Singer, Milton B.

Milton Borah Singer was born to Julius Singer and Esther Greenberg in Poland on July 5, 1912. He emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in Detroit in 1920, and was naturalized in 1921.

Singer received a B.A. in Psychology in 1934 and an M.A. in Philosophy in 1936, both from the University of Texas at Austin. His M.A. thesis, “George Herbert Mead’s Social-Behavioristic Theory of Mind,” prefigured his move to the University of Chicago, where he completed a dissertation "On Formal Method in Mathematical Logic," under the supervision of Rudolf Carnap, in 1940.

Singer joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1941 as an instructor in the Social Sciences in the College. He was named Professor in 1950, and Paul Klapper Professor in the Social Sciences in 1952, and served as chair of the Social Science staff from 1947 until 1952. In 1954, he was also named Professor of Anthropology. During these years, Singer collaborated on the development and teaching of a three-year undergraduate program in the Social Sciences.

In 1951, Singer became associate director of a project on the comparison of cultures and civilizations, directed by Robert Redfield, and funded by the Ford Foundation. He traveled to Europe in 1952, to attend conference and interview scholars engaged in cross-cultural research. Following Redfield's death in 1958, Singer became director of Comparison of Cultures project, holding the position until the close of the project in 1961.

Singer's role in the Comparison of Cultures project launched his career as a South Asianist. He made field research trips to India in 1954-1955, 1960-1961 and 1964, forging contacts with Indian scholars that would remain strong throughout his career. His research centered on the city of Madras and on the fate of the Sanskritic Hindu tradition in a modern urban center. In 1955, Singer became executive secretary of the University of Chicago's newly-formed Committee on South Asian Studies (COSAS). He served as COSAS director from 1967 until 1970. From 1959 to 1963, he co-directed the South Asian Language and Area Center (SALAC). Outside the University, Singer served on the Board of Directors of the Association for South Asian Studies, 1959-1963, and as Vice President of the American Institute of Indian Studies, 1961-1964.

Singer was deeply involved in the University's undergraduate program in non-Western civilizations, an outgrowth of both COSAS and the Redfield-Ford Foundation project. He chaired the course "Introduction the Civilization of India" from 1956 to 1959, and a faculty-student Honors seminar on comparative civilizations from 1962 to 1965, and led the Civilization Studies Program in the New Collegiate Division from 1966 to 1971.

From 1970 to 1979, Singer taught a Workshop on American Culture, applying Redfield's civilizational studies techniques to his own culture. At the same time, he conducted field research in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the subject of W. Lloyd Warner's pioneering "Yankee City" studies of American culture. Singer's research in Newburyport both support his teaching in the American Culture Workshop, and allowed him to complete comparative studies of modernization and cultural traditions in the United States and India.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Singer became increasingly engaged in the study of the historical roots of anthropological theories of cultural symbolism, and the development of a semiotic anthropology. Much of his writing during this period drew on his field research in Newburyport and India, and even on his graduate studies in logic and philosophy. In 1979, Singer became Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. In the 1980s, he served as a consultant to the Center for Psychosocial Studies, where he participated in a series of interdisciplinary colloquia on "Nuclear Policy, Culture and History."

Singer served as a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico in 1949, at the University of California, Berkeley in 1956, at the University of Hawaii in 1967, and at the University of California, San Diego in 1971. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1957 and 1958, a distinguished lecturer for the American Anthropological Association in 1978, and a Humanities Fellow for the Rockefeller Foundation from 1978 to 1979. Singer died in 1994 in Chicago, and was survived by his wife, Helen (Goldbaum).

From the guide to the Singer, Milton. Papers, 1925-1999, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)