ANTHR-PHD - Anthropology (PhD)

The Anthropology PhD program 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 PhD program 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 Anthropology PhD program is full time Doctoral students in the program are expected to maintain a significant physical presence on campus throughout their graduate studies. This ensures that students have access to advisors and mentors, libraries, and other resources that support timely progress towards completion of degree requirements. Additionally, being on campus ensures that students are part of the academic and campus community which supports continued scholarly and professional development. 

Information on how to apply for graduate study at Stanford is available on the university’s  Graduate Admissions website. Application information specific to Anthropology can be found on https://anthropology.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-program.