The research interests of our full-time faculty members reflect the broad mandate of anthropology as a discipline. We cover the traditional four subfields of anthropology: archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and socio-cultural anthropology; this includes strengths in forensic anthropology and the anthropology of health.
- Our common goal is to advance knowledge of who we are and how we came to be that way.
- We are all dedicated to disseminating anthropological knowledge though teaching, research, writing, and other forms of outreach.
- Our goal as a department is to train our anthropology students in the fundamentals of all of the discipline’s subfields. We aim to produce students who are curious about the world in its complexity, and who are well versed in the skills, theories, and databases of one or more of our discipline’s subfields.
Our research around the world
North America
- Health research and policy in Northern Canada (Galloway)
- Environmental archaeology and human-animal relations in Ontario (Hawkins)
- Application of archaeometric methods to understanding archaeological materials in Ontario (Hawkins)
- Application of next genome sequencing methods in Forensic Science in Canada and the United States (Novroski)
- Vitamin D status in Canada (Parra)
- Genetic risk factors for type 2 diabetes in Mexico (Parra)
- Genetic variation and demographic history in Cuba (Parra)
- Environmental archaeology and plant food processing on the Canadian Plateau (Ramsey)
- Forensic anthropology and crime scene technology in Canada (Rogers)
- Environmental archaeology of coastal British Columbia
- The toxic effects of US military burn pits (Wool)
- Injured US Soldiers and Veterans (Wool)
- Toxicity and environmental injustice (Wool)
- History of neurology (Wool)
South America
- Pharmacogenomic studies in Brazil (Parra)
Europe
- Energy and fracking in the United Kingdom (Sanders)
Africa
- Language and Muslim youth in Kenya (Hillewaert)
- Malagasy small-scale agriculturalists (Samson)
- Sleep-wake patterns in Tanzania foragers (Samson)
- Politics of knowledge and gender in Tanzania (Sanders)
- Hominin evolution in South Africa (Schroeder)
Middle East
- Political and legal anthropology in Iraq and Turkey (Bozcali)
- Smuggling networks across Turkey, Iraq, and Iran (Bozcali)
- Environmental archaeology and plant food processing in the Levant (Ramsey)
South Asia
- Language and politics in India (Cody)
- Archaeology of urban societies in South Asia (Miller)
- Ancient technology in South Asia and beyond (Miller)
- Genetics and evolution of pigmentation in South Asia (Parra)
Southeast and East Asia
- Genetics in East Asia (Parra)
- Sociolinguistics in Vietnam (Sidnell)
- Prehistoric technologies and origins of agriculture in China (Xie)
Topics
- Exploring the intersection of political and legal anthropology, political economy, transnational flows, and science and technology studies, with a focus on the modern Middle East (Bozcali)
- Signatures and citizenship in contemporary India (Cody)
- Patterns of growth and health in northern Indigenous populations (Galloway)
- Indigenous-led collaborative archaeology investigating sustainable land and resource management (Hawkins)
- Studying everyday linguistic, material, and bodily practices in relation to religious, cultural, and global identities in Eastern Africa (Hillewaert)
- The exploration of ancient pyrotechnologies in South Asia (Miller)
- The relationship between genetics and human evolution (Parra)
- How humans modify their environments with plant management strategies and the processing of plant resources (Ramsey)
- Research related to crime scene investigation (Rogers)
- The relationship between sleep and cognition within the primate order with a focus on human evolution (Samson)
- The study of how Euro-American scientists produce knowledge about climate change and energy (Sanders)
- Exploring the intersection of ecological worldviews, social justice, and faith-based environmental practice (Scharper)
- Exploring the evolutionary processes underlying morphological diversity in hominin evolution (Schroeder)
- The structures of social interaction and the coordination language, gesture and gaze in the Caribbean (Sidnell)
- The embodied after life of US warmaking among US soldiers and veterans; the links between environmental injustice and the military-industrial complex; cultural and clinical logics of disability, gender, sexuality, and race that distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy (Wool)
- The study of technological changes, urbanization, labour mobilization, and cultural transmission in ancient China (Xie)
We [anthropologists] have been the first to insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in jungles and paintings in deserts; that political order is possible without centralized power and principled justice without codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that we see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and that they look back on ours through ones of their own.
--Clifford Geertz