The Department of Comparative Human Development is an interdisciplinary department at the critical edge of thought and research in the social sciences. We believe that social life is too complex and too exciting to be left within any single discipline. Consequently, we bring together anthropologists, biologists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists and methodologists whose methods and theories cross individual social science disciplines. Faculty and students' research examines issues of central concern to socio-cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, comparative education, behavioral biology, language and thought, cultural psychology. In addressing those issues, we highlight shifting categories such as gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ability.
Comparative Human Development is the oldest genuinely interdisciplinary social science graduate program in the United States. The Department's name signals our long-standing commitment to exploring a wide range of issues across multiple levels of analysis:
Comparative: To understand is to compare. 'Comparative' means attention to likeness and difference. Work in the Department looks at how practices, ideologies, capabilities, and behaviors vary across time, between cultures, and between species.
Human: What makes us human? Research in the Department explores the socio-cultural, psychological and biological processes that humans share with, and that distinguish them from, each other and from non-human animals.
Development: This complex and vexed term highlights change over time. It raises debates about cultural values and provokes disagreement about desired states. Work in the Department critically examines understandings about development in relation to both societies and individuals, and it analyzes practices and policies that may promote or prevent it.
The Department offers programs that lead to BA and PhD degrees. Students in the Department have pursued innovative and successful careers in anthropology, biology, education, human development, psychology and sociology.
Faculty Spotlight
Professor Richland has recently joined the Department
Lindsey Richland is a developmental psychologist who joined the Department of Comparative Human Development in 2011. Dr. Richland investigates cognition, memory, and the development of higher order thinking from preschool through young adulthood. She primarily explores the development of humans' powerful ability to draw relationships and generalize between phenomena, such as through metaphor and analogy. Dr. Richland conducts lab experiments and classroom-based studies of naturally occurring mathematics and science instruction. She conducts her research both in the United States and cross-nationally. In addition to theory building, she aims to develop practice-relevant tools for improving students' educational outcomes in mathematics and science.
Dr. Richland's work has been published in diverse journals including Science, Developmental Science, the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Educational Psychologist, Cognition and Instruction, and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Her work was also covered in Scientific American. A CAREER award from the National Science Foundation as well as grants from the Office of Naval Research, the Spencer Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences have supported her research. In 2008, she was awarded a National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received her Ph.D in Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Richland directs the Learning Lab.
Upcoming Events
In The News
Professor David Orlinsky received an honorary degree from the University of Oslo.
Professor Orlinsky, an internationally recognized expert in the field of psychotherapy research, was the 5th honorary doctor conferred by the Department of Psychology since Henry A. Murray in 1969, and was in Oslo on September 1st and 2nd to receive the degree and present a public lecture at the Department of Psychology as part of the University of Oslo's 200th anniversary celebration.
Professor Jill Mateo's research featured by the UC News Office
Professor Mateo, an expert in kin recognition, teamed with a MAPSS student to study recognition in penguins at Brookfield Zoo. For the first time, they demonstrated that birds can use odors to discriminate among birds they know, and even recognize relatives they have never encountered before.
