After my first class meetings for HIST 290 and ANTH 289 this week, I am looking forward to the opportunity that I think both classes will allow for – namely to further develop my own lines of research inquiry but with some facilitation, guidance, feedback and support from the faculty and peers in a class structure. Both Kris and Kavita appear to be approaching their classes more like reading groups which suits my purposes perfectly since in the Anthro department, this year (Year 3) is supposed to be largely dedicated towards developing one’s own project and orals documents (more on that in future posts).

As part of Kavita’s HIST 290 course, we are expected to post weekly on what we are reading (related to science, race, gender, and empire) and to share annotated bibliographies and thoughts pertaining to these topics. As such, I’m roping off a corner of this blog for these regular posts and I invite both my classmates and also those who are not in the class to review and offer feedback and any suggested additional readings!

Next steps: I’m working on a first draft of my proposed reading list for the rest of this quarter and will post that shortly. I will also post the annotated bibliography at the end of the 10-week quarter together with a short document that hopefully has some synthesis on the literature and its relation to my project (i.e. a basis for one of my orals docs!)

I hope to do the same for the ANTH 289 class (although that is not an explicit requirement of the course). I’ve therefore also roped off a section of the blog for that, although, time pertaining, I may not post as regularly there…

And just like that, we are off: the start of a 10 week quarter begins! (for those of you who haven’t experienced the quarter system… it feels like doing a marathon at a sprint!)