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About Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology

The faculty in cultural and linguistic anthropology share an abiding interest in all forms of inequality, especially those based on race/ethnicity, class, age, gender/sexuality, religion, and nationality. We focus on examining the political economy of these inequalities as they are historically produced, globally connected and locally contingent. We also investigate the myriad of ways that different groups construct, reproduce, and contest these inequalities through engagement with material and expressive culture, language, media and the public sphere, state institutions, organizations, migration processes, and religious practice.

Our commitment to exploring causes, forms, expressions, and contestations of inequality, at local and global levels, is part of a larger department vision we share with the other subfields of biological anthropology and archaeology. We regularly share our analyses of ethnicity/race, class, gender, generation, and material culture, making us a truly integrated four-field department.

While our faculty embrace a global approach to understanding contemporary problems, we complement this approach with significant area strengths in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States. While several of us also conduct research on the discipline of anthropology itself, we are all also deeply committed to interdisciplinarity, with most members having affiliations or simultaneous appointments in Gender Studies, Performance Studies, African Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina and Latino Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies. Members of our faculty also work with the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for Policy Research.

Key areas of faculty research