Mellink, Machteld J. (Machteld Johanna)

Machteld Johanna Mellink, celebrated archaeologist and professor of archaeology at Bryn Mawr College from 1949 to 1988, was born in Amsterdam, Holland in 1917. She received her BA in 1938 and MA in 1941 from the University of Amsterdam, and her PhD from the University of Utrecht in 1943.

During World War II, Mellink actively worked for the Dutch resistance movement, “forging documents to save lives, risking her own,” (Özgen, p. 2). After the war, she moved to the United States and became Resident Scholar in Classical Archaeology and Marion Reilly Fellow of the International Federation of University Women at Bryn Mawr College in 1946-1947. During the summer of 1947, Mellink worked at the University of Chicago under a Ryerson Grant. In 1947, she joined the excavation directed by Hetty Goldman, a 1903 Bryn Mawr graduate, at Tarsus in Cilicia (Turkey), in which she participated until 1949. “While in Tarsus, she received the invitation to join the faculty of Bryn Mawr College,” (Özgen, p. 2) thus starting her illustrious teaching career which continued until 1988. She served as chairman of the Archaeology Department from 1955 to 1983. Through her initiatives, the program expanded to include Near Eastern Archaeology in 1959, and sponsored excavations in Turkey, Italy and Greece. In 1972, she received the Leslie Clark Chair in the Humanities and, in 1975 she earned Bryn Mawr’s Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. She served as Acting Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science in the academic year 1979-1980. Mellink retired from teaching in 1988, but remained Professor Emerita in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology until shortly before her passing in 2006.

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