On this page, you can find a selection of courses I have taught, with some links to syllabi. If you feel inspired to borrow from them for your own teaching, I’d love to hear from you.
A workshop in anthropological theory, focused on the study of technologies made to entice, lure, and persuade. The first half of the course is dedicated to the study of trapping, with students designing and analyzing traps of their own (to capture prey like office workers or undergraduates). The second half of the course focuses on digital media and persuasive design, using anthropology’s comparative method to think about the connections between technologies that range from sharpened sticks to machine learning.
I taught an earlier iteration of this course, focused on reading research methods, as Trap Theory in Spring 2023.
An advanced undergraduate seminar examining attention as a social and cultural phenomenon. Attention commonly appears in popular discourse as an explanation for contemporary problems, from political polarization to climate change. This class examines how our understandings of attention are culturally situated, drawing common appeals to universalizing psychology into question. In recent iterations, students choose an attention measurement system to study and explore how it operationalizes “attention,” what kinds of attentional subjects it engenders, and how it might be undermined.
The version of the syllabus that’s spread the most online is the one from Spring 2018, which involved weekly exercises (like counting distractions encountered while reading or attending to one’s gait while walking), and which I wrote about for Somatosphere.
A mid-level survey course covering work on the social and cultural aspects of computers, from histories of calculation to internet infrastructure to algorithmic personalization. Recent versions have been organized into four broad units: the history of computers and the internet; the materiality of computing; work and play; and the rise of algorithmic profiling.
An anthropological theory course, required for anthropology majors at Tufts, which introduces the canonical history of the field as well as critiques of it. This version of the course takes students through four short essay assignments: a historicist and presentist appraisal of early-20th-century anthropological disputes; a comparison of mid-century computational methods in anthropology with contemporary big data “science of culture”; a close reading of a recurrent theoretical metaphor (like blood, water, or trees) across the semester’s texts; and a careful analysis of a recent ethnographic article, locating it within disciplinary history.
A wide-ranging survey of STS and the anthropological study of science and technology, designed to introduce students to canonical theories and topics in the field. Students learn about boundary work, pseudoscience, and the social construction of knowledge as well as infrastructures, techniques of the body, and the gendering of technical artifacts.