Career
From 1943 to 1946, the Frenches served as relocation advisers and community analysts with the War Relocation Authority, monitoring conditions at relocation centers for Japanese-Americans, as part of a program to mitigate abuses.
After David French took a teaching post at his former undergraduate institution, Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, in 1947, the couple began a decades-long involvement with the Warm Springs community. While her husband's research focused on ethnobotany and language, hers focused on naming practices and ceremonialism, in a community composed of Sahaptins, Paiutes, and—the Frenches' specialization -- Wasco Chinookans. French received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1955. Her dissertation, though unpublished, is considered an important contribution to the study of ceremonialism in the region and an innovative study in the semiotic analysis of ritual.
The Frenches' fieldwork at Warm Springs often involved mentoring the inaugural fieldwork experiences of budding anthropologists and linguists (many as Reed undergraduates) such as Yvonne Hajda, Dell Hymes, Gail M. Kelly, and Michael Silverstein.
French served on the faculty of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland from 1959 to 1980, pursuing an interest in the intersection of pediatrics, gerontology, cultural anthropology, and public policy. From 1981 until her death, she was an adjunct member of Reed's anthropology department.
In the 1980s and 1990s French and Yvonne Hajda, a former student of David French's, collaborated in a long-term study of change and continuity in ceremonialism on Warm Springs, with Wenner-Gren Foundation funding. That material still awaits publication.
Read more about this topic: Kathrine S. French
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)