Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Cultural Anthropology

Our doctoral program prepares students to meld grounded field research with theoretical sophistication in doing anthropology sensitive to the challenges and complexities of making sense of human experience. Our department is on the cutting edge of new debates about globalization and diaspora, popular culture and mass media, nationalism and identity, race and sexuality, and the politics of tradition and modernity. We explore these issues through a range of theoretical orientations that include postcolonial and Marxist theory, feminist and critical race theory, psychoanalysis and psychology, political ecology and science and technology, and much more. Students in our program receive a strong training in theory as well as in contemporary research methods and proposal writing. They may choose to work in areas where the faculty has strengths (Latin America, Africa, the US, Europe, the Caribbean, the Middle East, East Asia) or elsewhere. They may also pursue interconnections between places through flows of various kinds—media, culture, labor, capital, pop culture, advertising—or study the construction of ("imaginary") places and identities through, for example, movies, fiction, virtual reality. Recent dissertation projects include those on African American churches in North Carolina; strip clubs in Atlanta; tourism in Cuba; miners in Romania; Turkish militarism; the sex trade in the Black Sea area; Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon; soap operas in Japan; a Christian development organization in Canada and Somalia; rural militias in Sierra Leone; migrant domestic workers in Kuwait; skateboarding youth in Japan; Pentecostalism in Ghana. The Ph.D. program is designed primarily to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for an academic career in anthropology, but is flexible enough to accommodate students interested in bringing their training to careers outside the discipline. In the course of their studies, students gain familiarity with theoretical perspectives and appropriate methodologies, spoken and/or written competence in a foreign language relevant to their research, and teaching experience as part of their professional training. All complete a doctoral dissertation based on significant and original research. The plan of study enables each student to develop particular interests, to acquire general competence through exposure to classic paradigms and current trends within the field, and to meet departmental and university requirements. Our program is unique in that it does not culminate in written or oral exams. During their three years in residence prior to fieldwork, each student instead develops a portfolio, based on the three broad fields of interest she or he has developed in coordination with her adviser. The completed portfolio contains research papers, short essays, book reviews, annotated reading lists, course syllabi, an intellectual statement of interest, and a dissertation prospectus; all of these materials are developed in consultation with the student’s faculty advisers over the course of their first three years. This system gives students preparation in the basic skills and literacies required of a professional anthropologist and also ensures sustained intellectual engagement between students and faculty in the course of study, as opposed to mad crashing for nerve-wracking exams at the end of the third year. There is a comprehensive exam in anthropological and social theory at the end of the first year, based on the two-sequence theories course all students must stake. But once this is completed, the student’s work centers around working towards the completion of the portfolio, culminating with a portfolio workshop with all members of the student’s committee at the end of the third year.