Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology

The Department of Anthropology Ph.D. program at the University of California, Irvine focuses on social and cultural anthropology. Graduate training in anthropology involves a period of long-term, independent fieldwork, generally (though not always) outside the United States, and often conducted in a language other than English. Graduate students generally obtain grants or other external funding to conduct their fieldwork. Attentive to our discipline's past and indeed the paradigm of disciplinarity that has structured social inquiry since the early 20th century, our program gives students a breadth of knowledge in traditional anthropology and the traditional subjects of anthropological study. At the same time, we push the boundaries of the discipline and use our ethnographic work to stretch the anthropological imagination.

The department provides students with superb training in both theory and method. Areas of teaching emphasis include: the anthropology of modernity and development, political, legal, and economic anthropology, ethnographic method, and the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. In addition, Ph.D. students have the option of enrolling in a number of graduate emphases that involve interdisciplinary work in a number of schools and programs across the campus, including feminist studies, critical theory, visual studies, translation studies, and others. The department is committed to fostering new and innovative approaches to anthropological inquiry in a pluralistic and intellectually open academic environment. The faculty take diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to a variety of substantive issues. They are united, however, in a willingness to question taken-for-granted theoretical premises and analytic frames, and to engage in intellectual dialogue about alternative models and approaches