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Department of Anthropology
The Johns Hopkins University
404 Macaulay Hall
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

Phone 410-516-7272
Fax 410-516-6080

The Discipline | Our Department | Department History

The Discipline
Anthropology varies with time, according to changes in the world and in academia, to anthropologists' responses to these changes as well as their individual and collective initiatives. Traditionally, the discipline was divided into four fields: socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology and anthropological linguistics. Those fields have changed and so have the connections and boundaries between them. Here at Johns Hopkins, our department specializes in social cultural anthropology, broadly conceived.

Our Department
The Anthropology Department specializes in social-cultural anthropology, one of the four traditional subfields of the discipline. A distinctive feature of Hopkins anthropology is our insistence that social and cultural studies of specific populations be situated historically and comparatively in relation to global political economy. For the last 25 years, Hopkins faculty and alumni have contributed significantly to the development of a historical perspective within the discipline. We approach cultural creations as embedded in socio-historical processes, as realized and transformed in daily practices. Hopkins anthropology necessarily uses many disciplinary lenses. Our training and teaching includes linguistics and a specialized attention to language.

Faculty and students share many foci of cross-disciplinary interests in history, politics, economic development, demography, religion and medicine as well as gender, ethnic, environmental and global studies. Our faculty brings into the classroom an extraordinary range of personal and professional experiences. We are proud to have one of the most diversified faculty in the discipline worldwide, both in terms of gender and ethnic or national origins. Their collective fieldwork experience spans the world, including the Americas, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. The Anthropology Department offers courses to non-anthropologists, a B.A. program and a PhD program. The undergraduate program is designed for two kinds of students. It provides a solid liberal arts foundation for various careers, such as international work or public health, where an anthropological perspective is an asset. It also prepares students for graduate study in anthropology and related disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. The PhD program trains students for creative scholarship and teaching and for non-academic careers where fieldwork experience and a foundation in anthropological theory constitute distinctive assets.

Department History
The Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins was created on the initiative of Dean George Owen and historians linked to the Atlantic Program in History, Culture, and Society. In the fall of 1973, the Rockefeller Foundation financed two positions in history and two positions in anthropology as part of the newly created Atlantic Program. In 1974-75, Sidney W. Mintz, Richard Price, and Emily Martin, all three of whom had moved from Yale, started teaching at Hopkins.

The list of past permanent or adjunct faculty includes: Talad Asad, David W. Cohen, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Ashraf Ghani, Beatriz Lavandera, Hy van Long, Emily Martin, Sally Price, Richard Price, Kathleen Ryan, William Sturtevant, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Katherine Verdery, and Yun-xiang Yan.

The list of past visiting faculty includes: Arturo Warman, Sir Edmund Leach, Dell Hymes, Sandra Barnes, Fredrik Barth, Maurice Bloch, John Murra, Hill Gates, John Rickford, Michael Silverstein, Sharon Stevens, Stanley Tambiah, Harriett Whitehead and Brackette F. Williams.

The Discipline | Our Department | Department History