With a diversified faculty, the Purdue graduate program offers training in all four subfields of anthropology (click here to read more about the subfields). Faculty specializations include the anthropology of the environment and conservation, identity, religion, semiotics, Women’s studies, gender and sexuality, popular culture, kinship, economic anthropology, African American Studies, the archaeology of Mesoamerica, South America, the Nile Valley and Central Asia, archaeometry, bioarchaeology, popular culture, kinship, economic anthropology, African American studies, archaeometallurgy, the archaeology of complex societies, ancient mining communities and landscapes of power, medical anthropology, human health and aging, women's health, reproductive ecology, nutrition, human evolution, conservation and primate and hominin diet and ecology, and cultural and applied anthropology in several regions of the world. The courses taken during the first two years develop a four-field foundation for subsequent specialized research. Our program emphasizes personalized intensive instruction and interaction with graduate student peers. Faculty research interests include Saami pastoralists; rural communities in West Sumatra, Indonesia; lowland gorilla social organization and ecology in the Central African Republic; health in indigenous populations in the Indian Himalayas; health of older adults in the United States; settlement archaeology in Mexico; cross-cultural research; craft production, household archaeology, and provenance analysis in the Andes; bioarchaeology in the Nile Valley; comparative youth cultures and psychoactive substance; the interaction between communities and the environment; the impact that extralocal politics, ideologies, and markets have on the livelihood strategies of indigenous communities; human-environmental relationships the entanglements between nature, place, identity, and space use. Graduate student research has been undertaken in India, Bangladesh, Morocco, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, Croatia, Italy, Greece, Appalachia, and the Midwestern United States.

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