Life History Theory in Ten Papers

Ever since things started going horizontal in the Anthropology Department, I haven't had much student interest in my graduate class, Demography and Life History Theory. This means that I really haven't taught my bread-and-butter (graduate) class since 2013. This is frustrating for many reasons, but one key frustration is that I get a lot of people at other institutions telling me that they wish they could take my life history class.

When a couple students in my social networks class last winter actually expressed an interest in life history theory, I decided to offer an alternative class (with less reading, no problem sets, etc.) this year (in part because I already had my teaching commitments filled out). The idea was to read a single classic paper for each of the ten weeks of a Stanford academic quarter. I figured I could also augment readings with some recorded videos on the technical aspects of the sometimes quite-technical works. Given that all coursework here is remote this quarter, it seemed a good time to open up the class for people beyond the immediate Stanford community. I invited colleagues to pass the word along to their students. 

Life History Theory in Ten Papers is now live and, so far, we have a quite active group in the synchronous sessions (I have no idea how many people are accessing the online material). I've recorded six videos so far for the first two weeks. All the videos are linked in the weekly course notes, made available on the course web page.