Du Bois, Cora Alice, 1903-1991

Cora Alice Du Bois, an anthropologist, was one of the first female tenured professors at Harvard. She was a prominent figure in the culture and personality movement within American anthropology, and her fieldwork was among the Wintu in California, the community of Atimelang on the island of Alor in Indonesia, and Bhubaneswar, India.

Du Bois was born October 26, 1903 in Brooklyn, New York. Her family lived in St. Quentin, France and Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Her father died when she was eighteen. Du Bois enrolled at Barnard College in the fall of 1923 and graduated in 1927 with a degree in history. In her senior year at Barnard, Du Bois took an anthropology course taught by Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict. Inheritance from her father allowed her to pursue graduate studies, beginning with a master’s degree in medieval history at Columbia. At Columbia she took a course titled Primitive Religion taught by Ruth Benedict. In 1929 Du Bois began a Ph.D. program in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and studied with Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowrie. Her first fieldwork experience was with the Wintu in northern California. An interest in psychology and anthropology led to a dissertation entitled “Girls’ Adolescence Observations in North America.”

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