Program Description
The faculty of the Department of Anthropology reflect a range of overlapping specializations, consistent with the diversity of the discipline. The 12 full time sociocultural and linguistic anthropology faculty, along with additional affiliated anthropologists in other departments, are involved in research in Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Oceania, and North America. These regional strengths of the department are complemented by a number of interdisciplinary programs and centers on the UIUC campus, which provide a wealth of resources for faculty and for our students—from language training, to speaker series, to financial support for preliminary research and language study abroad.
Program Themes in Faculty Research and Teaching
Many of the issues in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology that we pursue can be organized under a set of thematic clusters. While the following list does not exhaust our expertise or our sense of the scope of the discipline, we consider these to be among the most vital ventures in contemporary anthropology, and identify these as areas of particular intellectual breadth and depth that distinguish Anthropology at UIUC from other programs in the US and internationally. Students interested in pursuing research questions organized around these issues will find a number of faculty mentors and student colleagues working on comparable themes. These converging interests rarely result in absolute intellectual agreement; we ask this neither of our colleagues nor of our students. We find it is the depth of these overlapping intellectual concerns, and the lively debate they spark, that make the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a productive and challenging place for anthropological research and training.
Body, gender, and sexuality
A great number of our faculty share an explicit research interest in the body as an ethnographic site, as a prime locus of culture, as a resource for social action, and as a focal point for historical processes. We come to the body through a variety of research questions and intellectual trajectories, from a concern with the inheritance of Cartesian dualisms, to a focus on locality and situated practice, to an engagement with queer theory, to the pasts, presents, and futures of feminist anthropology, to a focus on dance and human movement, to an examination of selfhood, to research into cognition and agency.
Ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationalism
Our work as a faculty includes research on processes of ethnic and national identity construction, research on transnational populations (migrant and diasporic communities), and research on transnational social phenomena (from missionaries to global capital).
Race and racialization
Our faculty considers race as a pivotal component of their research programs. Race is no longer accepted by anthropologists as a biologically determined feature but rather one that is socially created, imposed and contested. Race is approached through faculty research on the roles played by the state in the continuing production, imposition and performance of racialized identities as well as the construction of racialized counter-narratives by peoples in various spaces. It is also approached through the construction of racial identities and categories through discourse.
Work, class, and culture
Transnational and global economic developments have renewed a long standing interest within anthropology in the organization of work and its articulation to social reproduction, cultural practices, and local and national politics.Our faculty has produced work that has addressed these issues on a variety of levels.
History, memory, and anthropology
The fuzzy and fertile boundaries between history and anthropology, between past and present, and between memory and experience, are indispensable reference points and constant resources for innovation for anthropology. Our work as a faculty spans historical anthropological studies of colonial situations, missionary encounters, and the anthropology of modernity, close ethnographic examinations of memory practices, along with efforts to address the intellectual and practical history of our own discipline.
Language, culture, and communication
Our faculty expertise in linguistic anthropology engages research on languages and language use in a rich variety of sociocultural contexts, with a shared commitment to understanding discourse as semiotic processes constitutive of social life. Our work as a faculty spans research on political and human rights discourses and social justice discourse; signed languages and co-expressive talk/gesture; language endangerment and revitalization; language, gender and sexuality; language and identity; communication and digital media, discourses of race and racisms, diaspora construction; narrative and migration; comedy and other forms of humor and language in education contexts. Our courses include training in a broad range of methods in linguistic anthropology applicable to these diverse research topics.
Religion, belief, and modernity
A number of our research and teaching interests converge around the imbricated themes of religion and modernity: as analytic frames for examining cultural difference and its negotiation through history, as key diacritics of our contemporary moment, and as questions that cut across a long disciplinary genealogy. This nexus is an especially productive one for anthropology today as the perpetuation and proliferation of religious identities and practices, often in complex relation with the phenomena of globalization, compel new understandings of culture and new approaches to ethnography, including in highly contested zones. As a faculty, we address these issues through a wide range of cases and a mix of particularist and comparative perspectives.
Program Regional Strengths of Faculty Research and Teaching
Image courtesy of UI Public Affairs: Seay-Knoblauch.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Regionally, UIUC has a strong focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, with the research of Rosas focused on Mexico and the US-Mexican border area (Nogales, Sonora), Moodie on emergent subjectivities in the post-conflict transitions in Central America (particularly El Salvador), and more recently in Cuba, Orta on Aymara communities and foreign missionaries in highland Bolivia, and Dominguez on the French, English, and Spanish-Speaking Caribbean. (See also the archeological work of Silverman in Peru as well Lucero’s archaeological analysis of Mayan political systems and water management in Belize.)
North America
The department also boasts a number of faculty engaged in research with North American communities, including Davis' and Farnell's work with Native North Americans, Desmond’s work on culture and feminist theory, popular culture, and media and live performance in the U.S. and beyond, on the transnational study of the U.S. and on human-animal relations, Rosas’s work in the Midwest and on the Borderlands, Dominguez’s work in Louisiana and on transnational U.S. studies. In addition, Calhoun's research focuses on African American communities in the U.S., while Harrison's and Smalls' research focuses on the African diaspora as well as transnational studies. (See also the archeological work of Pauketat and Fennell). Affiliated faculty in other departments offer additional anthropological expertise in regional foci such as Latino/a Studies and Asian American Studies.
Other Regions of Focus
Another notable area of research strength is both the anthropology of Europe, reflected in the research of Greenberg in Post-Soviet Europe, and Dominguez’s work in the Middle East. In East Asia, Martin conducts research on China.
Graduate Studies Program Contact Information
We invite you to contact the Graduate Studies Program Coordinator, Director, and affiliated faculty and staff for more information on Sociocultural & Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Students interested in applying for admission to our graduate program can also consult our online graduate admissions information.
Dr. Jessica R. Greenberg, Director of Graduate Studies Program
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
109 Davenport Hall (MC‐148)
607 Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217)-300-0410
Email: rgreenb@illinois.edu
Ms. Joyce Dowell, Graduate Studies Program Coordinator
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
109F Davenport Hall (MC‐148)
607 Mathews Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217)-300-9167
Email: joyce14@illinois.edu