The Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University offers a wide range of courses covering the discipline's four major subfields:

• Sociocultural anthropology
• Linguistic anthropology
• Physical anthropology
• Archaeology of complex societies

Areas of faculty specialization include economic anthropology and development, gender studies, urban anthropology, sociolinguistics, symbolic and semiotic studies, prehistoric and historic archaeology, cognitive and psychological anthropology, computer-mediated communication, medical anthropology, religion, comparative methods, material culture and cultural patrimony, and theory and method in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology.

The Department of Anthropology at Brandeis offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology as well as a joint M.A. degree in anthropology and women's and gender studies. The department also participates in the interdisciplinary master's program in cultural production.

The department admits only a small number of students each year in order to maintain its character as a small department in which students and faculty are closely associated and to ensure as high a level of student financial support as possible. Graduate training is based on required courses in the history, theory and method of anthropology and on elective courses in the four subfields of anthropology: sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology and physical anthropology.

Students concentrate on one of three foci of anthropological inquiry:

• evolutionary processes
• comparative social institutions
• systems of meaning

Training for independent research is stressed, with particular emphasis on theoretical issues and fieldwork.