Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule ( August 11, 1928 – February 6, 2001) was an American classical scholar and archaeologist.

Biography

She was born on August 11, 1928 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. She earned an undergraduate degree at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....

 in 1950, and earned a master's degree from Radcliffe College

Radcliffe College

Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...

 in 1954, and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr in 1956. As a Fulbright Scholar in 1950, she attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

American School of Classical Studies at Athens

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is one of 17 foreign archaeological institutes in Athens, Greece.-General information:...

. As a Catherwood Fellow three years later, she studied at Oxford University. She married the archaeologist Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III

Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III

Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III was a scholar of ancient art and curator of classical art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1957 to 1996.-Biography:...

 in 1957. Together they had two children: Blakey Vermeule

Blakey Vermeule

Emily Dickinson Blake Vermeule , commonly known as Blakey Vermeule is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind. She is a Professor of English at Stanford University.-Biography:...

, a professor of English literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, and Adrian Vermeule

Adrian Vermeule

Adrian Vermeule, who is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, has been Professor of Law at Harvard Law School since 2006 and was named John H. Watson Professor of Law in 2008. He was a Visiting Professor of Law in 2005...

, a professor at Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

.

Emily became the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray-Stone Radcliffe Professor at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1970. In 1983 Vermeule received a Litt.D. from Bates College

Bates College

Bates College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college located in Lewiston, Maine, in the United States. and was most recently ranked 21st in the nation in the 2011 US News Best Liberal Arts Colleges rankings. The college was founded in 1855 by abolitionists...

.

In 1982 the National Endowment for the Humanities

National Endowment for the Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...

 selected Vermeule for the Jefferson Lecture

Jefferson Lecture

The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities is an honorary lecture series established in 1972 by the National Endowment for the Humanities . According to the NEH, the Lecture is "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."-History of...

, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

. Her lecture was entitled "Greeks and Barbarians: The Classical Experience in the Larger World," and dealt with the relationship between the Greeks and their "less civilized" neighbors. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

 on February 6, 2001.

Legacy

Vermeule was also a published poet, whose poems appeared in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

and Poetry Magazine.

Works

• The Trojan War in Greek Art (1964)
• Greece in the Bronze Age (1964)
• The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (1972) with Martin P. Nilsson
  Martin P. Nilsson
  Martin Persson Nilsson was a Swedish philologist, mythographer, and a scholar of the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman religious systems...
  
  
• Toumba Tou Skourou. The Mound of Darkness. A Bronze Age Town on Morphou Bay in Cyprus (1974) with Florence Z. Wolsky
• Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (1979)
• Mycenaean Pictorial Vase Painting (1982) with Vassos Karageorghis

External links

• Harvard Gazette: obituary