The Department of Anthropology supports three streams: Anthropological Archaeology, Socio-cultural Anthropology, and Museum and Media Anthropology. For more information on individual faculty members, please click on their names.
Anthropological Archaeology
Michael Blake. Emergence of social and political complexity, origins and spread of agriculture--especially maize; Mesoamerica (Early Formative and Postclassic Chiapas, Mexico), North America (Coast Salish peoples of British Columbia).
Brian Chisholm. Director, Laboratory of Archaeology. Archaeology and biological anthropology, prehistoric subsistence, archaeological science, bio-archaeology, paleo- anthropology, Pacific Northwest, Japan, S.E. and E. Asia.
Zhichun Jing. Canada Research Chair in Pacific-Asia Archaeology. Archaeology of early China; geoarchaeology; human impact on ancient environments; archaic states and early complex societies; systematic regional survey and analysis; quantitative analysis; environmental archaeology; provenance of archaic jades and ceramics; archaeometry.
Andrew Martindale. Northwest Coast British Columbia, settlement patterns, economics, social organizations. Archaeology and indigenous oral records. Colonialism and culture contact: European-Indigenous interactions, historical archeology, political economy.
David Pokotylo. Archaeological methods and theory; archaeology of western North America (Plateau and subarctic); cultural resource management; public archaeology; quantitative techniques; lithic technology; ethno-archaeology; paleolithic in East Africa.
Michael Richards. Archaeological science, bioarchaeology, isotope geochemistry, geochronology, nutrition. European prehistory, origins of agriculture, dietary adaptations and changes.
Susan Rowley. Public archaeology, Arctic archaeology, oral history, ethnohistory, material culture.
Darlene Weston. Human Osteology, Palaeopathology, Infectious disease, Stress indicators, Bone Biology, Cultural modification of the human skeleton, Skeletal radiography, SEM-BSE analysis of human bone and funerary archaeology.
Socio-Cultural Anthropology
John Barker. Department Head. Religion: missionaries and Indigenous Christianity; art; post-colonial studies; globalization; Melanesia; Northwest Coast.
Carole Blackburn. Legal and political anthropology, race and colonization, human rights, indigenous rights and sovereignty, First Nations and the Canadian state, injury, trauma and reconciliation.
Alexia Bloch. Migration and transnationalism; gender; Indigenous identity politics and movements; visual anthropology; socialist cultures and project of modernity; Russian culture and society; peoples of Siberia.
Millie Creighton.Sociocultural Anthropology, Japan, Japanese descent communities (Nikkei or Nikkeijin), Korea, Inter-Asian Relations, Identity, Consumerism, Popular and Mass Culture, Gender, Minorities, Work and Leisure.
Gaston Gordillo. Anthropology and history; place and space; practice theory; social memory and commemoration; political economy and cultural production; fetishism; state violence; hegemony and ethnic politics; Latin America, Argentina: Indigenous groups and criollos of the Gran Chaco.
Vinay Kamat. Medical anthropology; global health; Tanzania: childhood malaria; India: outsourcing of clinical drug trials.
Jennifer Kramer. First Nations and Northwest Coast; visual and performative culture; art markets; national identity production; representation; repatriation; cultural property; Aboriginal cultural tourism; Indigenous pedagogies; collaborative and critical museology.
William McKellin. Medical anthropology: impact of genetic testing on families and clinicians; disability; qualitative health research. Sociolinguistics: cultural and cognitive models; interpretation of metaphors.
Charles Menzies. Director, Ethnographic Film Unit. Ethnology and ethnography of resource use and social conflict; ecological anthropology; maritime anthropology; First Nations studies; anthropology of work, inequality and global processes; ethnographic film. Northern British Columbia; coastal Brittany; coastal Ireland; North Atlantic rim.
Bruce Miller. Ethnology, ethnohistory of the Northwest Coast; political anthropology; anthropology of law; state-Indigenous relations.
Patrick Moore. Graduate Advisor. First Nations languages documentation and revitalization; literacy and orality; collaborative community research on First Nations cultures and histories; anthropology of media; Athabaskan languages and cultures.
Shaylih Muehlmann. Environmental politics; linguistic anthropology; drug trafficking; indigeneity; water scarcity; the anthropology of the awkward; US-Mexico borderlands; Mexico.
Felice Wyndham. Ecological anthropology and human ecosystems; environmental education; First Nations resource management; Indigenous ecological knowledge; historical ecology; ethnobiology; Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico.
Museum and Media Anthropology
Jennifer Kramer. Museum Anthropology. First Nations and Northwest Coast; visual and performative culture; art markets; national identity production; representation; repatriation; cultural property; Aboriginal cultural tourism; Indigenous pedagogies; collaborative and critical museology.
Charles Menzies. Director, Ethnographic Film Unit at UBC. Ethnology and ethnography of resource use and social conflict; ecological anthropology; maritime anthropology; First Nations studies; anthropology of work, inequality and global processes. Northern British Columbia; coastal Brittany; coastal Ireland; North Atlantic rim.
<//a>Critical museology and curatorial practice; the global politics of tangible and intangible cultural heritages; the production of space; technologies of memory and place; the history of museums and museum anthropology, with special reference to the material, visual and performative cultures of Asia and the Pacific Northwest.Nicky Levell.
Patrick Moore. Anthropology of media. First Nations languages documentation and revitalization; literacy and orality; collaborative community research on First Nations cultures and histories; Athabaskan languages and cultures.
Susan Rowley. Museum anthropology; Public archaeology, Arctic archaeology, oral history, ethnohistory, material culture.
Anthony Shelton. Director, Museum of Anthropology. Theoretical foundations of the anthropology of art and aesthetics; critical museology; Mexican visual culture; comparative ethnography of the Sierra Madre Occidental, Mexico, with special reference to the Huichol; history of anthropological theory and cultural criticism.