Expertise

The Department has 16 full time faculty, one adjunct, and a number of faculty affiliates from other departments. Eight of the full time faculty have joined the Department in the last six years. Four new faculty work in the emerging area of the anthropology of science and technology. They join colleagues with expertise in medical anthropology, leading the Department to national prominence in this important area. Three faculty work in the anthropology of markets and finance, and join colleagues trained in political economy and development. Two faculty are exploring social lives in virtual worlds, and others are exploring new media and film. In short, the Department maintains expertise in the small-scale societies that were anthropology's traditional focus, but also studies global transformations in areas like mass media, global markets, technology, and governance.

Using a range of methods to study everything from food in the Marshall Islands to new cultures of cyberspace, faculty and graduate students work to understand the wrenching changes of global connection and disconnection. Members of the Department have conducted research on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Ten faculty have expertise in Asia or the Pacific, and over half have expertise in Islamic societies. Almost all conduct their research in languages other than English.

In addition, the Department has a strong interdisciplinary vision, with research and teaching interests in economic anthropology, political and legal anthropology, social history and social change, the anthropology of science, technology and medicine, anthropology of finance, identity and ethnicity, gender and feminist studies, sexuality studies, urban anthropology, modernity and development, religion, visual anthropology, and the arts and expressive culture. The Department also has a strong emphasis on the study of contemporary issues, especially those concerned with emergent, fluid, and complex global phenomena such as international flows of goods, peoples, images, and ideas; the relationship between global processes and local practices; immigration, citizenship, and refugees; population politics; violence and political conflict; ethnicity and nationalism; gender and family; food, health, and technological innovation; law; development and economic transformation; urban studies; and environmental issues. Geographic regions of expertise include China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Latino communities of the United States, as well as diasporic and transnational communities in the United States and abroad.