Department of Anthropology

The Anthropology Department at the University of Delaware will innovate holistic approaches to understand, analyze, and address the challenges and opportunities facing 21st-century global citizens. We will model engaged, collaborative, interdisciplinary faculty and student research and teaching designed to comprehend the diversity of the human experience over time and across space and promote social and global justice.

The Anthropology Department at the University of Delaware explores what it means to be human. Integrating social science, humanities, and natural science approaches, we study the diversity of human culture and people’s place in the natural world across space and over time.

Learning
The Anthropology Department gives students a comparative, cross-cultural, broad-based perspective on the human condition, past and present.
The undergraduate program

1. educates students about human biology and the social, economic, political, ideological, technological, and environmental diversity and complexity of cultures worldwide
2. provides students with the methods, theories, and knowledge that underlie the study of cultures and human biology
3. furnishes students opportunities for experiential learning through original laboratory, ethnographic, and archaeological research, and
4. emphasizes key skills in writing, critical thinking, analysis, and interpretation.

Anthropology engages students in interactive classes and innovative learning contexts and provides significant opportunities for collaborative, individual, intra- and interdisciplinary research with personalized supervision that culminate in professional products, including conference presentations and faculty-student publications. These experiences foster the strong sense of community between students and faculty that both enhance learning and characterize the humanism and scientific approaches that define the field of anthropology.

Anthropology and Graduate Education

Anthropology faculty contribute to graduate education in human biology, history, and cultural studies at UD and around the world. Through courses, field and lab-based learning projects, internships, and M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation advising, we work with students to develop holistic scholarly approaches and to augment their methodological skills, theoretical breadth, and knowledge base. Focal areas include human evolution, medical and nutritional anthropology, paleoenvironmental studies, historical anthropology, indigenous studies, modernization and globalization, economic and social change, and cultural heritage, patrimony, and material culture studies.

The faculty

• collects, describes, and analyzes data from diverse theoretical perspectives
• values engaged research, applying knowledge to serve and advocate
• emphasizes interdisciplinary, collaborative research at local, national, and global scales, and
• articulates our research, teaching, and service for their mutual enhancement.

Service
The Anthropology department applies anthropological perspectives to serve the discipline, university, community, state, nation, and peoples around the world.