Anthropology (BA)
Program Description
The Department of Anthropology is one of the country's leading graduate and undergraduate centers for cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology—the four principal subfields studied in the undergraduate curriculum. The department considers its greatest assets to be the various individual areas of faculty expertise: archaeological specialties such as medieval archaeology and European, Near Eastern, and South Asian prehistory; biological anthropology areas such as molecular primatology, primate behavioral ecology, and paleoanthropology; linguistic anthropology foci such as discourse analysis and language socialization; and sociocultural anthropology specialties such as the ethnography of North America, Africa, India, China, the Near and Middle East, Russia and the former Soviet Union, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and the South Pacific. Major theoretical emphasis is on the systems of thought and symbolic representation of the self and society; the relation between female and male domains of interaction; changing patterns of social organization and hierarchy within small-scale societies, urban settings, and bureaucratic institutions; medical anthropology; evolutionary approaches to the study of primate and human origins; religion; art; science studies; race and ethnicity; and the problem of ethnographic representation in film and other media.
Departmental resources include an extensive film and video collection as well as teaching and research labs for archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology, which can be used for research by advanced undergraduates. A departmental colloquium series and an undergraduate student association welcome undergraduate participation. The department participates in the University's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, the Institute for French Studies, the Center for Religion and Media, the Center for the Study of Human Origins, the Institute for Study of the Ancient World, the Program in Museum Studies, and the Center for Media, Culture, and History.
Formal and informal cooperative arrangements with museums, zoos, and other academic institutions in the greater New York City area place at students' disposal a group of anthropological scholars, materials, and resources unparalleled in the country.
Honors Program
A degree in Anthropology is awarded with honors to selected Anthropology majors who apply for admission to the program through the DUS during their junior year. Honors program candidates are expected to meet all the requirements for the program and to maintain a grade point average of 3.65, both overall and in the major. Candidates for the honors program must complete a total of ten 4-credit courses (40 credits) in anthropology, which is 4 credits more than the standard major. These include the two-semester research/thesis writing sequence taken in the candidate's senior year—ANTH-UA 901 Honors Research I and ANTH-UA 902 Honors Research II—plus at least one graduate course, typically taken in the junior or senior year. These courses all count toward the major. In both semesters of the candidate's senior year, students must also enroll in a 2-credit independent study with their thesis advisor.
In the spring semester of the junior year, students will secure a faculty supervisor for their honors thesis (in January of the senior year, the student will also choose a second faculty reader in consultation with their thesis supervisor). In the fall semester of the senior year, all thesis writers from across departmental subdisciplines enroll in ANTH-UA 901 Honors Research I, a 2-credit seminar course in which research methods are taught and individualized to fit each student’s topic—e.g., assembling a bibliography; constructing hypotheses; using secondary, primary, and occasionally original sources to generate data; and analyzing data. In the spring semester, all thesis writers enroll in ANTH-UA 902 Honors Research II, a 2-credit seminar course in which students share their developing theses with the group. Honors candidates are strongly encouraged to formally present posters/papers at the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Conference and within the department. Feedback will be offered at different stages by both faculty and student peers in the seminar. It is the responsibility of the thesis writer to consult with his or her departmental faculty adviser who is supervising the honors project and who will serve as the primary thesis reader.
Admissions
New York University's Office of Undergraduate Admissions supports the application process for all undergraduate programs at NYU. For additional information about undergraduate admissions, including application requirements, see How to Apply.