Bryn Mawr Stories

This class aims to trace the history of higher education and its ongoing impact on the geography, economy, and culture of greater Philadelphia and U.S. urban space broadly.

This course will take a broad view of the nation’s first capital, in anthropological, geographic, and historical perspective.

This class investigates the unique history of housing in Philadelphia. We will cover the problems the city has faced and still faces in providing affordable housing, fair access to housing and creating diverse and vibrant neighborhoods and its great legacy of innovation in this area.

This course will explore the vibrant contemporary art world of the city of Philadelphia—a city uniquely positioned to attract artists with its many top-tier fine art schools, world-class museums, affordable living and studio spaces, and thriving network of artist-run galleries and exhibition spaces.

This transdisciplinary course, which will be taught in Philadelphia, focuses on anthropology’s contributions (and potential contributions) to engaging critical environmental issues in urban settings.

This course will examine the history of epidemic disease in American cities, with a focus on Philadelphia.

Using Philadelphia neighborhoods as our site of study, this course will analyze the relationship between race/ethnicity and spatial inequality, emphasizing the institutions, processes, and mechanisms that shape the lives of urban dwellers.

This course aims to look at the importance of access to finance to small businesses and low and moderate income households, identifies how and why this access is lacking and examines efforts to address this issues.

The course will engage with the history of Philadelphia as an immigrant city and look at the ways in which the different neighborhoods have changed over time.

An introduction to the history and theory of environmental justice, an interdisciplinary field that examines how inequalities based on race, class, ethnicity, and gender shape how different groups of people are impacted by environmental problems and how they advocate for social and environmental change.

What is public art? What is public space? What is the role of public art in a democracy? Does the fact that something is historically significant give us a reason to preserve it? Which historically significant things should we preserve and why? What is the moral value of commemorative art?  How should we assess controversies surrounding the removal of art honoring persons or groups we now judge to be morally objectionable? How best should we memorialize victims of injustice?

In this course, we will take up a number of philosophical questions about the nature of public art, political aesthetics, and the ethics of commemoration using case studies drawn from Philadelphia.