Anthropology

Graduate Degree Programs

The Department of Anthropology offers graduate programs leading to the master of arts and the doctor of philosophy degrees.

Admission

Students without the equivalent of the department’s undergraduate concentration may be admitted to either degree program, but they will be required to make up deficiencies in their anthropological backgrounds. In addition to the Graduate College admission requirements, students are required to submit Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores. Students whose native language is not English are required to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and achieve a minimum score of 550 on the paper-based test (213 computer-based test). Students are admitted for the fall term only.

Graduate Teaching Experience

Although teaching is not a general Graduate College requirement, experience in teaching is considered an important part of the graduate experience in this program.

Master of Arts

The master’s degree can be a first stage toward the doctorate or may be used by students wishing to apply knowledge of anthropology to a related field. Candidates for the master’s degree must complete at least 32 graduate hours of graduate credit and present a thesis (or paper in lieu of a thesis) acceptable to their advisers and another member of the graduate faculty within the department. At least 12 graduate hours must be at the 500 level, and 8 of these hours must be in anthropology.

Doctor of Philosophy

Requirements for the Ph.D. include 96 graduate hours of graduate coursework or 64 graduate hours beyond the master’s degree, a preliminary examination, a Ph.D. thesis, and a final defense of the dissertation. The preliminary examination consists of a predissertation research paper, a proposal for doctoral research, and a written examination designed by the student’s doctoral committee followed by a two-hour oral examination. The final examination is a defense of the doctoral thesis. High proficiency in one, or reading ability in two, foreign languages is required. Statistics, computer modeling, or similar expertise, however, may be used in lieu of one foreign language. Fieldwork is strongly recommended, although not required.

Research Interests and Facilities

Courses and individualized study provide broad coverage of sociocultural, linguistic, archaeological, and physical anthropology. The department provides special emphases in the analyses of state ideologies and cultural transformations; complex societies in transition; kinship and gender relationships; symbolism and cognition; cosmology, art, and religion; politics, economics, and ethnicity; language and culture; ethnomusicology; text and narrative analysis; formal analysis and mathematical modeling; medical anthropology; human evolution; agricultural origins and development; hunter-gatherer adaptations; diet and nutrition; paleoecology and paleobiology; comparative and analytical osteology; and nonhuman primate evolution, morphology, behavior, and ecology. The department’s Laboratory of Anthropology has archaeological, paleoethnobotany, faunal analysis, human biology, casting, stable-isotope analysis, and ethnographic laboratories. The department is developing visual arts and networked computer laboratories.

Departmental funds and a grant from the National Science Foundation are available for graduate students’ summer field research. An archaeology field school is held at various locations in Illinois and occasionally elsewhere (location varies from year to year). Graduate student programs are enriched by close departmental relationships with the interdisciplinary area studies centers on campus (African, East Asian and Pacific, Latin America and Caribbean, and Russian and East European), and with the Afro-American Studies and Research Program, Women’s Studies Program, La Casa Cultural Latina, Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program, Spurlock Museum, Museum of Natural History, Krannert Art Museum, and the Program in Ancient Technologies and Archaeological Materials.

Agreements between the University and various governments and institutes facilitate research in many nations. Training is available in various languages, including Quechua, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Thai, Burmese, Swahili, Hausa, Lingala, Wolof, Arabic, and Shona. Students have ready access to the extensive computer facilities of the University and to the department’s facilities, which include microcomputers, printers, software, and mainframe computer terminals, a graphic digitizer and color printer, photographic and video equipment, and other research-oriented hardware and software. The Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society, edited by graduate students, has been published since 1969.

Financial Aid

University fellowships, Graduate College fellowships for under-represented minorities, and teaching and research assistantships provide variable levels of funding for most graduate students who do not hold external awards. Tuition and service fee waivers accompany fellowships and assistantships. Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships are available through various area centers. Extensive contract archaeology programs in the department provide support and research employment for graduate students, as does the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign.