About

Anthropology is known for its holistic approach to human questions, bridging the humanities and the social and natural sciences through its four fields of culture and society, human and non-human primate evolution, archaeology and linguistics. Anthropologists are committed to in-person research, whether engaging with other people through direct experience and interaction where they live, analyzing the fossil record and other physical evidence of evolution, assessing the legacies of past societies, or working among non-human primates in the wild. The Department of Anthropology at Hunter College embraces this holistic tradition, and pursues cutting-edge research and critical teaching linking social justice to ecology and human adaptations. 

Our faculty are leading scholars with expertise in primate evolution and ecology, social behavior and care (among other primates and in human kinship), conservation biology, paleontology, medical anthropology, human rights, class and global economic differentiation, cultural practices from music to technology, and the politics and lived experience of race, gender and sexuality. Our biological anthropology faculty maintain world-class research laboratories in genetics, endocrinology, molecular evolution, and nutrition, while our cultural anthropology, linguistics and archaeology faculty have active research projects on global health, climate change, land and indigenous rights, displacement and migration, diaspora cultures and music, race and inequality, nationalism and religion, and energy and the environment.

Through research, teaching, service, and outreach, the Department of Anthropology works to affirm the dignity of Black lives and oppose anti-Black racism and other forms of discrimination.

A Division of Anthropology was established within the Department of Sociology at Hunter College in 1942. The Department of Anthropology was created in 1963, and from this year began offering graduate courses as well as an undergraduate degree. 

Anthropology had been taught within the biology department early in the twentieth century, conceived as a science of biological differences between human groups. The discipline’s development at Hunter, away from these roots, parallels its wider history. 

In the 1930s, pioneering scholars who taught anthropology classes at Hunter, such as Cora du Bois, sought to synthesize social, psychological and developmental perspectives on human beings while promoting values of tolerance and respect for differences. 

As the department grew in the 1960s and 1970s, it became home to the journal Human Ecology and gained wide recognition for its faculty’s research on political economy and development. Significant figures in maintaining the department’s prominence during these years included Francis Conant, an anthropologist of health and development in Africa, Burton Pasternak, Susan H. Lees, the linguists Sally McLendon and Edward Bendix, and the biological anthropologists John Oates and Frederick Szalay. Professor Emeritus Daniel G. Bates remains, as of 2021, editor-in-chief of Human Ecology. 

These faculty members continued their work alongside the scholars who joined the program in the 1980s, including Louise Lennihan and Gregory Johnson. Prof. Johnson, an archaeologist of the Middle East, was the longtime chair of the Hunter Department of Anthropology and retired in 2017, while Prof. Lennihan helped to redirect anthropological research in political economy and development in more critical directions, and served as executive officer of the PhD program in anthropology at the Graduate Center from 1997 to 2008. She was succeeded in that role by Gerald Creed, another Hunter faculty member and specialist in political change and rural community in Eastern Europe. In 2018, Prof. Creed rejoined the Hunter faculty and served as chair of the department from 2018 to 2020.

Hunter’s anthropology department continues to be a center for innovative research. Its cultural and linguistic anthropologists combine close attention to cultural forms—music and ritual, technology and art, medicine and healing, cuisine and kinship—with a deep concern to understand the systems of power that shape gender and sexuality, affect economic inequality and material injustices, and that drive racism, racial disparities, populism and exclusionary belonging in the contemporary world. Its biological and archaeological anthropologists, sharing similar concerns, examine problems of biodiversity conservation, global change, and historical patterns of inequality, while approaching their questions through rigorous empirical research into evolutionary, biological and ecological factors in human societies.

• Faculty and Staff
• Research