The Department of Anthropology currently has four major strategic strengths in well-funded research and scholarship.
Our particular strengths in this area are theoretical archaeology, environmental archaeology, archaeological heritage and material culture/museum studies and the application of multimedia and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in archaeology.
This area also provides significant opportunities for interdisciplinary outreach with the internationally renowned and, in the U.S., unique Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology (IEMA) and its interdisciplinary faculty.
The focus in this area includes expanding research into questions of suffering and personhood, narratives and practices of health and illness, ethnomedicine and ethnopsychiatry, and applied medical anthropology.
Research foci include energy and the environment, cultural heritage, nation-state, social justice, war and ethnic conflict, law and immigration.
In order to support active collaboration of faculty and students, grant writing and fundraising activities the department has created an Anthropology of Europe Lab (AEL) housed in the main office space of the department.
Research and teaching in primate and behavioral studies is well integrated in the medical school and especially in the graduate program in Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior (EEB).
Through the establishment of the Human Evolutionary Morphology (BHEML) and Evolutionary Anthropology (EAL) Laboratories, the department is developing not only a unique strategic research strength in biological anthropology, but also extends its interdisciplinary research profile with European archaeology. These labs will train students for an emerging job market in bioarchaeology and evolutionary anthropology with highly specialized skills such of geometric morphometrics, virtual anthropology and cultural transmission experiments.