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ANTHR-PHD - Anthropology (PhD)

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Anthropology Anthropology PHD - Doctor of Philosophy

Program Overview

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.

Ph.D. Students in Anthropology must complete a minimum of 135 quarter units with a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 (B).

Admissions Information

The deadline for graduate application to the PhD degree program is December 4, 2024.

Successful applicants for the PhD program may enter only in autumn quarter of the following academic year. The department does not require the GRE test scores for admission to the PhD degree program in Anthropology.

Enrollment in the PhD is full-time only.

Director of Graduate Studies

Lochlann Jain Professor of Anthropology