The graduate program in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University is a PhD program designed to educate and develop scholars and researchers who study the human condition through time and across cultures. Our graduates apply these skills to academics, business, government, and nongovernmental jobs and careers. Although candidates may receive an AM degree during the course of their study, the department does not offer a standalone master's degree. The anthropology department has a strong tradition of graduate student satisfaction and close mentoring by faculty advisors. In addition, graduates of the Washington University anthropology PhD program have a solid history of placement in highly desirable academic and nonacademic positions.

The department has a strong three-field approach, with active programs in archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and biological anthropology. Program strengths in archaeology include the origins of agriculture and pastoralism, paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, landscape archaeology, and environmental archaeology. Sociocultural anthropology foci include politics, pluralism and religion, indigenous political movements, the politics of gender and sexuality, fertility and population, global health and the environment, and medical anthropology. Program strengths in biological anthropology include human and primate evolution, the ecology and conservation of modern primates, human physiology, biological variation in living human populations, quantitative studies of morphology and genetics, and human life history.

Contact Information

Email: Xinyi Liu at liuxinyi@wustl.edu or Kirsten Jacobsen at kjacobsen@wustl.edu

Phone: 314-935-7770 or 314-935-5252

Contact Info

Website:

http://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/graduate

Chair

Endowed Professors

Professors

Associate Professors

Assistant Professors

Senior Lecturer

Lecturers

Professors Emeriti

Universal Departmental Requirements

The following is an abbreviated list of requirements for the PhD in Anthropology. Each subdiscipline also has its own additional guidelines and requirements. A more comprehensive description of the requirements (including additional requirements for each of the three subdisciplines: archaeology, biological anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology) can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook (PDF). All students in the PhD program are expected to satisfy the academic performance requirements of the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, which can be found in the General Requirements section of this Bulletin. Similarly, all subdisciplinary requirements are in addition to those set out here for the department as a whole.

Degree Length and Course Units

Students are expected to complete the degree in six years. All students must complete a minimum of 60 units of graduate-level course work for the PhD, but they must not exceed 72 units of credit. A typical semester course load for the first year of study is 12 units (i.e., four 3-credit courses per semester). The semester course load for the second and third years is typically 9 units. Graduate students must take a minimum of 9 units of credit to be considered full-time by the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences. Most students will meet the 60-unit requirement by the end of the third year, but they must maintain full-time status throughout the PhD program. Students will work with their advisors to identify the appropriate registration options to maintain full-time status.

Master's Degree

Students are expected to receive their master of arts (AM) degree by the end of their second year or fourth semester of full-time study. The requirements for the AM in Anthropology are as follows:

1. Theory requirement. All students are required to take Anthro 5472 Social Theory and Anthropology during their first year. Under special circumstances, this requirement may be delayed or waived by petitioning the departmental faculty. This request should be initiated through the student’s advisor.
2. Two subdisciplinary course requirements. Graduate students earning a PhD in Anthropology are expected to have familiarity across the subdisciplines of anthropology. To this end, all AM students must complete at least one course taught by a faculty member in the anthropology department in each of the two subdisciplines other than their own. Anthro 5472 Social Theory and Anthropology may satisfy the sociocultural requirement. Courses taken in other subdisciplines should strengthen the student’s understanding of the subfield, complement their research and, ideally, enhance their ability to teach across subfields. Students with good cause to substitute prior extensive course work in the subdiscipline — especially in the context of a master’s degree from another university — for one or both of the other subdisciplinary requirements may petition the relevant subdisciplinary faculty to do so.
3. Courses with six faculty. All graduate students are required to have had courses with at least six different departmental faculty members. Team-taught courses may count for both faculty members.
4. Credit units. The Department of Anthropology requires 36 credit units for the award of an AM degree without a thesis.
5. Petition for the award of the master’s degree. Once a student has completed all requirements for the AM degree, the student and their advisor submit a petition to the chair. The chair circulates the petition to the entire faculty and reports the successful completion of requirements to the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences. This petition should include documentation of the satisfactory completion of all of the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, requirements including cumulative credits, thesis (if applicable), and grade point average; of the other requirements in this list; and of any special requirements set by the student’s subdiscipline.

Doctoral Candidacy

Although the Department of Anthropology only accepts students who wish to pursue the PhD, students are not officially admitted to candidacy for the PhD immediately upon entry into the program. Admittance to candidacy for the PhD program requires the successful completion of the requirements of the AM degree as well as of the requirements listed below. Continuation for the PhD requires that the student be advanced to doctoral candidacy. The defense of the doctoral proposal and admission to doctoral candidacy are expected by the end of the third year.

1. Credit units. Students must have completed 48 units before filing the petition to advance to candidacy.
2. Forming the Doctoral Research Advisory Committee (RAC). Students are encouraged to work with a variety of faculty while shaping their dissertation proposal. Prior to scheduling their dissertation proposal defense during their third year, students must formally assemble a Doctoral RAC in consultation with their advisor. This committee must consist of a minimum of three full-time tenured or tenure-track members of the Anthropology faculty who must approve the dissertation proposal defense and also sign the RAC Form and — along with the department chair — the Notice of Title, Scope, and Procedure of Dissertation. This committee typically forms the basis of the Dissertation Defense Committee.
3. Student-specific requirements for doctoral candidacy. Prior to admission to candidacy, students may be asked by their committees to fulfill additional requirements that are directly relevant to their doctoral dissertation research. These requirements may include a foreign language or specialized training outside of the anthropology department in areas such as statistics, computer programming, or laboratory techniques. Students will be formally notified by their advisor of such additional requirements.
4. Defense of the doctoral proposal. All students must defend a doctoral proposal prior to admission to PhD candidacy. PhD proposal defenses should be carried out by December 15 of the student's third year and must be carried out no later than the end of the third year. Proposals must be defended before the RAC.
5. Petition for admission to doctoral candidacy. After a student’s doctoral proposal has been successfully defended and after all other requirements set by the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences; the Department of Anthropology; the subdiscipline; and the student’s committee have been met, the student and their advisor should submit a petition to the chair for advancement to candidacy. The chair will then inform the entire faculty and report the successful advancement to the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences.

Mentored Teaching Experience

As part of the training and professionalization of graduate students in anthropology, the department requires all students to participate in a minimum of five Mentored Teaching Experiences (MTEs). All students participating in the MTEs are required to attend the teaching orientation offered by the Washington University Teaching Center during the summer after their first year of graduate study. First-year students will not participate in an MTE, but they subsequently will complete at least five MTEs during years two through six. All teaching for the MTEs must be done in the Department of Anthropology, and students will register under LGS 600 during the semesters in which they complete MTEs.

The Doctoral Dissertation

In addition to the general guidelines below, specific details about timelines for each subdiscipline can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook (PDF).

In all cases, the dissertation must constitute an integrated, coherent work, with parts that are logically connected. It must have a written introductory chapter that sets forth the general theme and core questions of the dissertation research and that explains the relationship among the constituent chapters or parts. The introduction will typically include, as is appropriate to the discipline, a review of the literature relevant to the dissertation; an explanation of theories, methods and/or procedures utilized by the author; and a summary discussion of the contribution of the dissertation project to knowledge in the field. In its final deposited form, the dissertation must constitute an archivable product that meets the standards prescribed by the university.

The dissertation may consist (in whole or in part) of co-authored chapters and articles, but the candidate must be a major contributor to the research and writing of any such papers and must describe their ideas, individual efforts, and contributions to the larger work. To be in compliance with the university’s policy on plagiarism and academic integrity, a dissertation that incorporates co-authored work must also include in its introduction an explanation of the role of the candidate in the research and in the writing of the co-authored work.

Whether this dissertation format is appropriate for a given dissertation in the Department of Anthropology (within a subdiscipline that accepts such a dissertation) must be determined a priori by the student and their doctoral committee. Should it be deemed appropriate, the dissertation must have an introductory chapter that provides the theme and core questions of the dissertation research and that explains the relationships between the constituent chapters and parts. It must also have a concluding chapter that brings together the information and ideas expressed in the thesis, relates them to the introduction, and shows how they constitute a coherent whole.

If a dissertation includes previously published materials (authored or co-authored), the candidate must provide a full referencing of when and where individual papers have been published. Because prior publication and multiple authorship have implications with respect to copyright, PhD candidates should discuss copyright with advisors and obtain copyright clearance from any co-authors well in advance of defending the dissertation. Written permission must be obtained in order to include articles copyrighted by others within the dissertation.

It is the responsibility of the student and the student’s dissertation committee to ensure that the dissertation meets all requirements regarding authorship, academic integrity, and copyright.

The Dissertation Defense

Prior to submitting the final dissertation to the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, the student must successfully defend their dissertation in an oral examination before a committee approved by the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences.

In addition to the general guidelines below, specific details about timelines and procedures for each subdiscipline can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook (PDF).

Committee approval. Approval of the written dissertation by the RAC is necessary before the student can orally defend the dissertation. The Dissertation Defense Committee that examines the student consists of at least five members, who normally meet three independent criteria:

1. Three of the five members (or a similar proportion of a larger committee) must be full-time Washington University faculty members or, for programs offered by Washington University-affiliated partners, full-time members of a Washington University-affiliated partner institution who are authorized to supervise PhD students and who have appropriate expertise in the proposed field of study. One of these three members must be the PhD student’s primary thesis advisor, and one may be a member of the emeritus faculty.
2. All other committee members must be active in research/scholarship and have appropriate expertise in the proposed field of study whether at Washington University, at another university, in government or in industry.
3. At least one of the five members must bring expertise outside of the student’s field of study to the committee.

All committees must be approved by the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, regardless of whether they meet the normal criteria.

Procedure. Attendance by a minimum of four members of the Dissertation Defense Committee, including the committee chair and an outside member, is required for the defense to take place. This provision is designed to permit the defense to proceed in case of a situation that unexpectedly prevents one of the five members from attending. Students should not plan in advance to have only four members in attendance; if one of those four cannot attend, the defense must be rescheduled. Note that the absence of all outside members or of the committee chair would necessitate rescheduling the defense.

Submission of the Dissertation

Students who defend their dissertations successfully have not completed their PhD requirements until their dissertation submission has been accepted by the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences. The exact dates for the deadline to submit the dissertation to the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, are set yearly.

Specific Subdiscipline Requirements

Please consult the Graduate Student Handbook (PDF) for more information regarding specific subfield requirements.