History
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the few faculty members in anthropology at the University of Iowa were part of the Department of Sociology. June Helm, who was at the University from 1960 until her death in 2004, was instrumental in establishing anthropology as a separate department at Iowa. In 1963 a joint Department of Anthropology and Sociology was formed; in 1969 the two departments separated and the first chair of anthropology was appointed. The department from the beginning included socio-cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguistic anthropologists; in 1986 the first biological anthropologist was hired. The department reached its present size in the early 1990s.
Faculty members over the years have served as presidents of the American Anthropological Association, the Society of Economic Anthropology, and the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and as editors of Medical Anthropology Quarterly and the American Ethnologist. The department’s current strengths include medical anthropology, feminist anthropology, economic anthropology, paleoanthropology, and European archaeology.
The Department of Anthropology maintains close ties with the Office of the State Archaeologist, the Museum of Natural History, International Programs, and the College of Public Health.
Global Health Studies in the Department of Anthropology
In 2025, the Global Health Studies Program (GHSP) joined the Department of Anthropology. For over 25 years, Global Health Studies at the University of Iowa has been a model of interdisciplinary education, drawing students and faculty from multiple departments and colleges into the collaborative study of real-world health that grounds our graduates in both the practical and theoretical bases of the complex factors influencing health and disease locally and around the world.
GHSP at Iowa was among the first such undergraduate academic programs nationally when it began offering the Global Health Studies Certificate in 1996. It remains distinctive by virtue of its liberal arts (rather than health professional) administrative home, and by its continued commitment to undergraduate (versus graduate or professional) education. The Global Health Studies minor was implemented in 2000, and the BA and BS in Global Health Studies were implemented in 2016. Being rooted in a broad interdisciplinary base that builds upon the humanities, social sciences and health sciences, the Global Health Studies curriculum helps students understand underlying forces—such as history, culture, gender and sexuality, economics, politics, race and ethnicity, the environment, law, and technology—which lead to health disparities worldwide.