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Fall 2021 Course Offerings

The following courses are being offered during the Fall 2021 semester. The University is planning a return to in-person teaching, so the course format will be face-to-face unless otherwise noted.

All of the courses listed are related to the health humanities and may qualify for health humanities related degree programs.

African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies (AAAD)

AAAD 287: Health Equality in the African Diaspora
Kia Caldwell | TuTh 11am-12:15pm

Examines historical and contemporary processes shaping health and well-being in Africa Diaspora communities. Emphasis will be placed on health and health equity within African-descendant communities in the United States, Haiti, and Brazil.

American Studies

AMST 248: Intersectionality – Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice (cross listed with ENGL 248 and POLI 248)
Frank Baumgartner, Heidi Kim, and Tanya Shields | TuTh 11:00am-11:50am + Recitation

The first goal of this super course is to give students real tools for how to address multiple modes of difference and identity formations like race, gender, class, and sexuality.

AMST 715: Community Histories and Public Humanities
Robert Allen | Th 5:00-8:00pm

Community Histories and Public Humanities explores how communities have been, are, and might be preserved, documented, represented, and remembered. Focuses on the use of digitized primary sources and tools to engage communities in public history/humanities initiatives using interdisciplinary approaches informed by American Studies and Folklore. Participants have opportunity to work on ongoing community history/archiving projects. Project-based work is supported by reading in memory studies, representation, sites of trauma, community archiving, and oral history.

Please Note: Participants will be dealing with the historical experience of mental illness and trauma, and conducting and sharing amongst ourselves original research into sometimes troubling institutional records.  Interested participants should contact Prof. Allen (rallen@email.unc.edu ) to set up a Zoom/telephone interview.  Enrollment is limited and is by permission of the instructor.

Anthropology

ANTH 147: Comparative Healing Systems
Michele Rivkin-Fish | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm + Recitation

In this course we compare a variety of healing beliefs and practices so that students may gain a better understanding of their own society, culture, and medical system.

ANTH 270: Living Medicine
Martha King | MWF 1:25-2:15pm + Recitation

This course examines the social and cultural experience of medicine, the interpersonal and personal aspects of healing and being healed. It explores how medicine shapes and is shaped by those who inhabit this vital arena of human interaction: physicians, nurses, other professionals and administrators; patients; families; friends and advocates.

ANTH 278: Women in Science (cross listed with WGST 278)
Nicole Else-Quest | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

The role of women in scientific domains throughout history and a consideration of the status of women and men as scientists. The development of science as a cultural practice.

ANTH 390: Special Topics in Medical Anthropology – Political Economy of Healthcare
Sandy Smith-Nonini | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

Description TBD

ANTH 405: Mental Health, Psychiatry, and Culture
Jocelyn Chua | MWF 10:10-11:00am

This course explores mental illness as subjective experience, social process, key cultural symbol, and object of intervention and expert knowledge. Our questions include: Does mental illness vary across cultural and social settings? How do psychiatric ways of categorizing, diagnosing, and treating mental illness shape people’s subjective experience of their affliction? How is psychiatry predicated on cultural ideas about self and society? What does this contingency mean for the movement for global mental health?

ANTH 442: Health and Gender after Socialism
Michele Rivkin-Fish | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

This course examines post-socialist experiences of the relationship between political, economic, social, and cultural transitions, and challenges in public health and gender relations.

ANTH 448: Health and Medicine in the American South
Martha King | MWF 11:15am-12:05pm

This course examines ways we can understand the history and culture of a region through the experience of health and healthcare among its people. With an anthropological approach, this course considers the individual, social, and political dimensions of medicalized bodies in the American South from the 18th century through the current day.

Note: This course is part of Reckoning: Race, Memory and Reimagining the Public University, a shared learning initiative for fall 2019. Learn more at: college.unc.edu/reckoning.

ANTH 750: Seminar in Medical Anthropology
Jocelyn Chua | W 11:15am-1:45pm

This graduate seminar serves as an advanced introduction to sociocultural approaches to the sub-discipline of medical anthropology. Through the careful scrutiny of selected, acclaimed monographs and articles, we will explore major theoretical concerns taken up by medical anthropologists to make sense of and account for health, disease, and treatment in diverse settings. Rather than setting out sections on theory, methods, and substantive topics, this course is organized around several of the most important analytical frames that have shaped and continue to shape medical anthropology. We consider these analytical frames as they have developed alongside the emergent realities of contemporary life that medical anthropologists endeavor to make sense of: new biotechnologies, expanding markets, new epidemics, and changing forms of subjectivity in our globalizing world. We will be concerned throughout this course with the linkages among approaches, and the dialogues, debates, collaborations, and divergences that have developed interactively in light of and in response to the others. The course seeks to plunge us into the life of a discipline, into the medley of discussions, trajectories, and the choreography of interactions that together comprise theory and practice in sociocultural approaches to medical anthropology.

Economics

ECON 450: Health Economics: Problems and Policy
Andres Hincapie Norna | TuTh 2:00-3:35pm

Economic analysis applied to problems and public policy in health care.

Note: Prerequisites, ECON 400 and 410; a grade of C or better in ECON 400 and 410 is required; permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites.

English & Comparative Literature

ENGL 057: First-Year Seminar: Future Perfect: Science Fictions and Social Form
Matthew Taylor | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

What will our world look like in ten years? Fifty? One hundred? Will the future be a utopian paradise or a dystopian wasteland? Through a wide-ranging survey of popular science writing, novels, and films, this first-year seminar will examine fictional and nonfictional attempts to imagine the future from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore everything from futurology and transhumanism to warnings of imminent environmental collapse. Our focus will be less on assessing the accuracy of these predictions and more on determining what they tell us about the hopes and fears of the times in which they were made. The course will culminate in a short research paper on a future-oriented topic of your choosing.

ENGL 248: Intersectionality – Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice (cross listed with AMST 248 and POLI 248)
Frank Baumgartner, Heidi Kim, and Tanya Shields | TuTh 11:00am-11:50am + Recitation

The first goal of this super course is to give students real tools for how to address multiple modes of difference and identity formations like race, gender, class, and sexuality.

ENGL 266: Science and Literature
Margaret O’Shaughnessey | MWF 1:25-2:15pm

Introductory exploration of the relation between science and literature, as well as the place and value of both in the contemporary world.

ENGL 269: Introduction to Disability Studies
Kym Weed | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary field that, according to Simi Linton, “aims to expose the ways that disability has been made exceptional and to work to naturalize disabled people.” As a corrective to the historical marginalization of disabled people, Disability Studies works to center the experiences of disabled people in its analysis of the social, political, and rhetorical forces that contribute to discriminatory policies and beliefs. Because, as Alison Kafer notes, cultural notions of disability affect everyone—disabled and nondisabled people alike—investigating the lived experience, representations, and cultural understandings of disability help us understand the ever-changing relationship between our bodies, selves, and worlds.

This course will introduce students to key critical concepts and debates in the field of Disability Studies by drawing on multiple disciplinary perspectives. Through readings (critical essays, fiction, memoir, poetry, and film), guest lectures, and professor and student-led discussion, students in this course will be introduced to the biomedical, social, and justice models of disability; explore the histories of disability communities and activists; examine representations of disability; and study how multiple forms of inequality and oppression intersect with disability and disability justice work.

ENGL 303: Scientific and Technical Communication
Ruby Pappoe | MWF 2:30-3:20pm

Advanced course focused on adapting scientific and technical content to public or non-expert audiences in oral, written, and digital forms. Assignments may include composing professional reports, developing multimedia instructions for a product, or developing an interactive exhibit.

ENGL 370: Race, Health, and Narrative
Cynthia Current | MWF 2:30-3:20pm

This interdisciplinary course explores how issues of health, medicine, and illness are impacted by questions of race in 20th-century American literature and popular culture. Specific areas covered include pain, death, the family and society, reproduction, mental illness, aging, human subject experimentation, the doctor-patient relationship, pesticides, and bioethics.

ENGL 763: Introduction to Methods in Health Humanities
Kym Weed | M 11:15am-2:15pm

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar will introduce students to topics and methods in health humanities. In recent years, scholars have sought to define the field of health humanities as a broader and more inclusive set of research practices and objects of study than related fields like medical humanities. Therefore, this course will sample critical and creative texts that represent this field-expanding trend. Students will read foundational critical texts in health humanities and related fields including medical humanities, narrative medicine, disability studies, medical anthropology, graphic medicine, and rhetoric of health and medicine along with a series of primary texts. Together, we will define the scope, methods, and values that constitute the field of health humanities.

ENGL 825: Renaissance Literature in Context – Environment, Embodiment, Nature, and Habit in Early Modern English Literature
Mary Floyd-Wilson | Th 2:00-5:00pm

It is our aim in this course to investigate how Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood custom, habit, use, and nature. What aspects of a person were “stamped” and what could be changed or transformed through action or practice? Where does the Puritan notion of habitual sin fit into this discourse? What kinds of texts suggest a dynamic interplay between body and environment? How were somatic, moral, and spiritual practices thought to inform the construction not only of character, temperament, health but also class, gender, and race? Part of our focus will be on how the management of the six Galenic non-naturals (air; food and drink; rest and exercise; sleep and waking; excretion and retention; the passions) permeated daily life. How did “habit” work on the mind and the body? Where do we find clashes or conflicts in the discourses on habit, custom, and nature? We will bring these questions to bear in our reading of a range of early modern handbooks that advise on matters of regimen, education, courtesy, travel, and devotion, including texts by Roger Ascham, Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Galen, George Herbert, Michel de Montaigne, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, and others.

ENGL 881: Biopolitics and Control
Greg Flaxman | W 5:00-8:00pm

In the spirit of Michel Foucault’s “history of the present,” this seminar will consider the transformation of biopolitics and the corresponding “society of control” that has emerged over the past several decades. Indeed, Gilles Deleuze introduced the concept of “control societies” precisely in order to extend Foucault’s historical and genealogical project to the future. But whereas Deleuze located control in a post-disciplinary (and decidedly European) framework, we’ll suggest that the designs of control society take shape in the uniquely rapacious circumstances of American liberalism. Specifically, the class will revolve around the techniques/technologies of the grid, which precipitated not only the conquest of indigenous peoples but also the “endocolonization” of its own (settler) population.

In the first part of the class, then, we’ll consider the growing interest in gridding across a number of fields (e.g., computer engineering, geography, urban planning, infrastructure studies, architecture and art history, cartography, demography, surveillance and security studies, etc.). In the second part of the seminar, we’ll turn to the tradition of liberalism within which the United States developed the grid as an instrument of political economy and biopolitical technology. The final portion of the class will trace the terrestrial and infrastructural iterations of gridding from property lines (plats), to roads (and later highways), to communication networks (telegraphs,  then telephones), to electrical (power) grids, and finally to the specter of a global information grid. In this context, we’ll seek to understand the emergence of control in relation to the urge to get off the grid. In what sense does the material and rhetorical proliferation of grids lend itself to conspiratorial narratives, and how is it possible to resist control without resorting to the “paranoid style of American politics.”

Environmental Sciences

ENVR 525: Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Global Health
Michael Fisher | 3:30-4:45pm

Builds on an understanding of infectious and toxic hazards, disease causation, and environmental transmission. Deals with hazard and disease classification; safety, risk, and vulnerability; interventions and their health impact; approaches in different settings; distal factors (e.g., water scarcity, climate change); and approaches to studying unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

ENVR 610: Global Perspectives on Environmental Health Inequalities
Staff | TBA

Students will learn about how social, economic, and political factors impact environmental health outcomes and will be introduced to theories and methods for incorporating social determinants frameworks into environmental health research, as well as the role of environmental justice movements.

ENVR 705: One Health: Philosophy to Practical Integration
Jill Stewart & Mamie Harris | M 5:00-7:00pm & Th 8:00-9:15am

This course explores the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health and facilitates the understanding of health as an inexorably linked system requiring multidisciplinary collaborative efforts. The One Health concept demonstrates the importance of a holistic approach to disease prevention and the maintenance of human, animal, and environmental health.

Note: This graduate-level course is also open to undergrads. The course is available for 2 or 3 credit hours. The course includes students from diverse disciplines in Duke, UNC and NCSU. Students taking the course for 3 credits are required to enroll in the 1 hour discussion session on Thursday mornings (8:00 – 9:00 am) on UNC campus. All students can attend a maximum of 50% selected Tuesday evening lectures via video conferencing from UNC campus. Under special circumstances and with permission, students may take the class for 1 credit with reduced assignments.

Geography

GEGO 222: Health and Medical Geography
Michael Emch | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Health and disease are studied by analyzing the cultural/environmental interactions that lie behind world patterns of disease distribution, diffusion, and treatment, and the ways these are being altered by development.

Health Behavior

HBEH 700: Foundations of Health Equality, Social Justice and Human Rights
Alexandra Lightfoot and Deborah Stroman | Tu 9:30am-12:15pm

This is a required course for masters’ students in the EQUITY concentration. The course will expose students to the broad context through which public health practitioners and researchers understand and address public health issues in regards to health equity, social justice and human rights. This course will provide students with an overview of the field, as well as an introduction to concepts and topics that are relevant across the MPH curriculum.

HBEH 701: A Holistic Approach to Understanding & Achieving Health Equity
Patsy Polston | TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This course will take a holistic approach to understanding and achieving health equities. We will explore how inequities appear in different populations; examine historical and relevant events to unpack how these inequities came to be; and identify strategies to intervene to reduce or eliminate these inequities. We will identify and develop a model to be utilized as a tool when addressing public health related issues.

HBEH 720: Leading for Racial Equality: Examining Structural Issues of Race and Class
Deborah Stroman and Geni Eng | W 2:30-5:30pm

This multidisciplinary seminar prepares participants from graduate programs and communities to address the challenges of racial, ethnic, and tribal equity. Co-instructors promote applied leadership through: a firm definition and analysis of racism, power, and privilege; historic and current structures that sustain inequities; and anti-racism tools and resources for system change.

Health Policy and Management

HPM 571: Health and Human Rights (Cross listed as PLCY 570)
Benjamin Meier | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Course focuses on rights-based approaches to health, applying a human rights perspective to selected public health policies, programs, and interventions. Students will apply a formalistic human rights framework to critical public health issues, exploring human rights as both a safeguard against harm and a catalyst for health promotion.

HPM 758: Underserved Populations and Health Reform
Pam Silberman | Tu 5:00-8:00pm

This course gives students a greater understanding of programs available to serve underserved populations, and how the ACA (or any replacement) will impact on care provided to underserved populations. The course is designed to help students think critically about the impact of policy changes on different populations.

Honors

HNRS 350: Learning the Art of Medicine
Rick Stouffer | Tu 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

This course is designed to supplement knowledge obtained through the traditional pre-medical curriculum in order to enhance students’ development as health care providers. It has five objectives:

  1. To introduce students to non-biological factors that affect the health of individuals and society.
  2. To provide students with an overview of changes in the delivery of medical care.
  3. An introduction to the medical training system and how to pick a specialty.
  4. Provide practical knowledge that healthcare providers must possess including an introduction to ethics, government regulations that practicing healthcare providers need to know, the malpractice system and other issues affecting healthcare providers in the US
  5. Discuss topics related to healthcare delivery including the importance of innovation in healthcare and international healthcare

The course will combine weekly seminar meetings with visits to Dr. Stouffer’s clinics, where they will see issues discussed in class play out in the real-life treatment of patients.

Note: Honors Carolina third and fourth year students only.

HNRS 355: Narrative and Medicine
Terry Holt | M 2:00-4:30pm

This seminar explores the role of narrative in medicine from two sides: the patient’s experience of illness, and the experience of caring for the sick. As a writing workshop, this course offers students a supportive environment in which to explore their own experiences and refine their writing skills. It also provides an opportunity for service work in a variety of clinical settings, in which students will have a chance to participate in medical care. Taught by a clinician-writer with years of experience in medical care, professional publication, and workshop instruction, this course offers a rare opportunity to learn from a highly skilled professional engaged in the central concerns of his work.

Note: Honors Carolina students register online when their registration appointment begins. Non-honors students register beginning June 14. If you are unable to enroll online, submit a wait list request at honorscarolina.unc.edu/waitlist between June 14 and August 11.

Information and Library Science

INLS 710: Evidence-Based Medicine
Megan Von Isenburg | TBD (Remote Only – All Asynchronous)

An introduction to the process of evidence-based medicine (EBM) including question building, searching, and critical appraisal of studies and to the supporting roles and opportunities for medical librarians.

Note: Non- SILS students are not allowed to register for all other INLS courses as they are restricted to INLS major, minors and graduate students during early registration. NON-SILS students will need to add yourself to the waitlist in Connect Carolina for the course you are interested in, as we will not be keeping an internal waitlist. We will enroll from the waitlist as seats become available.

Japanese

JAPN 482: Embodying Japan: The Cultures of Beauty, Sports, and Medicine in Japan
Dwayne Dixon | MWF 1:25-2:15pm

Explores Japanese culture and society through investigating changing concepts of the human body. Sources include anthropological and history materials, science fiction, and film.

Note: Some seats in this course are reserved for DAMES majors. Anyone may waitlist, and unused reserved seats will be released sometime on June 16.

Law

LAW 465: Current Issues in Law and Medicine
Joan Krause & Richard Saver | Tu 10:15-11:55am

This seminar explores contemporary issues in law and medicine from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course will address legal topics impacting the practice of medicine and the delivery of health care, with the aim of having students appreciate both the relevant law and the broader legal and medical context.

Media & Journalism

MEJO 560: Environmental and Science Journalism
Tom Linden | MW 11:00am-12:15pm

Prepare students to work as environmental and science journalists. The course emphasizes writing skills in all delivery formats and interpreting environmental, science, and medical information for consumers.

Philosophy

PHIL 150: Theory, Evidence, and Understanding in Science
Yifan Li | MWF 10:10-11:00am

What is distinctive about the kind of knowledge called “science”? What is scientific explanation? How are scientific theories related to empirical evidence?

PHIL 165: Bioethics
Staff | MWF 1:25-2:15pm
Staff | MWF 3:35-4:50pm

An examination of ethical issues in the life sciences and technologies, medicine, public health, and/or human interaction with nonhuman animals or the living environment.

PHIL 765: Advanced Studies in Value Theory – Bioethics Methods
Rebecca Walker | Th 4:00-6:30pm

Philosophical bioethics is sometimes described as “applied moral theory.” This gives the impression that bioethicists mainly interpret normative moral theories in order to generate prescriptions for ethical conduct in medicine and the life sciences. However, philosophical work in bioethics is not necessarily prescriptive and frequently does not proceed by way of applying particular moral theories like Kantianism, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics. In this course we will investigate “methods of bioethics” – approaches that the field has either developed or adapted to address its complex ethical issues. Prominent examples include the four principles (respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice), casuistry, feminist, and narrative approaches – and yes, also applied moral theory. We will interrogate these and other selected approaches for their broader philosophical implications. We will also consider approaches to specific bioethics topics. Examples include the development of principles to guide human subject research, moral theory and the use of nonhuman animals in biomedical research, case-based approaches to medical interventions at the end of life, feminism and dementia care, and critical race theory considerations of representation in research. This course is developed to give a foundational understanding for graduate students interested in teaching bioethics, or who are doing (or are interested in) research in the field.

Psychology

PSYC 504: Health Psychology
Karen Gil | TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm (Remote Only – All Asynchronous)
Karen Gil | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm (Remote Only – All Asynchronous)

An in-depth coverage of psychological, biological, and social factors that may be involved with health.
Prerequisites, PSYC 101 and 245.

Note: Seat restriction periods: April 6th-July 29th and August 11th-August 24th. Majority of seats restricted to PSYC majors, NSCI majors, Cognitive Science minors, and Neuroscience minors only during the noted times

Public Policy

PLCY 361: Health Policy in the United States
Carmen Gutierrez | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

An analysis of the evolution of American health policy with special emphasis on current health care finance and delivery challenges.

PLCY 570: Health and Human Rights
Benjamin Meier | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Course focuses on rights-based approaches to health, applying a human rights perspective to selected public health policies, programs, and interventions. Students will apply a formalistic human rights framework to critical public health issues, exploring human rights as both a safeguard against harm and a catalyst for health promotion.

PLCY 575: Innovation, Science, and Public Policy
Jeffrey Warren & Maryann Feldman | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Introduction to analysis of science policy. Course explores how events transformed science’s role in American life and how science relates to industry and economic development. Topics include the mechanisms of allocating scientific resources, the commercialization of academic discoveries, regulating emerging technology, and achieving consensus on controversial scientific issues.

Public Health

PUBH 610: Introductory Spanish for Health Professionals
Elizabeth Tolman | Tu 5:00-6:30pm
Staff | W 5:45-7:15pm

This course is intended for students who know no Spanish or so little they feel the need to start over. Students with more than two semesters of college Spanish are not eligible. The course covers the curriculum of first-semester Spanish taught within a health context, with a focus on speaking.

PUBH 706: Advanced Health Policy for Clinicians
Sue Tolleson-Reinhart | W 2:30-5:10pm

An introduction to the fundamental organization, behavior, financing, and challenges of the health system of the United States. The course treats the entire edifice of American health care as “the American health system,” and intends to examine it in toto, including by comparing it to other national health systems, and in part, by examining critical components of the system. Students must be enrolled in the Population Health for Clinicians Concentration or permission of the instructor.

PUBH 711: Critical Issues in Global Health
Karine Dube | TuTh 5:00-6:15pm

Explores contemporary issues/controversies in global health through an interdisciplinary perspective; examines complexity of social, economic, political, and environmental factors affecting global health; analyzes global health disparities through a social justice lens; and exposes students to opportunities in global health work and research.

Religious Studies

RELI 220: Religion and Medicine
Zara Surratt | MW 3:35-4:50pm

This course will deal with various interactions of religion and health care in the past and present.

Sociology

SOCI 180: Introduction to Global Population Health
Bethany Stoutamire | TuTh 8:00-9:15am

This course provides students with an introduction to population health, with an emphasis on three perspectives: demographic methods for assembling data and evidence, the social determinants of health framework, and the role of global institutions and movements in population health.

SOCI 422: Sociology of Mental Health and Illness
Taylor Hargrove | TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Examines the uniqueness of the sociological perspective in understanding mental health and illness. Draws upon various theoretical perspectives to best understand patterns, trends, and definitions of mental health and illness in social context. Focuses on how social factors influence definitions, perceptions, patterns, and trends of mental health and illness.

SOCI 469: Health and Society
Yang Yang | TuTh 8:00-9:15am
Taylor Hargrove | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

The primary objective of the course is to explain how and why particular social arrangements affect the types and distribution of diseases, as well as the types of health promotion and disease prevention practices that societies promote.

Women’s and Gender Studies

WGST 278: Women in Science (cross listed with ANTH 278)
Nicole Else-Quest | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

The role of women in scientific domains throughout history and a consideration of the status of women and men as scientists. The development of science as a cultural practice.

The HHIVE Lab

Department of English & Comparative Literature
Greenlaw Hall, Room 524
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
hhive@unc.edu

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