The Department of Comparative Cultural Studies (CCS) is a focal point and concentration through which members of the university community - undergraduate and graduate students and faculty – may elect to concentrate on the Caribbean Gulf through the fields of anthropology, religion, studies of the Indian Diaspora. CCS faculty involved include:

• Ken Brown - Maya specialist, Plantation culture in Texas and Louisiana
• Elizabeth Farfán-Santos - Social justice and health care among Hispanic Houstonian; Brazilian Quilombo movement.
• Andrew J. Gordon - Dominican Republic (Fulbright Fellow); Belize, and Health Care planning; Venezuela, consultant for Pan American Health Organization
• Janis Hutchinson - Immigrant populations to Houston, Afro-American culture in Gulf States.
• Keith McNeal - Trinidad and the Afro-Caribbean Religion
• Rachel Afi Quinn - Afro-Dominican women’s identities in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
• Rebecca Storey - Maya Copan and Aztecan Tepoztlán
• Randolph Widmer - Prehistoric Florida indigenous populations and Aztecan Tepoztlán

Areas of concentration in the Caribbean Gulf among CCS faculty are many and varied, including but not limited to

• the exchanges and movements of populations (indigenous, population African Diaspora, movement of indigenous peoples, now tourists, in-migration and cultural traditions;
• the presence of economic forces in CARICOM, NAFTA, CAFTA ,the enormous tourism presence and the role remittances
• the ever-looming importance of petroleum energy, biofuels, and less invasive sources such as wind power and solar energy
• the expression of post-colonial and historic traditional popular culture through areas such as foodn literature, music, religion, and visual arts
• multiple opportunities for research from the perspectives of ethnography, archeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, as well as concerns with applied and medical anthropology.