About the Department
The undergraduate program in anthropology provides each student with a broad, holistic, integrated, and species-wide perspective on contemporary human behavior. Anthropology may be the only major that provides significant intellectual and professional links with the humanities and other social science fields, while also providing separate bridges into both the natural sciences and the field of business. The anthropology major prepares students for successful entry into any number of fields and disciplines and their appropriate professional graduate schools. including medical schools, public health, and law.
Human evolutionary models, critical comparative analysis, ethnographic methods, and a variety of developmental approaches are taught and applied in our classes to such diverse topics and research areas as health; illness; addiction; human communication (verbal and nonverbal); human origins; the nature of social groups; the family; worldwide political and socioeconomic systems; religion; warfare; infancy and childhood; nonhuman primate ecology and behavior; archaeology, prehistory, and ethnology, especially of North America and the Middle East; sexuality; museum studies; China; evolutionary medicine; transnationalism; sex and gender; and medical anthropology.
Focus on Undergraduate Research
In moving toward our goal of achieving national prominence as one of the top undergraduate research and teaching departments in the nation, our faculty emphasize the importance of innovative and significant undergraduate research. We aim to provide as many majors as possible with hands-on research experiences both in the field and laboratory. Two Smithsonian and two Chicago Field Museum summer research internships created by the department are available to majors, and it is common that, throughout the school year and summer, the faculty pair up with students to conceptualize and work together on research projects, both here and abroad. Often, this collaborative research leads to joint publications.
Our undergraduate students receive many undergraduate research awards from the University and regularly attend national professional meetings and stand alongside graduate students and professors from around the nation to present the results of their research. Our anthropology minors also participate to a high degree.
Encountering Self and Humanity
Aside from its applicability and relevance across different disciplines, professions, and careers, one of the truly unique aspects of anthropology is that it changes in a most profound and insightful way the manner in which our students experience and come to interpret their own lives. The subject of anthropology is, of course, humankind as viewed not through a local lens limited by the biases or world view of one’s own culture, but by a view that attempts to reconcile and understand the intersecting and sometimes conflicting, yet often logical alternative ways by which our fellow human beings live and think.
Perhaps it is this very personal encounter, experienced alongside exposure to the very best scholarship, that permits our anthropology students to connect so easily and successfully with the diverse professional communities to which they are drawn. But whatever accounts for this relative fluidity by which our graduates make the transition into so many diverse fields, the knowledge and skills gained by studying anthropology, in addition to providing keen insights into others, enrich one’s understanding of one’s self. In this way, anthropology maximizes the chances of personal achievement and self-fulfillment, and proves a surprisingly powerful beginning point for just about any career.