Department of Anthropology

Welcome to the Department of Anthropology

Welcome to the IUPUI Department of Anthropology web page. Anthropology is a broadly based discipline that focuses on a vast range of aspects of human culture and biology. We are interested in many different aspects of the human experience across time and space: our faculty research interests include museum studies, human osteology, historical archaeology, and Greek, South Pacific, and Cape Verdean cultures. The IUPUI Anthropology Department focuses on training student to apply anthropological insight to non-academic settings. This means our graduates become practicing anthropologists in such diverse settings as hospitals, state and federal agencies, zoos, museums, archaeological contracting firms, and almost any context in which an understanding of human culture is essential. Many of our students acquire graduate degrees and have been admitted to some of the most competitive graduate programs in the country.

Anthropology majors have many opportunities to develop their own research. We have a physical anthropology lab and skeletal comparative collection as well as an archaeology lab for students whose interests are in either physical anthropology or archeology. We also conduct an ethnographic field school in Greece and archaeology field schools here in Indianapolis and in Mexico. Indianapolis is home to many community organizations representing many different constituencies and many of our students conduct research and work in one of these local organizations.

For information on the 2013 IU/IUPUI Joint Field School in Archaeology at Angel Mounds, please click on the link to the following website: http://www.angelmounds.info.

Catch up on  Anthropology faculty and students have been doing at the Anthropology Department News page, including:

• Larry Zimmerman was selected as the Richard J. Frucht Memorial Lecturer by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and has been appointed to serve on the Salish Kootenai College Tribal Historic Preservation Major Advisory Committee
• Jeremy Wilson conducted the joint archaeology field school at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site in Evansville, Indiana 
• Chris Glidden directed the continuing excavations on the Boxley Cabin site in Sheridan, Indiana
• Liz Kryder-Reid won the Landscape History Essay Prize given by the Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians for her article: "‘Perennially New’: Santa Barbara and the Origins of the California Mission Garden." published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Vol. 69:3 (September), 378-405.  Jurors noted that "Kryder-Reid’s history is well-written, well structured, well-scaled, and contributes directly and powerfully to new histories and/or to revisionist of preservation practices of landscapes.  She also received the 2012 Trustees Teaching Award.
• Paul Mullins was named a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oulu, Finland, where he will be working on the project "Historical Archaeology and Consumer Society in Northern Europe, 1600-1900" and teaching in Fall, 2012.  In Fall 2011 his book "The Archaeology of Consumer Culture" was published by the University of Florida Press
• Wendy Vogt received a New Frontiers Exploratory Travel Fellowship for December 2012.

The Anthropology Department welcomes new Assistant Professor Wendy Vogt, whose academic interests include Migration, Violence, Political Economy, Transnational Feminisms, Borders & Transit Spaces, Race & Gender, Historical Anthropology, Engaged Anthropology, Mexico, and Latin America.
 

Please feel free to contact us with any questions you have about the IUPUI Department of Anthropology, and you are certainly welcome to visit us anytime.