The Majors
Our majors will teach you to think critically in order to understand our social worlds in their full complexity. Through Anthropology, you’ll explore the range of compelling answers humans across the world have produced to address the fundamental questions of the human condition as they organize collective life and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. Through Sociology, you’ll explore how the same quests are carried out in modern social systems, and learn to see how biography, history and social structure intersect to shape individuals’ opportunities and horizons. Both disciplines teach you to frame and pursue your own questions through interpretive social research and introduce you to major themes in social theory that cut across disciplinary divides.
Why Study Anthropology and Sociology?
Anthropology and Sociology provide you with essential tools for meeting complex challenges, including data analysis, empathy and listening skills, and the ability to synthesize ideas and information. Our graduates go on to pursue a range of careers, including medicine and public health; law; finance and consulting; software engineering; education; nonprofit and NGO work; fundraising; and museum and curatorial work. We also have numerous alumni pursuing master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology, Sociology, or related fields.
Major Requirements
Anthropology and Sociology teach you how to formulate, frame and address intellectual problems. You’ll learn classical and contemporary theories that illuminate social experience. You’ll learn the empirical methods widely used in Anthropology and Sociology: ethnography, participant observation, interviewing, discourse and visual analysis, archival research, oral history, and archaeological methods.
To earn a degree in either discipline, you’ll complete a minimum of nine courses.
We’re committed to the unity of the social sciences—because the fields are closely bound, Anthropology and Sociology offer joint core courses in methodology and theory.
Featured Courses
How are politics shaped by culture? Does culture determine structures of power? And what do we even mean by “politics” in the first place? What methods help us understand the practices of institutions, states, and individuals?
This course offers a rigorously structured opportunity for thinking and learning about Palestine. Centering the work of Palestinian scholars and writers, we engage diverse sources about some of the histories, lived environments, traditions, and key concepts that have shaped Palestinian identities and visions of the past and future from the early 20th century to today.
This course introduces students to Black feminist thought. We critically analyze key insights, debates, and assumptions held within Black feminist worldviews and the political horizons of Black feminist knowledge production.