Rice University Anthropology

Rice University Anthropology Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Undergraduate and PhD. Observing the complexity of the living. Visit our website.

Transformative social theory and methodological innovation.

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight📚 ANTH 341/541 - Museums & Heritage: Exhibiting Art, Exhibiting Culture🗓️ Wednesdays, 2:00 p...
08/24/2026

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight

📚 ANTH 341/541 - Museums & Heritage: Exhibiting Art, Exhibiting Culture
🗓️ Wednesdays, 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
✒️ Dr. Mary Prendergast & Dr. Franziska Regier

A wide-ranging introduction to museum studies with a particular focus on the collection and exhibition of cultural heritage materials. We will examine how heritage objects are displayed and represented in museums of art, natural history, and heritage. Topics include looking and ethics of collecting, policies of display, changing roles for museums; exhibition design and curatorial practice.

One of our undergraduate students, Marcel González, is among the first students admitted to the inaugural class of Rice'...
08/22/2026

One of our undergraduate students, Marcel González, is among the first students admitted to the inaugural class of Rice's new orchestral conducting program at the Shepherd School of Music.

“[Anthropology and music] both get at trying to understand and recreate the human experience. They’re both very empathetic arts and they’re both very context dependent in that you cannot execute music without understanding the cultural, historical, sociopolitical atmosphere in which it was written,” González said. “Because all art is reacting to something that is happening in the world.”

🔗 Read the full story here: https://www.ricethresher.org/article/first-students-accepted-to-rices-conducting-major-20260422

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight📚 ANTH 319 - Commodities and Consumption🗓️ Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00 pm - 3:45 pm✒️ Dr. K...
08/21/2026

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight

📚 ANTH 319 - Commodities and Consumption
🗓️ Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00 pm - 3:45 pm
✒️ Dr. Khadene Harris

In a world of rapidly changing technologies, consumers and their commodities are now central to economic growth in most parts of the world. Consumer spending remains resilient, accounting for the bulk of economic activity in the world’s largest economies. Where do the resources come from to sustain such growth, and for whom? What are the conditions that facilitated this current social, political economic climate? This course is an anthropological approach to the study of consumption and the processes that entangle people and objects together on a global scale. Throughout the course we will examine how consumption practices shape the modern world by emphasizing its impact on individual behaviors, the environment, the economy and public policy. This class will address a wide variety of processes involved in the creation, exchange and, consumption of commodities in a global historical context. Special attention will be paid to labor practices and social identities that are intricately tied to the way human consume and the material objects they acquire.

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight📚 ANTH 334/534 - Black Feminist Science Studies🗓️ Wednesdays, 1:00 pm - 3:35 pm✒️ Dr. Victor...
08/20/2026

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight

📚 ANTH 334/534 - Black Feminist Science Studies
🗓️ Wednesdays, 1:00 pm - 3:35 pm
✒️ Dr. Victoria M. Massie

This class introduces students to key concepts and theories in science & technology studies through Black feminist theory. How can we better understand scientific "objectivity" through an intersectional framework that considers race, gender, sexuality, and disability? What can critical methods of speculation teach us about what it means to be human? How can Black feminist theory help us build a more just world with science and technology against oppressive forces?

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight📚 ANTH 306 - Illness Narratives: Rewriting Health Inequalities🗓️ Mondays & Wednesdays, 4:00 ...
08/20/2026

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight

📚 ANTH 306 - Illness Narratives: Rewriting Health Inequalities
🗓️ Mondays & Wednesdays, 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm
✒️ Dr. Victoria M. Massie

This course will examine how narratives become a powerful tool for evaluating the social, political, economic, historical, and environmental conditions that shape our understanding of illness. By focusing on the gap between biomedical diagnosis and lived experience, the course will explore how larger social meanings (from colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, and class) become embodied by patients, and the intimate and structural dynamics that shape the possibilities of care. However, by drawing on different narrative forms - from memoir, fiction writing, film, and poetry, in addition to ethnography - the course will enable students to experiment with narrative forms to reass whether and how the body becomes the source of sickness. By considering the relationship between narrative form and the metaphors of illness it enables, students will develop their own illness narrative projects to reimagine and re-write our understanding of health inequalities today.

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight📚 ANTH 350 - Bad Language and Semiotic Crimes🗓️ Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9:25am - 10:40am✒️ Dr....
08/19/2026

🍂 Fall 2026 Course Spotlight

📚 ANTH 350 - Bad Language and Semiotic Crimes
🗓️ Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9:25am - 10:40am
✒️ Dr. Ilana Gershon

How is it possible that certain strings of sounds, uttered in just the right social context, have the power to offend, hurt feelings, ruin careers, be considered crimes, and even spark wars? In this class, we investigate a range of speech types —curses, oaths, insults, gossip, argument, taboo words, obscenities, blasphemy, slang—and the essential roles they play in our lives. At the same time, we develop a cross-cultural perspective by comparing our own notions of what counts as bad language with ways of speaking that other cultural groups consider rude, vulgar, and even dangerous.

Congratulations to PhD candidate Sylvia Wemanya, who has been awarded a Leakey Foundation Spring 2026 Research Grant and...
08/18/2026

Congratulations to PhD candidate Sylvia Wemanya, who has been awarded a Leakey Foundation Spring 2026 Research Grant and the 2026 Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research Grant.

Wemanya’s research project, “Kansyore Foodways: A Social Archeology Study of Fisher-Foragers in the Victoria Basin During the Holocene,” will focus on her fieldwork in western Kenya, laboratory work in Nairobi and the US.

Wemanya is one of 32 recipients of the Leaky Foundations Spring 2026 research grants. The recipients were chosen from a pool of 151 applicants through a rigorous peer review process. Sixteen of this cycle’s grantees, including Wemanya, are PhD candidates.

The 2026 Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research Grants are supported by a benefaction from the late Stanford Ascherman, MD, of San Francisco, which came to the American Philosophical Society through the Stanford Ascherman/Baruch Blumberg Fund for Basic Science.

Check out our graduate student Alejandra Osejo's research in Rice Magazine 🦛For decades after Pablo Escobar's death, the...
08/13/2026

Check out our graduate student Alejandra Osejo's research in Rice Magazine 🦛

For decades after Pablo Escobar's death, the hippos he once kept at Hacienda Nápoles have thrived in Colombia's Magdalena River. Now Alejandra's asking what to do about them, and who gets to decide.

“This is not only an ecological problem,” says Alejandra. “It is social, historical and ethical.”

She combines ethnography with acoustic research, listening to how sound moves through the river to understand what's changed as these massive, unexpected animals settled in.

Read the full story here: https://magazine.rice.edu/spring-2026/colombias-unexpected-inheritance

🎉 Congratulations!Rising junior Lillian Alexander received the Charles Garside Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Summe...
08/03/2026

🎉 Congratulations!

Rising junior Lillian Alexander received the Charles Garside Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Summer Travel Grant this year, allowing her to attend a field school just outside of Rome, Italy.

As a student on the Gabii Project, Lillian spent five weeks this summer learning open trench excavation techniques, familiarizing herself with Roman ceramics and methods for sorting and drawing them, practicing several environmental archaeology techniques, and building connections in the field of classical archaeology.

Beyond the excavation site, she explored many Roman ruins and museums, enriching her excavation experience and deepening her understanding of what she was studying.

Congratulations, Lillian, on this incredible achievement!

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