Welcome to the UW Department of Anthropology

Luce Fellowship and UW Southeast Asian Archaeology Program The UW anthropology department has a program in SE Asian Archaeology, in collaboration with the UW Museology Program, Libraries and the Asian Law Center. The new program is offering a graduate fellowship for students studying the archaeology of Southeast Asia. More information IGERT NSF Fellowships The UW anthropology department has an NSF-funded IGERT graduate fellowship program in Evolutionary Modeling in collaboration with Anthropology and Biology at WSU More information

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The Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington was launched in the 1920s by Leslie Spier and Melville Jacobs. Both were students of Franz Boas, as was Erna Gunther who took the reins in 1929 and under whose lively leadership the department grew for a quarter of a century.

Today, we are a large, and still lively, department that includes 35 faculty members and houses three academic subdisciplines: archaeology, biocultural anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology, as well as a graduate program in environmental anthropology.

While pursuing a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, we all work toward a common goal, namely to document and understand our many interconnected ways of being human in a world now inhabited by six billion people speaking five thousand languages.

For a brief summary of our program view the Anthropology Department Fact Sheet.

At the heart of anthropology research, theory and practice lies a shared appreciation of and commitment to understanding all aspects of human difference. View the Anthropology Department Diversity Mission Statement.

Anthropology makes a world of difference.