The Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins is one of the few in the United States that was founded—and had developed organically—as a department specializing in socio-cultural anthropology. The department 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.  Founding members of the faculty focused attention on matters of political economy, globalization, and transnational forms of social and political organization, working at the intersection of anthropology and history.  Our current research themes build upon and carry forward these founding concerns, routed now through a renewed emphasis on ethnography, its pursuit across diverse scales of analysis, and the use of novel conceptual prisms.

Past Faculty

Talad Asad, Eytan Bercovitch, Jean Besson, Donald Carter, David W. Cohen, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Hill Gates, Ashraf Ghani, Suzanne Kuechler, Ruby Lal, Beatriz Lavandera, Hy van Long, Emily Martin, Sheryl McCurdy, Felicity Northcott-Grant, Gyan Pandey, Sally Price, Richard Price, Kathleen Ryan, Sonia Ryang, William Sturtevant, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Katherine Verdery, Yun-xiang Yan<

Past Visiting Faculty

Robert McCormick Adams, Sandra Barnes, Fredrik Barth, Maurice Bloch, Fenella Canell, Hill Gates, Dell Hymes, Murray Last, Sir Edmund Leach, Barbara Little, Stuart McLean, Deepak Mehta, Johan V. Murra, Kalpana Ram, Wendy Richardson, John Rickford, Jennifer Robertson, David Scott, Michael Silverstein, S. Hoon Song, Sharon Stevens, Stanley Tambiah, Paul Trawick, Arturo Warman,  Harriett Whitehead, Brackette F. Williams