Kay B. Warren, a scholar of women’s studies and anthropology professor at several Ivy League universities, passed away on April 16. She was 79 years old.
Dr. Warren began her collegiate education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology and cultural geography. She went on to complete a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton University. She was among the first doctoral students trained in anthropology at the Ivy League institution and among the university’s first cohorts of women graduate students.
After nearly a decade of teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Dr. Warren returned to Princeton in 1982 as an associate professor of anthropology and founding director of the program in women’s studies (now known as the gender and sexuality studies program). She served as the program’s director for six years and was promoted to full professor in 1988. In 1994, Dr. Warren was named chair of Princeton’s department of anthropology.
Four years later, Dr. Warren joined the Harvard University faculty as a professor of anthropology. In 2003, she was named the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she would stay for the remainder of her career. Dr. Warren directed the politics, culture, and identity program at Brown’s Watson Institute for five years and directed the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women for four years. She retired in 2017 as a professor emerita.
Throughout her career, Dr. Warren was an advocate for human rights, women’s equality, and democratic movements throughout Latin America. She conducted extensive fieldwork in Guatemala as well as the Peruvian Andes, Japan, and Columbia. Her research involved ethnographic studies of counterinsurgency wars, community responses to violence and peace processes, indigenous intellectuals, the anthropology of multi-cultural democracies, and gender and politics. Dr. Warren was the editor and author of numerous books, including her debut monograph, The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town (University of Texas Press, 1978), and her final publication, Japanese Aid and the Construction of Global Development (Routledge, 2009).