondary areas of the shift to resource production throughout the world are investigated, and theoretical models to explain the transition are examined.
The course will follow a seminar format, where the class will meet to discuss a particular topic. For each of these meetings, a team of students will be responsible for researching the topic in some detail and presenting a summary, while the rest of the class will be responsible for preparing questions for discussion. In addition, each student will prepare one research paper for submission. The paper will require the student to formulate a major topic for detailed investigation, write a paper on the research, and present the results to the class.
ANT6035H - Advanced Research Seminar: Ethnography and Poetics (Anne Spice)
The way anthropologists write can be a barrier to understanding the situations we write about. This course pushes past the limitations of academic prose and considers alternative ways of writing about social and cultural worlds. We will read the work of ethnographers who use poetry to express experiences that evade flat analysis (from the transcendent to the violent to the devastating), and we will practice using our own poetic voices to describe ethnographic contexts. Poetics offers a way into (and through) the grief, loneliness, frustration, and joy of anthropology (and life). In this course we’ll write our own ethnographic poetry and creative non-fiction as we reach for more meaningful expressions of our overlapping emotional, political, social, and academic lives.
ANT6037H - Advanced Research Seminar VII: Toxicity and Environmental Injustice (Zoë Wool)
Toxicity is a defining feature of contemporary life, but its effects can be hard to pin down. It is everywhere, but it is not everywhere the same. This course grapples with what toxicity and associated waste infrastructures have to teach us about power, knowledge, and embodied experience in an uneven world. Informed by critical feminist approaches to the environment and Indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS), we trace how toxicity connect us to varied histories, processes of social reproduction, and subjects positioned otherwise and elsewhere, to understand how distributions of toxicity and waste both rely on and unsettle racial and colonial geographies.