Message from our Chair and Vice Chairs
There has never been a better time to study Anthropology—nor a better place to study it than UCLA.
In a world facing profound challenges– from the explosion of artificial intelligence, uncertain shifts in the job market, the impacts of climate change, war and forced migration, a global inequality, and destabilizing geopolitical realignments– Anthropology confronts the complexity of the human experience and contemporary reality with the power of knowledge drawn from the full sweep of the world’s cultures across time.
Holistic training in Anthropology’s four subfields of specialization gives us the tools to respond to new landscapes of professional opportunity and equips us with the flexible skills that allow us to thrive in and contribute to a rapidly changing world. Biological, archaeological, linguistic, and social-cultural anthropology (including psychological-medical anthropology) contribute distinct but complementary approaches to the fundamental questions that lie at the core of Anthropology as a field of intellectual inquiry.
Anthropologists investigate such challenging questions as how humans evolved and came to adapt to diverse environments; what led to the rise of urban life; what causes suffering, disease, and premature death; how people imbue their lives with meaning and value in families and community; how language, material culture, and social media reflect and shape social life; how we interact with our environment and non-human species; how we create difference through social hierarchy, racialization, and social exclusion; how we produce and resolve conflict. Anthropology seeks to explore and address humankind’s most vexing problems, from intractable political conflicts to the human consequences of globalization. Through direct engagement on the ground with diverse living communities, archival methods, and work in the lab, our faculty and students approach such contemporary issues as how new media and technologies influence the ways we experience the world and how individuals and families balance the increasingly complex demands in their lives.
UCLA’s Department of Anthropology honors the full breadth of the discipline. Our faculty and students conduct research in all parts of the globe including the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Many also work locally in Los Angeles, throughout California, and across the United States. A leading center for cutting-edge research and teaching, our department consistently ranks as one of the top 10 Anthropology Departments nationally and globally.
Our undergraduate major offers tracks toward either a B.A. or a B.S. degree. We also offer a track for those wishing to minor in anthropology. Undergraduates participate in a wide range of research opportunities, including assisting with faculty and graduate student projects and developing research of their own design. In addition, through a generous gift from Professor Robert B. Lemelson, the department offers a well-established undergraduate honors research track, the Lemelson Undergraduate Honors Program.
We are very proud of our doctoral program (consistently ranked one of the top ten in the US). Graduate training involves coursework in at least two subfields, specialized courses in methods, and subfield seminars. In accordance with our aim to maintain active conversations across the subfields, the department supports weekly interdepartmental interest group colloquia: Behavior, Evolution and Culture (BEC), Culture, Power, and Social Change (CPSC), the Discourse Lab (Ling Lab), and Mind, Medicine, and Culture (MMAC). Faculty and students are also active members of many of the interdisciplinary centers and programs across campus, notably the regional centers that make up the International Institute, including our past and present faculty Directors of the Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for India and South Asia (CISA), the Center for Near East Studies (CNES), and the Center for European and Russian Studies, as well as the ethnic studies programs that comprise the Institute of American Cultures (including the American Indian Studies Center); the Cotsen Institute of Archeology; the Institute for Society and Genetics; the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy; and the Center for the Study of Women.
Beginning in 2014, the department has been able to train a rapidly expanding cohort of stellar MD-PhD scholars through the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), a combined MD-PhD training program with the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM). This collaboration, with the support of the Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities, has contributed to the growth of interest in ethnographic approaches to health across the university. The social science track of the MSTP program is now broadly recognized as one of the largest, most diverse, and most highly ranked social science MD-PhD training programs in the United States. We also have been delighted to host a growing number of postdoctoral scholars and visiting professors across the subfields, from US and international universities.
Our faculty has earned international recognition including election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Their work is supported by grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the W.T. Grant Foundation, among others. They have been honored with fellowships from all of the major foundations that support social science research including the MacArthur Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute, as well as with a multitude of book prizes including the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Their teaching and mentoring have been rewarded with UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, many other campus teaching awards, and a host of national prizes.
On behalf of all of us in the department, I cordially invite you to discover the promise and excellence of anthropological studies here at UCLA.
Laurie Kain Hart, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department
