Overview
Our faculty has conducted fieldwork in areas around the world, including in Oceania, Southeast and East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, using fine-grained ethnographic research as the foundation for anthropological analysis and cross-cultural understanding.
Although our interests and expertise are diverse, ranging from justice and human rights to transnational commodity chains, sustainability and environmentalism to kinship and religion, a common theme that distinguishes the department from others at Rochester is its interest in the world outside of the U.S. and its contribution to understanding global interconnections, whether through migration, the capitalist system, religious or political movements, international NGOs, or transnational media.
Our faculty also shares an interest in developing methodologies and theoretical approaches appropriate to the new kinds of ethnographic objects confronting anthropologists today. Whether it is food traceability systems, the production of ecological knowledge, corporate social responsibility, or transnational networks of elites, experts, and NGOs, the research that we produce is both grounded in the fundamental preoccupations of anthropology and also engaged with the most current debates in the social sciences.
See profiles of individual faculty members for information about their current research interests.
Undergraduate Research
We also offer several opportunities for students to conduct their own independent research by taking advantage of the: