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Anthropology

UC Irvine

About

The Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine is at the forefront of innovation in anthropological research. The Department focuses on social and cultural anthropology, with a strong emphasis on understanding emergent processes and systems at a number of scales, including the local, national and transnational level. The Department fosters a critical empiricism that employs a range of ethnographic, historical, and quantitative methods to address questions of subjectivity, political economy, and social inequality. The department has become recognized as one of the top anthropology programs for graduate work in the United States. It is the second largest sociocultural program in the University of California system and among the twelve largest nationally. Between 2000 and 2006, the department ranked first in placing research articles in the top three academic journals in anthropology. In 2006, the Center for a Public Anthropology ranked the department eighth nationally in disseminating its research to a broader audience. Since 1998, the department has received continuous graduate student and faculty research funding from the National Science Foundation and other extramural agencies.