Ellen Oxfeld

Professor Oxfeld is very passionate about what she teaches, but you may find her teaching dry at some point. This course requires constant readings since you have to read around 5 books or so and need to do comparative essays about them. Her grading is quite easy if your essays captured the essence of the readings well. Essay prompts are really open to interpretations.

Oxfeld is a nice person, but her lectures were not very engaging. Course contents were interesting, but there were too many readings assigned. Don’t take this class if you are looking for a chill experience.

I'm sure profs don't enjoy teaching massive intro classes filled with students just there for the distribution credit, but this class was very nonremarkable. Lectures were very dull and felt prepackaged, there were so many of us in the room and no effort was ever made to build community among the students. Exam and paper grading was difficult, requiring specific detail, even though the concepts were taught very abstractly. That's not to say there wasn't some interesting material, especially the sections on political economy and hunter-gatherer societies, but it was presented with no enthusiasm in such an uninteresting manner that it prevented me from learning too much or enjoying it.

I'm sure profs don't enjoy teaching massive intro classes filled with students just there for the distribution credit, but this class was very nonremarkable. Lectures were very dull and felt prepackaged, there were so many of us in the room and no effort was ever made to build community among the students. Exam and paper grading was …Read more