About the Department

The Department of Anthropology offers comprehensive training and coursework at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the traditional sub elds of American anthropology: archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. As a department, we also value integrative, interdisciplinary, and critically applied research, teaching, and practice that often blurs lines between sub-disciplines and imaginatively reshapes the eld. To highlight this commitment, we are self-organized into two thematic research clusters that span sub-disciplines.

Faculty and students in the Categories, Knowledge, and Justice cluster examine and deconstruct how knowledge and categories are used across a range of settings including medicine, law, immigration, design, language, science, and the archaeological record. In framing knowledge and categories as problems to be explored, members of this cluster investigate how types are deployed, maintained, and transformed and the social, material, and political implications of how difference is embodied and constructed. Concerned with and committed to justice in multiple contexts, they examine anthropology’s own knowledge production practices, developing new tools, techniques, and modes of representation with applied, policy, pedagogical, and disciplinary implications.

Faculty and students in the Environment, Power, and Adaptation cluster examine how past and present environmental, social, and biological change are interconnected across a range of research themes including agricultural production and subsistence, resource use and management, biodiversity, climate change, and human evolution and health. Concerned with and committed to sustainable adaptation across multiple scales, members of this cluster apply their research and knowledge to address contemporary environmental problems, including climate change adaptation, food security, resource degradation, species conservation, policymaking and activism, and the management of natural resources.