ANTHR-PHD - Anthropology (PhD)

All students must satisfy the university’s basic requirements for the PhD degree outlined in Graduate Degree Requirements.

Education in Anthropology provides excellent preparation for living and working in a multicultural and globally-interconnected world. It equips students for careers in various fields, including law, medicine, business, public service, environmental sustainability, and resource management. The Department of Anthropology at Stanford approaches the rich legacy and ambitious scope of Anthropology through a shared commitment to long-term and embedded ethnographic, historical, and empirical studies of societies, communities, and mobile networks of people, things, and ideas. Our faculty and students engage significant questions that are of critical importance to people in many parts of the contemporary world – climate change, the legacy of the deep past, self-determination, economic inequalities, dependencies, health and affliction, racial discrimination, historical memory, public violence, the power of objects, inheritance and kinship, genetics and science, social segregation, urban aesthetics, and much more.

We are committed to a deep engagement of social theory, rigorous fieldwork, and field methodologies and a rich historical understanding of social and political action, shared beliefs, and cultural memory within the communities and societies we study. We are all generalists but also area specialists because we believe the human condition can only be properly understood in its specific cultural and historical manifestations.

The deadline for graduate application to the PhD degree program is December 5, 2023. Successful applicants for the PhD program may enter only in autumn quarter of the following academic year. It is the Department of Anthropology’s policy not to defer graduate admission. The department does not require the GRE test scores for admission to the PhD degree program in Anthropology. Additional department application requirements and procedures are required. Please consult the department’s Admission webpage. Also, consider reviewing the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences’ Guide on Getting into Grad School to explore which graduate program may best suit your interest, what graduate committees look for, and the benefits and challenges of pursuing a graduate degree.