USC
University of Southern California
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Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology

Applications for the doctoral program may be obtained from the Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0032.

The Ph.D. requires 60 units of course work. These include the 32 units required for the M.A. (16 units of required courses and 16 of graduate electives), 4 additional graduate units, plus a sequence of two graduate courses in an outside field. The additional required units for the Ph.D. are ANTH 790 Research (8 units) and ANTH 794ab Doctoral Dissertation (2-2 units). Before being admitted to Ph.D. candidacy, the student must fulfill the language requirement, present an expanded version of the field statements at a qualifying examination, write a dissertation prospectus and pass the qualifying examination. Having completed this work, the student will conduct fieldwork and write the doctoral dissertation.

Degree Requirements

required coursesunits
ANTH 501History and Foundations of Anthropology4
ANTH 502Contemporary Theory in Anthropology4
ANTH 562The Practice of Ethnography4
ANTH 790Research (minimum 8 units required)8
ANTH 794abDoctoral Dissertation2-2
4 anthropology graduate electives20
Completion of the program requires 60 units.

Foreign Language Requirement
A reading knowledge of a scholarly language (normally chosen from among Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish) is required before admission to candidacy. If some other field language is required for the dissertation research to be successfully completed (for example, Maya, Hebrew, Javanese, etc.), this will be communicated to the student upon submission of the field project required for admission to candidacy.