Graduate Study in Environmental Anthropology

The department offers a graduate specialization in environmental anthropology. Students in this specialization must apply and be admitted to a one of our degree granting programs (Archaeology, Sociocultural Anthropology and Biocultural Anthroplogy).

Goals

• To promote, perform, and disseminate research on all aspects of human-environment relations from a variety of anthropological perspectives.
• To educate graduate students to be able to take part in promoting, performing, and disseminating research on all aspects of human-environment relations from a variety of anthropological perspectives

Core Faculty
Students in the EA specialzation will have a supervisory committee chaired by a member of the core faculty in EA. These faculty are all members of the graduate faculty in Anthropology, and include:

Ben Fitzhugh(archaeology, human paleoecology, biogeography, evolutionary ecology, cultural evolution and adaptation, hunter-gatherers, Alaska and the Russian Far East)
Steve Harrell (human ecology, development, education, ethnic identity, political economy, China and Taiwan)
Devon G. Peña (agroecology and sustainable agriculture, critical studies of agricultural biotechnology, environmental history, ecological politics, new social movements; Intermountain West, Mexico)
Eric A. Smith (population ecology, ecological economics, foragers; arctic North America, indigenous Australia)

Admissions
Students applying to any of the three sub-disciplines will have the opportunity to check the "environmental anthropology  specialization" at the time of application. All applications that have had the environmental option checked will be reviewed by the EA core faculty, which will rank the applications and pass the ranking on to the subfaculties.  It will be understood that the subfaculties should give some weight to recommendations by EA faculty, if students recommended meet subdisciplinary standards.  We anticipate that this will mean an average of 1 student every year or two in B-C and ARCHY, and 1-2 students per year in S-C, for a combined total of 2-3 EA students per year.  All students will have to be admitted to a subdiscipline in order to be members of the EA specialization.

Curricular Requirements
Students admitted to EA and a subdiscipline will have two sets of curricular requirements.  In addition to their subdisciplinary core requirements, they will also be required to take two EA series. One series will consist of three seminars on environmental anthropology, one taught from the perspective of each sub-discipline.  The other will be the current EA Forum-EA methods sequence.  The possibility is open for EA students in any subdiscipline to substitute one EA core course for one course in the subdiscipline's core requirements.

Examinations
EA students in each subdiscipline will take that subdiscipline's comprehensive and general exams.  Since these exams are structured so differently in the three subdisciplines, there may be an extra EA exam requirement to insure that all EA students have met the same standard.  The details of this issue remain to be negotiated.

EA Forum
EA students will be encouraged to attend the EA Forum and other academic and non-academic activities that are meant to promote and strengthen the intellectual community.