Areas of regional expertise include Latin America and the Caribbean, Native America, Southeast Asia, Japan, Tibet and the Himalayas, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, and Europe. Among the topical interests of the faculty are:

• gender and sexuality
• culture and power
• modernity and consumption
• tourism and popular culture
• medical anthropology
• science and technology studies
• kinship and relatedness
• environmental anthropology
• human and political ecology
• pastoralism
• public anthropology
• nationalism and ethnic identity
• racial constructs
• post-colonialism
• history and memory

In addition, the cultural anthropology faculty share an interest in globalization, using ethnographic skills to understand the contemporaneous but countervailing forces that encourage both global homogenization and local fragmentation.