PROGRAM IN GLOBAL HEALTH STUDIES

Fall 2025 Class Schedule

Global Health Studies courses often reach their maximum capacity and subsequently close during registration. When this happens, students are advised to put themselves on a waitlist. If a student withdraws from a class, seats are filled from the waitlist. When necessary, graduating GHS seniors will be prioritized.

Students can add themselves to a waitlist in CAESAR by checking the “add me to the waitlist if this class is full” option when they put the course in their shopping cart.

Note that being on the waitlist does not guarantee admission into the class. Students will be contacted via email if spots become available. Students should not email GHS faculty or staff about gaining admission into a course. We are rarely able to add additional seats to a course, both because of space constraints in classrooms and to keep each faculty member's teaching capacity manageable. 

NOTE: The class GBL_HLTH 390 (Re)Mixing Qualitative Methods is, as of Fall 2024, GBL_HLTH 303. This is the same course, and it now counts toward the methods requirement for the adjunct major.

fall 2025 class Schedule

Core Courses

Elective Courses

fall 2025 course descriptions

Core Courses

Global Health 201: Introduction to Global Health 

This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call “global health” today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems underpinning specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health practice, and place present-day developments in historical perspective. As an introductory course on global health, the class delves into comparative health systems, including comparative health systems in high- and low-income countries. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health, key actors in global health, comparative health systems, structural violence, gender and reproductive health, chronic and communicable diseases, politics of global health research and evidence, and the ethics of global health equity.

Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement

Global Health 302: Global Bioethics

Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few healthcare resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will explore and consider these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core global bioethical concerns - such as structural violence - and core global bioethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as beneficence and solidarity - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the central goal of global health: reducing health inequities. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce inequities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and planetary health. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and equitable access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19. Beatriz will not be use ungrading for this course but each student will create an assignment bundle.

Fulfills Area V (Ethics and Values) distribution requirement

Global Health 309 (History 379): Biomedicine and World History

This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine. We will break the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) the "unification of the globe" by infectious diseases; 2) the role of empires, industries, war, and revolutions in spreading biomedical cultures around the world; 3) the functions played by transnational and global health institutions in different continents; and 4) the growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the narcotics trade. Students will have a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to the more recent past. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement

Fulfills Area IV (Historical Studies) distribution requirement

Global Health 310-1: Supervised Global Health Research: Maternal Health in the 20th Century

Maternal health, in particular, maternal mortality, is a significant concern in global health, and in this class we will consider the historical roots of two areas of focus on improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality: women having access to skilled birth attendants and birth control options. We will look at this broad international concern by focusing on the work of one organization in the 1960s-1970s, the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), by examining their papers, held at the Wellcome Library and Archives in London. We will visit the library the week before classes start and this research will form the basis of the seminar course during the quarter. This class will culminate in a major paper using the primary sources from the ICM research done in London.

Course available to accepted applicants only.

Global Health 323: Global Health from Policy to Practice

This seminar explores global health and development policy ethnographically, from the politics of policy-making to the impacts of policy on global health practice, and on local realities. Going beyond the intentions underlying policy, this course highlights the histories and material, political, economic, and social realities of policy and its application. Drawing on case studies of policy makers, government officials, insurance agents, health care workers, and aid recipients, the course asks: what politics inform which issues become prioritized or codified in global health and development policy, and which do not? How do philosophies and values about “good governance,” “best practices,” “preparedness,” or “economic progress” influence the kinds of policies that are envisioned and/or implemented? How do politics affect global health or medical system governance, and to what effect on the ground? In what ways are policies adapted, adopted, innovatively engaged, or outright rejected by various global health actors, and what does this mean for the challenges that such policies aim to address? Ultimately, what is the relationship between global health politics and global health disparities?

Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity

Social Behavioral Sciences Distro Area

Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipline

Global Health 324: Volunteerism and the Ethics of Help

Since the early 2000s, there has been an exponential increase in the number of foreigners volunteering in low-income communities, within orphanages, clinics, schools, and communities. This expansion has been echoed by locals, who are also providing voluntary labor in a variety of locales throughout their communities. This class explores the discourses and practices that make up volunteering and voluntourism, from the perspectives of volunteers, hosts, and a range of professional practitioners both promoting and critiquing this apparent rise in “the need to help”. What boons and burdens occur with the boom of volunteer fervor world-wide? Why do people feel the need to volunteer, and what consequences do these voluntary exchanges have on the volunteers, and on those communities and institutions that are subject to their good intentions? What are the ethics and values that make up “making a difference” amongst differently-situated players who are involved in volunteering? Given that volunteers often act upon best intentions, what are the logics that justify philanthropy and the differential standards by which volunteers are judged based on where they go and how they engage in volunteering? This class seeks out some answers to these questions, and highlights why the increased concern for strangers that undergirds volunteering should also be, in itself, cause for our concern. 

Fulfills Area V (Ethics and Values) distribution requirement 

Global Health 325: History of Reproductive Health

The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]control over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.

Fulfills Area IV (Historical Studies) distribution requirement

Global Health 328: Human Circulations and Human Values: Global Mobilities of People and Products

Human beings and human parts/products are on the move across the globe, shaped by inequities that drive poor health outcomes for many involved in these circulations. More human beings are being forced from their homes than ever before in history; more and more are being turned away as they seek resettlement. Global economic migration is poorly regulated and rife with exploitation. The flow of human organs for transplantation increasingly moves from the poor in the Global South to the rich in the Global North. Even the production of human babies through international surrogacy is driven by economic inequities. This course examines the role of advocacy, law, politics and ethics to preserve dignity and health as human beings and human parts increasingly circulate across global boundaries.

Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity

Ethical and Evaluative Thinking Foundational Discipline

Ethics Values Distro Area

Global Health 337 (Environmental Policy 337): Hazards, Disasters, and Society

This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects. 

Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement

Global Health 338 (Environmental Policy 338): Environmental Justice

This course examines how environmental problems reflect and exacerbate social inequality. In this course, we learn the definition of environmental (in)justice; the history of environmental justice; and also examples of environmental justice will be discussed. We will learn about environmental movements. This course has a critical perspective on health disparities in national and international levels. How environmental injustice impacts certain groups more than others and the social and political economic reasons for these injustices will be discussed in this course. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lectures, discussions, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.

Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement

This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to explore the role of the arts and media narratives in shaping politics and experiences of mental health and illness around the world. We will consider forms of storytelling—including literature, film, and theater—across eras and cultures, tracking shifts in perspectives on normality and pathology and their consequences for the most vulnerable. How does the power of Western psychiatry intersect with that of global media to reinforce reigning paradigms and imperatives for how suffering is to be understood, classified, and experienced? Conversely, what counter-narratives are being produced by artists and their communities? What role can the arts play in individual and collective forms of healing—or in exacerbating pain and grievance? What kinds of voices seem to have power, and which are neglected? Where is the line between cathartic and exploitative representation of trauma and mental illness? How, in short, do the stories we tell about mental illness “get under the skin” and shape forms of suffering and care?

Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement

Global Health 390-0-21 (Public Health 390-0-20): Special Topics in Global Health: International Public Health

This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics. 

Global Health 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Literary Genres + Health: A TBR Readalong

When I was an undergraduate student my "To Be Read" list was always really long and often forgotten. As I have re-established my love of reading for fun I see how literary genres influence and challenge our understanding of well-being/health. Fiction, non-fiction, poems, memoirs, novels, young adult fiction, science fiction, mysteries, fantasy, fairy tales, horror, magical realism, and so many other genres influence our definitions of health or wellbeing. They provide insight into how other folks imagine and understanding situations we may or may not find ourselves in. Our course will consider some of these and other genres noted above. The best text allow us to empathize with the characters or challenge what we thought we knew. We will read one book as a class. In addition, you'll be asked to individually select a book to read/listen to, a list of various text will also be provided if you need guidance in choosing a text. You will learn how these materials influence or challenge norms about health and well-being. Professor Reyes will help you access books that aren't easily available or affordable.

Global Health 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Indigenous Foodways: Cultivating Mind, Body, and Soul

Explore the profound connection between Indigenous food, culture, and well-being in this illuminating course. Delve into the cultural relevancy of foods, tracing their origins and understanding their foundational role in Indigenous origin stories. You'll discover how food serves as medicine for the mind, body, and soul, and learn to approach cooking from a place of spirit and love. 

This course also examines the vital food sovereignty movement, exploring the environmental impacts on traditional foodways and their far-reaching effects on Indigenous cultures. Develop a holistic understanding and relationship with food, from seed to soil to plate, and uncover the rich heritage embedded within Indigenous culinary traditions.

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