The Department of Anthropology offers a Ph.D. program in Anthropology. The program focuses on social and cultural anthropology, with a strong focus on understanding emergent processes and systems at a number of scales, including the national and transnational level. Areas of teaching emphasis include the anthropology of modernity and development; political, legal, and economic anthropology; ethnographic method; and the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. In addition, Ph.D. students have the option of enrolling in a Feminist Studies or a Critical Theory emphasis, both of which involve interdisciplinary work with departments and centers in the School of Humanities.
The Department's faculty members have interests in ethnicity, gender, international migration, science, technology and medicine, law and finance, urban anthropology, youth culture, and social networks. The program also provides rigorous training in ethnographic method. The Department is committed to fostering new and innovative approaches to anthropological inquiry in a pluralistic and intellectually open academic environment. Program faculty take diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to a variety of substantive issues. They are united, however, in a willingness to question taken-for-granted theoretical premises and analytic frames, and to engage in good-faith intellectual dialogue about alternative models and approaches.