Q&A: Meet Professor Adam Harr
Meet Your Anthropology Mentor
Associate Professor of Anthropology Adam Harr’s passion for linguistic and cultural anthropology shines through in his engaging and interdisciplinary courses. By exploring the connections between language, culture, and identity, he inspires students to think critically about the ways we communicate and navigate the world.
What’s your favorite class to teach, and why?
My favorite class to teach first- or second-year students is Language and Human Experience. This is an introduction to the study of language from an anthropological perspective, and I love teaching it because students come into my classroom with a lifetime of experiences speaking one or more languages, yet the scientific study of language is brand new to almost all of them. That means I get to help them unpack bits and pieces of their own life experience while also guiding them to be more empathetic towards others' experiences. I find it tremendously rewarding to see the light bulbs going off around the room and I absolutely love it when students teach me a new slang word.
How do you make your courses engaging?
I love teaching with Community-Based Learning, which places students in community organizations related to the courses I teach. We think of these placements as experiential texts. In my FYP class Food, Self, and Society, students gain first-hand knowledge of local food systems while we read about food systems and culinary practices around the world. In my First-Year Seminar Childhood Across Cultures, students spend a couple of hours each week working with children in a local organization while we read ethnographic studies of the lives of children in a range of social contexts, from kin-based groups of foraging peoples to the daily lives of child soldiers. In a CBL class, students gain professional and life experiences while seeing how course content works in a range of "real world" contexts.
How do your students change your perspective on the subject matter you teach?
As a scholar of language and culture, I can honestly say that students change my perspective and challenge me meaningfully every single semester. I've been studying linguistics and anthropology for more than a quarter of a century. Learning about language and how humans communicate and coordinate is one of my driving passions in life. But there are over 6,500 languages in the world and they're all changing all the time, so no one can be a true expert in language. That means my students are always bringing in linguistic "data" that is new to me in class, whether it's from a language they speak that I don't or from youth slang they heard while working at a summer camp. This semester, I heard a lot about "skibidi."
What’s a favorite alumni success story?
I felt immense pride this past year when one of my advisees who took her first anthropology class with me got a fully funded doctoral fellowship at my own graduate institution.
