In Memoriam: Ernestine Friedl, 1920-2015

Ernestine Friedl, the James B. Duke Professor Emerita of anthropology at Duke University, died on October 12 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She was 95 years old.

Professor Friedl was a native of Hungary but came to the United States at the age of 2. She was a graduate of Hunter College of the City University of New York and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.

After completing her doctorate, Professor Friedl taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Queens College of the City University of New York. She joined the faculty at Duke University in 1973. In 1980 she was appointed dean of Trinity College at Duke, the first woman to hold that position.

Dr. Friedl served as president of the American Ethnological Society. She was the author of Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962) and Women and Men – An Anthropologist’s View (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975).

The classroom building housing the departments of African & African American studies, cultural anthropology, and literature at Duke University is named in her honor.