Undergraduate Program in Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human—past, present, and future. It asks how people live, learn, create, and adapt in every part of the world. Whether you’re interested in evolution, culture, language, or the forces shaping our societies today, anthropology gives you tools to make sense of the world and your place in it.

The Department of Anthropology at Rutgers brings together diverse approaches to the study of humanity — from culture and language to evolution, ecology, and material life. Our work is organized through two broad intellectual tracks that reflect the department’s interdisciplinary reach:

CITE – Critical Interventions in Theory and Ethnography

This track encompasses Cultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Medical Anthropology. Faculty and students in CITE investigate how meaning, power, and social worlds are produced and transformed—across communities, institutions, and global processes.

Research in this area explores themes such as migration and mobility, health and care, environment and infrastructure, gender and kinship, and the politics of representation. Students combine ethnographic methods with critical theory, working across contexts that range from local communities to transnational networks.

HES – Human Evolutionary Sciences

The HES track includes Primatology, Human Behavioral Ecology, Biological Anthropology, and Archaeology.

Faculty and students in HES examine the evolutionary and ecological foundations of human and non-human primate behavior, biology, and adaptation. Research ranges from field studies of primates, fossil hominins, and living human populations to laboratory analyses of bones, artifacts, and genetic evidence. Through this work, HES research situates human life within deep evolutionary time and changing environmental conditions, connecting biology, ecology, and culture.

Together, these two tracks reflect anthropology’s strength at Rutgers—a department where the study of meaning, biology, and environment converge. Across both CITE and HES, faculty collaborate around several shared research themes that shape our collective work:

• Health — from evolutionary adaptation to global systems of care
• Migration — from ancient movements to contemporary displacement and belonging