Temple University’s Anthropology MA degree program is designed for those who are seriously passionate about working hard towards furthering their anthropology education. If you’re accepted into the program, you’ll conduct exciting fieldwork and learn the skills you need to join the ranks of Temple grads performing groundbreaking anthropology work in academic and professional settings. Learn more about admissions into our graduate program and funding your education.
Graduate Programs
The newly restructured graduate programs in anthropology provide students with training that integrates the four traditional subfields of the discipline and organizes their engagement with anthropology around two thematic areas. The first, mobility and global inequality, emphasizes social processes and institutions that underlie the impact of peoples’ movement and the experiences they encounter in terms of social inequalities, resource distribution and power inequities. It is marked by the emphasis on ethnographic, linguistic, and visual data and analytical methods grounded in contemporary theory in the social sciences. The second thematic area, evolution and human environments, emphasizes the origins and development of all forms of human adaptations in the biosocial realm. It is marked by an emphasis on ecological, geographic and spatial-historical data, and quantitative analyses grounded in evolutionary theory. All students in the program complete a set of core courses, which include foundational courses in the thematic areas and history of the discipline.
Additional core courses provide professional training in ethics and grant writing in the discipline. Students complete elective courses allowing them to specialize in the literature, theory, and unique subdisciplinary perspectives most relevant to their intended career goals or dissertation research. Faculty from the subfields of prehistoric and historic archaeology, bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, visual anthropology and medical anthropology contribute to the program.
Our two-year Master of Arts program is intended for students who seek advanced training in the social sciences in preparation for a PhD program or employment outside academia. The program is structured along two thematic lines: evolution and human environments, and mobility and global inequality. A comprehensive exam is the culminating event. There is no thesis option. **Please Note - This program is not accepting applications for the 2025-2026 academic year.**
