Anthropology
If you are excited by the idea of rummaging for million-year-old fossils; talking to people about food, television, and health care; or finding out when people built the first cities of Europe or migrated to the Caribbean, you will find a home in the Department of Anthropology.
Undergraduate Resources
Undergraduates pursue hands-on research in the lab and in the field. Graduates are equipped to go on to many different endeavors, especially those benefitting from an appreciation of diversity, the ability to do research, and capability of bridging the gap between social and biological dimensions that define our lives. Our courses present the richness in human variation and cultural diversity, and offer the anthropological perspective as a model for future learning.
Undergraduate Courses
3-Year Course Offering
Curriculum Committee
Field Schools
Scholarships and Internships
What Can You Do With a Degree in Anthropology?
About Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of people, how we evolved physically and differ cross-culturally, and how we live and interact with one another. Anthropology combines the social and natural sciences in unique ways to study humanity in the broadest sense.
Using a four-field approach—sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology—the department combines the sciences with the humanities to understand the biological, social, and cultural factors contributing to the commonalities and differences of human behavior, past and present.
What Anthropologists Study
- Different cultures by living with the people, experiencing their lives as they themselves do, seeking to develop an empathetic knowledge of a given way of life
- How people once lived by studying the things they left behind, as recently as a century ago or from prehistoric times
- How language use relates to who we are, where we come from, and who we aspire to be
- How primates living and extinct inform us about the long history and evolution of the human body and mind, and primates’ place in nature
Graduate Resources
Meet Our Faculty
An important and vital part of the Anthropology Department is our highly qualified faculty.
News
Brooklyn College Paleontologist Stephen Chester and Colleagues Reveal New Clues About Early Primate Evolution
Findings help clarify the biogeographic history of the earliest primate relatives and highlight the importance of continued fossil exploration in understudied regions.
Professor Katie Rose Hejtmanek Wins Fulbright Award
Anthropologist to collaborate with leading scholars at Free University in Tbilisi.
Community and Heritage
Recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award Shelley Worrell ’01 made a career—and a lifestyle—celebrating Brooklyn’s Caribbean community.