Anthropology, Ph.D.

Program Overview

The Ph.D. program in Anthropology at UW-Madison offers flexible and individualized programs tailored to students' specializations. Students can choose concentrations in archaeology, social and cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, or an intersectional degree track. The program provides access to specialized area and language programs, archaeological sites, and laboratories for research and training.

Program Outline

Outline:

• The Ph.D. program assumes previous broad anthropological training in the undergraduate major and competence in a special field at the master's level.
• Ph.D. programs are flexible in content and are constructed individually within the field of specialization by the candidate, in consultation with the appropriate faculty.
• Students working toward the Ph.D. degree in anthropology who prefer to pursue a program leading to a specialization in, for example, linguistic anthropology, may elect to take a joint degree.
• Within the doctoral program, students are expected to seek additional training in areas relating to the field of concentration; in most cases, such related subjects may be taken as the required minor program.
• The archaeologist, for example, should elect course work in surveying, geology, cartography, zoology, history, and so on, depending on special interests.
• The biological anthropologist is expected to take work in comparative anatomy, human anatomy, genetics, and other biological sciences.
• The cultural or social anthropologist are encouraged to take further work in area studies, geography, history, history of science, linguistics, political science, psychology, sociology, and related fields.
• The university and vicinity provide many opportunities and facilities for training and research including specialized area and language programs, accessible American Indian reservations, significant archaeological sites, and important archaeological collections.
• Anthropological fieldwork is conducted in various parts of the world, and there is normally an archaeological field school every second summer.
• The department has major laboratories for biological anthropology and archaeology, and collaborates with the Center for Climatic Research.
• The archaeology laboratories maintain comparative collections; microscopes; a thin-section lab; a lab of archaeological chemistry; computerized drafting equipment; and modern drafting, computing, and analytical equipment for research and teaching.
• Facilities for training and research in biological anthropology include well-equipped laboratories for human and nonhuman primate skeletal biology, wet lab facilities, and computational laboratory with 3D printing and morphometrics, in addition to two large teaching laboratories.