The joint Ph.D. Program in French Studies and Anthropology allows students to blend rigorous training in anthropology with a broad, multi-disciplinary exploration of the French and Francophone worlds. Housed at both the Institute of French Studies and the Anthropology department, students chart their own course between both units, exploring ideas and devising their specific research projects with a wide array of faculty and graduate students. These opportunities — as well as a program of courses and events conducted in both English and French — make our program truly unique in the field. From year 1, students attend advanced seminars in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and history, conduct original research, and take courses in other disciplines of their choice, including sociology, museum studies, performance studies, and gender studies. Many take advantage of the Anthropology department’s Program in Culture and Media, which explores the theory, production, and ethnography of media. Working closely with advisors at the IFS and the Anthropology department, students explore new ideas while working toward a dissertation plan of study (to which they turn in earnest at the end of year 2). In the Anthropology department, students take courses with faculty who are committed to rigorous training in social and cultural theory, ethnographical method, comparative frameworks, and critical knowledge of representations of anthropological knowledge. Their domains of expertise include social memory, the anthropology of history, language ideology, visual ethnography, racial capitalism, carceral states, urban ecology, and critical approaches to religion. At the IFS, they delve deep into French and Francophone history and social sciences while working with faculty whose research — theorized and grounded in deep, critical archival or ethnographic research — revolves around the Caribbean and post-colonial circulations, migration, the politics of place and memory, ethnography, race and identity in France, the Maghreb, West Africa, family history, and new modes of historical writing.
