Judith Shapiro - Education and Career

Education and Career

A native of New York City, President Shapiro was the first Barnard president educated in the New York public schools. Her mother taught Latin and was a librarian in the school system. Judith Shapiro is a magna cum laude graduate of Brandeis University in Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in New York. She began her teaching career at the University of Chicago in 1970, the first woman appointed to the Department of Anthropology, and moved to Bryn Mawr in 1975.

She has written many scholarly articles on gender differentiation, social theory and missionization, based on her field research in lowland South America, notably among the Tapirapé and Yanomami Indians of Brazil, and in the North American Great Basin. She was President of the American Ethnological Society, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behaviorial Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. In December 2002, she received the National Institute of Social Sciences’ Gold Medal Award for her contributions as a leader in higher education for women. She was elected in 2003 to membership in the prestigious American Philosophical Society, joining 728 distinguished members nationally in the oldest learned society in the United States.