Department of Anthropology

Main Office
Sycamore Hall, Room 119A

Mailing address:
1155 Union Circle #310409
Denton, TX 76203-5017
940-565-2290

Lisa Henry, Chair

The Department of Anthropology offers both on-campus and online graduate programs leading to the Master of Arts and the Master of Science, both with a major in applied anthropology.

In cooperation with the UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, on-campus students may also earn a dual master’s degree in anthropology and public health.

The master’s degree in applied anthropology is grounded in the theory and methods of anthropology, and is designed primarily to prepare students for employment outside academia. Students will be prepared to apply anthropological knowledge in private and public sectors, foundations, and businesses in local, regional, and international areas. Knowledge is to be applied to our most compelling social problems and to the operation and administration of agencies charged with addressing these problems. The central goal of our program in applied anthropology is to provide the knowledge necessary for its graduates to undertake informed and thoughtful action as street-level practitioners, administrators, agency-based researchers and program evaluators.

Areas of interest

While students are not required to choose a specific track in the graduate program, the department offers several areas of interest. Please view our faculty directory for more information about individual faculty members.

Business, Technology and Design Anthropology
Christina Wasson and Susan Squires specialize in this area. It includes the areas of organizational analysis and change, teams, user-centered design, marketing, communication in the workplace, human-computer interaction, consumer behavior, diversity and globalization. We work with both the private sector and the not-for-profit sector. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex offers opportunities for partnerships with a wide variety of organizations.

Crossing Borders: Migration and Identities
Jara Carrington, Alicia Re Cruz, Doug Henry, Andrew Nelson, and Mariela Nuñez-Janes represent this area. This area addresses the experiences of immigrants and refugees through an emphasis on the politics and policing of mobility across cultural and physical borders. In particular, we are interested in the relationships between migration and the formation/negotiation of identities, such as religion, gender, ethnicity, race, class, caste, nationality and sexual orientation in transnational, national, local, and global contexts.

Medical Anthropology
Lisa Henry and Doug Henry specialize in this area. Topics include public health, healthcare delivery, risk, program evaluation, and the health issues of ethnic minorities, migrants and/or refugees. Students have access to the affiliated UNT Health Science Center at Fort Worth. In addition, the DFW area provides innumerable opportunities for students interested in the health issues of ethnic minorities, migrants and/or refugees from all over the world.

Anthropology of Education
Mariela Nuñez-Janes and Alicia Re Cruz represent this area. It focuses on understanding various aspects related to the educational process. It explores the connection between culture and education in a variety of contexts paying particular attention to concerns related to teaching and learning. Both faculty members focus on the challenges of bilingual education.

Environmental and Ecological Anthropology
Karine Narahara and Jamie Johnson represent this area, which examines human relationships with their environments. This includes climate change forecasting and adaptation, political ecology, environmental justice, the cultural politics of protected spaces, extraction and conflict, as well as the environmental epistemologies foundational to how we interact with the world around us. This emphasis has applications in the realms of environmental management, urban planning, policy writing, and activist environmental organizing.

Urban Anthropology
Andrew Nelson, Mariela Nuñez-Janes, and Jamie Johnson represent this area. Urban anthropology studies social phenomena in cities with an emphasis on the relationship between spatial, cultural and political-economic structures and the everyday life of people. It has applications in the arenas of policy, planning, social and health services, education, labor and migration, technology, business, ecology and community relations.

Students take 2-3 electives in one of these areas and 2-3 electives outside of anthropology. The reason we emphasize a second discipline is that the various institutions in which applied anthropologists work all have their own forms of knowledge. Students will be better prepared for jobs if they have prior exposure to those disciplines.

Funding

Each term/semester the department is able to provide a limited number of instructional assistant positions for graduate students. If interested, the student should fill out an application and turn it in to the department before the beginning of the new term/semester. Check the department web site for the most up-to-date information.

The Department of Anthropology has a limited number of scholarships it is able to offer. To maintain eligibility for a scholarship, on-campus students must take a minimum of 9 hours, and online students must take a minimum of 6 hours.

Programs

Master’s Degree

Dual Program

Courses

Anthropology

Quicklinks

Catalog

Department of Anthropology

Areas of interest

Funding

Programs

Courses