Franz Boas founded Columbia University's Department of Anthropology on the eve of the 20th Century, making it the first PhD Program in the United States. Originally founded on the concept of the “four field approach” to the study of human culture and society, the department now focuses its undergraduate and graduate programs on Sociocultural Anthropology and Archaeology. However, the Department continues the Boasian tradition of extended ethnographic research, critical theoretical approaches to contemporary global problems, and language sensitive and historically informed analysis. Faculty research interests span the range of the domains most critical to contempory anthropology, including continental philosophy, law, political anthropology, semiotics and post- semiotics, ecology and ecocriticsm, science and technology studies, critical native studies, aesthetics, affect theory, media (including film, photography, and sound recording), and new media.
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Patrick Nason's article, This is Not a Goldmine: Capital, Conservation, and the Politics of Recruitment in the Deep Bismarck Sea, was selected by the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as a finalist for the 2018 Roy A. Rappaport Student Prize. Patrick will present this paper at the 117th Annual Meeting of the AAA in San Jose, California in November, 2018
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Science and Art in Archaeological Illustration, a new article by Columbia College about Zoe Crossland’s illustration class.
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Zoe Crossland and Nan Rothschild have been awarded $146,500 from Columbia University's 2017 Collaboratory competition to buy archaeology lab equipment and develop a course with Dorothy Peteet and Jonathan Nicholas from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory on Interpreting Urban Environmental Data – New York City’s Changing Landscapes.
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Congratulations to Naor Ben-Yehoyada who received a Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant for “Mafias and the Antimafia in Sicily and Mexico.”
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Congratulations to Prof. Paige West for receiving the 2017 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award for her most recent book, "Dispossession and the Enviroment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea"
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The Department of Anthropology congratulates Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, honored as a Fellow of the British Academy. He joins sixty-six of the world's leading minds announced as Fellows of the British Academy on Friday July 21, 2017.