Comparative Cultural Studies
News and Events
Dr. Nicholas De Genova has been appointed to chair a Special Committee on Race and Social Justice in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
CCS Faculty engage the protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd.
CCS Researchers Engage the COVID-19 Pandemic
Congratulations! Dr. Elizabeth Farfán-Santos and Dr. Luca Oliva have both been awarded the 2020 Ross M. Lence Award for Teaching Excellence
Congratulations! Dr. Luca Oliva has been promoted to Instructional Associate Professor.
CCS Awarded $45,000 in Scholarships during 2019-20
CCS is proud to congratulate Dr. Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, who has been awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor, effective September 1, 2019
The undergraduate Anthropology program at the University of Houston ranked #15 nationally on the 2020 Best Colleges list, based on the median early-career salary data of over 5 million graduates from the U.S. Department of Education's resource, College Scorecard.
CCS has been awarded a grant of $20,000 through the Provost’s Multicultural Student Success Initiative to support the department’s seminar series on “The Politics of Difference”
Dr. Keith McNeal has been awarded a Cougar Initiative to Engage (CITE) grant of $8,650 to support the Friends of Haiti Learning Abroad trip to Trinidad & Tobago during the summer of 2020.
Dr. Rachel Quinn has been awarded a CLASS Research Progress Grant to continue archival research for her new book project Good Women Die: The Mixed Race Transnationalism of Philippa Duke Schuyler (1931-1967).
Dr. Keith McNeal has been awarded a Provost’s “50-in-5” Award to support the completion of a new book project on queer sexualities in Trinidad and Tobago
About Comparative and Cultural Studies at UH
The Department of Comparative Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary department offering degree programs in Anthropology (BA, BS, MA) Liberal Studies (BA, BS), Religious Studies (BA) as well as undergraduate minors in Anthropology and Religious Studies. Collaboration among these programs enhances the strengths of each, and encourages cross-cultural learning and understanding.
Students in these programs explore the historical production of cultures and the ways in which cultural constructs affect the political, social, and aesthetic relationships that shape human communities. By creating a shared space for interdisciplinary scholarly debate and student learning, the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies enhances the comparative cross-cultural opportunities inherent in its constituent disciplines.
CCS provides students with the foundation for lifelong learning and the intellectual tools for a wide range of careers in education, research, media and communications, business, government and policy-making, and the professions.
Goals of Comparative Cultural Studies
- to compare cultures from diverse disciplinary perspectives;
- to explore the universals of human experience, as well as practices and belief systems unique to particular cultures;
- to inspire, promote, and develop cultural understanding and visual literacy through the comparative study of distinct belief systems and symbolic and performative traditions;
- to provide students with the intellectual tools and interdisciplinary vocabularies to work in the complex networks that define cultural production worldwide;
- to provide the skills and knowledge to understand and work in cross-cultural and global contexts
Our students gain the comparative cultural knowledge and cross-cultural skills to become effective thinkers and culturally sensitive leaders in the global workplace and in local communities.
