Search for Summer 2025 Term Courses

This course examines Native American, Spanish, and Anglo arts and cultures of the American Southwest between 100 CE and the 21st century. It considers the effects of ethnicity, gender, and community identity on regional art traditions and places artworks within their material, religious, political, and economic contexts. Astronomical alignments, water, earth and sky, spirits and saints, the living and their ancestors—these are among the themes in the art of the region. Emphasis is placed on careful seeing, individual analysis and reflection, and collaborative learning. The course is designed for SMU-in-Taos. Many class days include field trips or interactive projects. Films, readings, and PowerPoint slide talks set the stage for visits to artists’ studios, archaeological sites, pueblos, churches, and museums. Hands-on art projects are simple and require no previous art experience to succeed. They will help you understand the technical and aesthetic qualities of artworks we study in this class. Watch Course Video

Counts as an Honors course. Focuses on contemporary issues facing the American Southwest, including social problems that exist within the contexts of particular groups, communities, cultures, and societies. Explores sociological issues relating to the environment, the media, poverty, immigration, food insecurity, education, crime, economic development, and health, among others. Community engagement will allow us expiore the major problems facing these Taos area communities as well as some possible solutions to the problems facing them.

Counts as an Honors course. This interdisciplinary course explores the history of New Mexico, from the pre-contact era to the present. In the first half of the class, we will consider New Mexico’s successive and overlapping waves of human settlement, from Pueblo Indians, to the Spanish Empire, the Mexican Republic, and the United States, with particular attention to the complex relationships between Native peoples, Hispanos, and Anglo-Americans. Then we will turn to a handful of key topics that continue to define the so-called Land of Enchantment even today: religion and spirituality; the natural world (particularly New Mexico’s scarce water resources); and its enduring cultural symbolism as reflected in literature and film.

Counts as an Honors course and a Business Elective. This course will show students how to leverage fundamental marketing frameworks and apply them to the nuances related to social impact marketing. In this course, the term “sustainability” will cover both Planet and People related issues (i.e. environmental as well as social issues), as it is known that these are many times inter-related. In the beautiful natural environment of Taos, New Mexico, students will have the chance to engage with 4 organizations that have either or both an environmental and social mission. After our site visits, students will be able to choose which of the 4 organizations they want to focus on for the duration of the course. Watch Course Video

This course explores the contributions of anthropology to understanding the experience of psychological phenomenon and mind across cultures. It will examine anthropological theories about the interplay of culture, mind and self in various Western and non-Western societies. Child development, cognition, emotion, morality, altered states, “brain sciences” and mental health and illness are analyzed from a cross-cultural perspective. Working through a full range of classic and modern works in medical and psychological anthropology, we debate the ways that social context—and local notions of what is “good” that are upheld in these contexts—impact one’s everyday life and one’s experience of one’s own mind, and with what consequences. It is important to have a comparative perspective in psychological anthropology, and we will have readings and films from Africa, South America, Oceania, East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the U.S. As this course is taking place in Taos, we will spend some time focusing on traditional ways of promoting mental health in the Southwest, including the vision quests of the Pueblo people and the adolescent initiation rites of the Apache. The course will also draw students’ attention to some of the mental health challenges facing this region, including high rates of opioid abuse, with an eye toward the ways that substance abuse is rooted in historical trauma, such as land loss, for Hispanos and Native Americans in the region.

Counts as an Honors course. First, the course seeks to provide you with an introduction to a wide variety of religious traditions, communities and practices within the context of globalization. Topics we will cover include the rise of religion as an academic subject in the age of modernity, religion as it relates to colonialism and national identities, religious expression in the media and in popular culture, and changing religious practices and expressions in the light of globalization and immigration. Second, this course aims to introduce you to several approaches to the academic study of religion. Throughout the course we will explore the ways that people have and do investigate religious histories, practices and people. Finally, this course is designed to build your skills in the analysis of complex argumentation and your abilities to discuss matters critically, curiously, and civically. Watch Course Video

Counts as an Honors course. This interdisciplinary and experiential course examines the intersections of food and identity in the Southwest. Through literary and scholarly texts, film, fine arts, pop culture, and experiences, students explore topics such as heritage and tradition, cultural contact and exchange, conquest, resistance and revolution, issues of gender, and responses to modernity and change in the so-called “American Southwest.” Examines how technology (including agriculture, cooking technology, commercial farming, global trade networks, and social media) impacts the production, consumption, distribution, dynamics of power, and systems of meaning of food and eating in this region. Watch Course Video

Counts as an Honors course. This course examines the chronology of American history through an interdisciplinary lens with the question of “who is an American” as a thematic focus. Students learn about important moments in American history, specifically in New Mexico and the Southwest. They begin to understand the basic chronology of the country, as well as how key events were understood and experienced by some of the country’s most creative and probing minds. The organizing theme of who is an American is an important examination of when and where the human rights of the country’s inhabitants have been respected–or not respected–over the decades. Open to all students. Watch Course Video