Fall 2025 Course Offerings

ENGL 163: Introduction to Health Humanities
Kym Weed | MWF 12:20-1:10pm
While human health is often understood as the purview of biomedicine, humanities methods can illuminate the social meaning of health, illness, disability, and mortality. The interdisciplinary field of health humanities calls upon methods and ways of knowing from a range of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to explore human health, illness, and disability. In this introduction to Health Humanities, we will apply the critical reading and analytical practices of the humanities to a range of texts that explore material, cultural, and political aspects of human health. Topics may include narrative medicine, medical training, illness narratives, disability studies, chronic illness, patient advocacy, and graphic medicine.

ENGL 121H: British Literature, 19th and Early 20th Century
Jeanne Moskal | TuTh 3:30-4:45pm
Our section of English 121, which surveys 19th and 20th-c British literature, will be informed, as above, by present-day concerns with climate change. On the literary side, the syllabus focuses more than is usual on women writers, stressing Jane Austen’s importance, as well as reflecting on the Gothic tradition, as exemplified in S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize. In terms of present-day concerns, we’ll study how the Industrial Revolution’s use of fossil fuels, as registered in literature, wrought long-term change on global health and climate.

In the semester’s major project, students will compose a commonplace book, which is a collection of quotations for personal use. This genre has been revived in the past five years or so because the physical object can be a site of crafting and because it offers an alternative to digital storage as well as a means of combating information overload. We will examine rare commonplace books in UNC’s Wilson Library and profile major commonplacers of the past (Leonardo DaVinci, Virginia Woolf) to inform our own practice. Writing assignments include two short papers (5-7 pages) and, to accompany your physical commonplace book, a ten-to-twelve-page reflection on commonplacing. During the final exam period, you will summarize your research for the class.

Interested students are welcome to contact the instructor with any questions or concerns at moskal@unc.edu

ENGL 227H: The Scientific Renaissance
Jessica Wolfe | MWF 1:25-2:15pm
This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the literature and culture of the English and European Renaissance (ca. 1520-1640), studying important landmarks of science, religion, and philosophy alongside selected major literary works of the period. We will approach our study of the Renaissance as an era that experienced numerous upheavals in the production and dissemination of knowledge: the spread of print, the European “discovery” of the Americas, the rise of modern scientific method, and the Protestant reformations. Our readings will place poets, playwrights, and essayists in conversation with medical writers, astronomers, travelers, and biblical scholars, among others, tracing the ways that writers of fiction both shaped and responded to some of the most pressing questions of the age: how do we know what we know? What are the limits of human knowledge, and how much can we trust knowledge gained by different means – reason, faith, our senses, our experience? How best may we come to understand the workings of nature and of God?

ENGL 266: Ecological Literature: On Mobile Dwelling
Denise Xu | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm
In the field of environmental studies, the prefix “eco-” appears in words ranging from ecocriticism and ecofeminism to ecocide and ecotourism. Why has this prefix become so prevalent?  This course returns to the building blocks of environmental studies by focusing on the most basic sense of “eco” (from the Greek word oikos) as a mobile dwelling place. We will consider major American authors from the nineteenth century (such as Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson) alongside contemporary ecological theorists (such as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Robin Wall Kimmerer).  By examining essays, poems, and administrative reports, we will follow a key set of questions. How have naturalists attempted to classify life, and how have unruly forms of life refused classification? How have empire, capital, and race influenced ecological discourse? How does the figure of the mobile dwelling place help us understand the past and present states of our environment?

ENGL 268/268H: Medicine, Literature, and Culture
Jane Thrailkill | MW 10:10-11:00am + Recitation
This course provides an introduction to Health Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines methods and topics from literary studies, healthcare, and the human sciences. We’ll read novels, screen films, learn about illnesses and treatments, and hear expert speakers as we investigate the importance of narrative in the time of high-tech medicine. We’ll play close attention to how ideas about sickness have changed over time and across cultures. Topics will include the clinician-patient relationship, medical detection, the rise of psychiatry, racism and social determinants of health, epidemics and the “outbreak narrative,” and the quest for immortality.

ENGL 269: Introduction to Disability Studies
Kym Weed | MWF 10:10-11:00am
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.” Almost every human will experience a significant illness or disability in their lifetime; therefore, investigating the lived experience, representations, and cultural understandings of disability give us insight into 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), pre-recorded presentations, and virtual 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 12:20-1:10pm
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 1:25-2:15pm
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 611: Narrative, Literature, and Medicine
Jordynn Jack | TuTh 9:30-10:45am
Sociologist Arthur Frank asserts that “whether ill people want to tell stories or not, illness calls for stories.” This seminar explores narrative approaches to suffering, healing, and medicine’s roles in these processes. Students learn literary and anthropological approaches to examine medically themed works from a range of genres.

AAAD 058: FYS – Health Inequality in Africa and the African Diaspora
Lydia Boyd | TuThu 2:00-3:15pm
This first-year seminar examines the ways that healthcare access and health itself are shaped by social, racial, and economic inequalities in our society and others. The geographic focus of this course is Africa and the United States. Drawing on research in medical anthropology, sociology, public health, and history, we will gain an understanding of the political, economic, and social factors that create health inequalities

AAAD 387: HIV/AIDS in Africa and the Diaspora
Lydia Boyd | TuThu 3:30-4:45pm
This course explores the history and contemporary politics of HIV/AIDS in African communities and across the Diaspora. The differing trajectories of the epidemic on the continent, in the West, and in the Caribbean and Latin America will be explored.

ANTH 147: Comparative Healing Systems
Michele Rivkin-Fish | TuThu 5:00-6:15pm
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 204: From Ayahuasca to Zoloft: Anthropological Approaches to Drugs and Drug Use
Morgan Hoke | MWF 12:20-1:10pm
This course considers the cultural, social, political, medical, and biological aspects of drugs (legal, illegal, pharmaceutical, botanical, and otherwise) through space and time. We take an interdisciplinary approach drawing on research from anthropology, science studies, biology, history, ethnobotany, and sociology to examine what counts as a drug, who determines what is a drug, why people use drugs, and how drugs influence us as individuals and as a society.

ANTH 270: Living Medicine
Martha King | MWF 1:25-2:15pm
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 334: Art, Nature, and Religion: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Benjamin Bridges | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm
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 341: Anthropology of Fitness Culture
Emily Curtin | MWF 11:15-12:05pm
This course examines the global rise of fitness culture and its relationship to health, social change, inequalities, gender, and globalization through a selection of anthropological and sociological texts. This course also has a methods component: students will acquire qualitative research skills including participant observation and interviewing through designing and carrying out their own ethnographic study in a local fitness space.

ANTH 389: Special Topics in Medical Anthropology – Research Methods and Experiences
TBD | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm
Mark Sorensen | Th 9:30-12:00pm
This course exposes medical anthropology students to a wide range of social science methods used to conduct research and analyze data. This course highlights approaches used primarily in medical anthropology but also draws on those used by other anthropologists. The focus will be on conducting fieldwork using participant-observation and interview techniques. Analytical techniques will focus on writing, organizing and analyzing fieldnotes. Students will engage in original fieldwork exercises and produce fieldnotes.

ANTH 390: Special Topics in Medical Anthropology: Bodies Under Capitalism
Emily Curtin | MW 3:35-4:50pm
A rotating topics course related to any of the subject areas and methodological approaches in medical anthropology. Seminar format will enable students to engage closely with a faculty member on his or her area of research. Intended for medical anthropology minors with enrollment open to other students if space allows.

ANTH 390: Special Topics in Medical Anthropology: Good Intentions, Uncertain Outcomes: Cultural Approaches to Global Health and Humanitarianism
Dariia Rachok | MWF 12:20-1:10pm
A rotating topics course related to any of the subject areas and methodological approaches in medical anthropology. Seminar format will enable students to engage closely with a faculty member on his or her area of research. Intended for medical anthropology minors with enrollment open to other students if space allows.

ANTH 405: Mental Health, Psychiatry, and Culture
Jocelyn Chua | TuTh 9:30-10:45am
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 448: Health and Medicine in the American South
Martha King | MWF 11:15-12:05pm
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

ANTH 582: Fieldwork with Social Models of Well-Being Credits
Michele Rivkin-Fish | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm
Required preparation, at least one introductory cultural medical anthropology course. This course highlights approaches and organizations that pursue well-being through social relations and social change, rather than through medical treatment and cure. Students will: 1) learn the conceptual understandings that inform social models of well-being in disability studies/disability rights, occupational science, and critical gerontology; and 2) learn and apply anthropological methods of participant-observation fieldwork and interviewing in local organizations that implement these social models.

ANTH 585: Anthropology of Science
Melissa Salm | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm
Cultural perspectives on science and technology at a global scale, including research settings and social contexts, knowledge claims and material practice, and relations between scientific worldviews, social institutions, and popular imagination.

ANTH 590: Special Topics in Anthropology I
Martha King | TuTh 9:30-10:45am
Subject matter will vary with instructor but will focus on some particular topic or anthropological approach. Course description is available from the departmental office.

ANTH 714: Current Issues in Participatory Research: A Workshop Course
Dane Emmerling | W 5:45-8:15pm
This one-hour course is open to UNC graduate students interested in Participatory Research (PR). It is required for the Graduate Certificate in PR and designed to integrate new students into the intellectual discussions and the PR community on campus.

ANTH 897: Seminar in Selected Topics
Caela O’Connell | Tu 5:00-7:30pm
Morgan Hoke | Tu 12:30-3:00pm
Topic determined by instructor and announced in advance.

ARTS 409H and BIOL409L: Art & Science: Merging Printmaking and Biology
TBA | MW 11:15-2:00pm
ARTS409H and BIOL409L together form a course that brings art majors and science majors together to learn theory and practical skills in both art and science, and to make use of this learning to make artworks using a variety of printmaking techniques. Students in this course learn some specific biological concepts and practical lab skills, and then use these and their own interests to guide, gather and generate visual information (frequently photographic) and pose questions that arise from scientific looking. These images, processes and ideas then become the point of departure for printmaking projects.

GEOG 240: Introduction to Environmental Justice
Sara Smith | MWF 12:20-1:10pm
Environmental justice is about social equity and its relationship to the environment. This course provides an introduction to the principles, history, and scholarship of environmental justice. It traces the origins of the movement in the US and globally and its relationship to environmentalism. Students will use case studies and engagement to become familiar with environmental justice concerns related to food systems, environmental health, climate change, and economic development.

GEOG 435: Global Environmental Justice
Shorna Allred | MWF 9:05-9:55am
This advanced course brings geographical perspectives on place, space, scale, and environmental change to the study of environmental justice. In lectures, texts, and research projects, students examine environmental concerns as they intersect with racial, economic and political differences. Topics include environmental policy processes, environmental justice movements, environmental health risks, conservation, urban environments, and the role of science in environmental politics and justice. (GHA)

GEOG 446: Geography of Health Care Delivery
Paul Delamater | TuTh 9:30-10:45am
This course examines the role that geography plays in shaping how people interact with the health care system. Topics include health care delivery system types, facility and personnel distributions, access to care, health care utilization, as well as GIS, spatial analysis, and decision support systems.

ENEC 201: Environment and Society
Gregory Gangi | MWF 12:20-1:10pm
Human-environment interactions are examined through analytical methods from the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. The focus is on the role of social, political, and economic factors in controlling interactions between society and the environment in historical and cultural contexts. Three lecture hours and one recitation hour a week. Honors version available.

ENEC 205 / FOLK 205: Environmental Humanities
Benjamin Bridges | TuTh 11:00-12:15pm

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HNRS 350.001: Learning the Art of Medicine Note: Honors website has full course description
George Stouffer | Tu 3:30-4:30pm
Work in the health professions provides many different pathways for individuals to find meaning, purpose, and impact in the world. We will explore a variety of perspectives through a series of invited speakers from our community.

Broad and overlapping currents in the organization of medical care, payment for healthcare services, performance improvement, government regulation, and innovation have been shaping the environment within which care is delivered in this country for decades. These will continue to shape the environment for the decades to come. The seminar will provide students with an overview of changes in the delivery of medical care across several of these areas.

The course will explore dimensions of person- and family-centered care, which has led to many advances in research and clinical care delivery. This can also include understanding the social situation of your patient, including environmental, financial and familial factors.
The course will provide students with information about navigating the medical training system as well as an introduction to the interprofessional team-based nature of health care delivery.

HNRS 390.003: Narrative and Medicine Note: Honors website has full course description
Jennifer Grayson | TuTh 11:00-12:15pm
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. Pandemic conditions permitting, it 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.

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Coming soon!