Fall 2026 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 2026 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 requirementGlobal Health 306: Biomedicine and Culture
Biomedicine (aka "Western" or allopathic medicine) is often represented as neutral and ‘scientific’— the opposite of culture. Yet experiences and practices surrounding biomedicine are influenced by culture, history, (infra)structures, and flows of ideas, people and resources. Thus, this course begins with the premise that biomedicine is produced through social processes, and therefore has its own inherent culture(s). The aim of this seminar course is to expose students to the social and cultural aspects of biomedicine through a geographic comparison between select world regions. Focusing on the interrelations between technology, medicine, science, politics, society, religion, power and place, topics covered will include: medical history, learning medicine, rethinking “care”, and unexpected aspects of biomedical cultures and practice. Through a focus on the logics by which biomedicine is practiced, we will be able to get into additional depth regarding how race, class, gender, history, and politics shape what medicine gets to be in different contexts, while also understanding how biomedicine converges with political economy, business, bureaucracy, profit, global health, and humanitarianism.
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) 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 318: Community-based Participatory Research
Oftentimes we hear of research done on communities. What we hear less about is the power inequities, silences, and sometimes, violence, that many research paradigms (un)intentionally produce within their research. This course exposes prevalent assumptions underlying common research methodologies and demonstrates why they are problematic for many of the communities that researchers purport to want to assist. We then delve into community-based participatory research (CBPR), a research paradigm that challenges researchers to conduct research with communities. In this reading-intense discussion-based course, we will learn the historical and theoretical foundations, and the key principles of CBPR. Students will be introduced to methodological approaches to building community partnerships, research planning, and data sharing. Real-world applications of CBPR in health will be studied to illustrate benefits and challenges of this methodological approach to research. Further, this course will address culturally appropriate interventions, working with diverse communities, and ethical considerations in CBPR.
U.S. Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
Social Behavioral Sciences Distro Area
Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipline
Global Health 320: Qualitative Research Methods in Global Health
This course is designed to provide global health students with the tools they will need in order to design, revise, conduct, and write up current and future qualitative research projects relating to global health topics. This course is experientially driven, allowing students opportunities to actually "do" research, while providing careful mentoring and engaging in in-depth discussions about ethical and methodological issues associated with qualitative approaches and with working with living humans. Students will learn methods such as: writing research proposals, research ethics, writing ethnographic field notes, doing qualitative interviews and focus groups, analyzing and writing up data.
Social Behavioral Sciences Distro Area
Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipline
Global Health 321: War and Public Health
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology and related social scientific fields to provide a comparative overview of the impact of armed conflict on public health and health care systems worldwide. Drawing primarily on examples from recent history, including conflicts in the Balkans, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, we will explore warfare as a crucial sociopolitical determinant of global health disparities and consider organized efforts to respond to the health impacts of mass violence. Key topics that we will consider include variations in the relationship between warfare and public health across eras and cultures; the health and mental health impacts of forced displacement, military violence, and gender-based violence; and the roles of medical humanitarianism and humanitarian psychiatry in postwar recovery processes. Through close readings of classic and contemporary social theory, ethnographic accounts, and diverse research on war, health, and postwar humanitarian interventions, this course will encourage you to build your own critical perspective on war and public health anchored in history and the complexities of real-world situations.
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
Ethics Values Distro Area
Interdisciplinary Distro - See Rules
Social Behavioral Sciences Distro Area
Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipline
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 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 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
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: Feminist Political Ecology
Global Health 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Clinical Materialities: Artifacts of Modern Healthcare