Diane Nelson, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, died on April 27 after suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Professor Nelson was a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Stanford University. She began her fieldwork in Guatemala in 1985 exploring the impact of civil war on highland indigenous communities with a focus on the more than 100,000 people made into refugees and 200,000 people murdered in what the United Nations has called genocidal violence. Dr. Nelson served on the Duke faculty for 21 years.
Professor Nelson was the author of Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide (Duke University Press, 2015), Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2009), and A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (University of California Press, 1999).