Barbara A. Babcock (folklorist)

Barbara Ann Babcock (August 7, 1943 – February 6, 2016) was an American folklore scholar, professor of Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies, Women's Studies, and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona.

This article is about the Arizona-based cultural studies professor Barbara A. Babcock (1943-2016); for the California-based law professor born in 1938, see Barbara A. Babcock; for the American actress born in 1937, see Barbara Babcock.
Barbara A. Babcock
BornAugust 7, 1943
Danville, Pennsylvania
DiedFebruary 6, 2016
Tucson, Arizona
OccupationProfessor, folklorist
Known forcomparative cultural studies of women in the American Southwest

Early life

Babcock was from Danville, Pennsylvania, the daughter of John Reed Babcock.[1] Her father was a medical doctor affiliated with Geisinger Medical Center. She earned a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Northwestern University in 1965.[2] She completed doctoral studies at the University of Chicago in 1975,[3] with a dissertation titled "Mirrors, Masks, and Metafiction: Studies in Narrative Reflexivity".[4] In 1977-1978, she held the Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work on a post-doctoral project, "Pueblo Ritual Clowning."[5]

Career

Babcock taught at the University of Texas at Austin, before she joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1980. Her research involved Pueblo culture, women's work, and storytelling.[6][7][8][9] Books written or edited by Babcock included The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition (1986, with Guy Monthan and Doris Born Monthan),[10][11] The Reversible World: Essays on Symbolic Inversion, Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, 1880-1980 (1988, with Nancy J. Parezo), an illustrated catalog published to accompany a museum exhibit and conference of the same title,[12][13] Pueblo Mothers and Children: Essays by Elsie Clews Parsons, 1915-1924 (1991), and The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (1996, with Marta Weigle).[14] She edited special issues of journals including "Signs About Signs: The Semiotics of Self-Reference" (a special issue of Semiotica), "Inventing the Southwest: Region as Commodity" (1990, a special issue of the Journal of the Southwest),[7] and "Bodylore" (1994, a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore).[3][8]

Babcock served as president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.[3]

Personal life

Babcock married Thaddeus John Koza in 1965.[2] She died in 2016, at her home in Tucson, aged 72 years.[3]

References
  1. "Birthday Party". The Danville Morning News. 1950-08-07. p. 2. Retrieved 2020-08-12 – via Newspapers.com.
  2. "Miss Babcock and Mr. Koza Marry in PSU Chapel". The Daily Item. 1965-09-03. p. 5. Retrieved 2020-08-12 – via Newspapers.com.
  3. "In Memoriam: Barbara Babcock". UA@Work. April 1, 2016. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  4. Babcock, Barbara Anne (1998). Mirrors, masks, and metafiction : studies in narrative reflexivity. University Microfilms. OCLC 473776989.
  5. "Weatherhead Fellowship". School for Advanced Research. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  6. Babcock, Barbara A. (1993), Lavie, Smadar; Narayan, Kirin; Rosaldo, Renato (eds.), "At Home, No Womens Are Storytellers:: Ceramic Creativity and the Politics of Discourse in Cochiti Pueblo", Creativity/Anthropology, Cornell University Press, pp. 70–99, ISBN 978-0-8014-2255-3, JSTOR 10.7591/j.ctt207g6hf.7, retrieved 2020-08-12
  7. Babcock, Barbara A. (1990). "'A New Mexican Rebecca': Imaging Pueblo Women". Journal of the Southwest. 32 (4): 400–437. ISSN 0894-8410. JSTOR 40169766.
  8. Babcock, Barbara A. (1994). "Pueblo Cultural Bodies". The Journal of American Folklore. 107 (423): 40–54. doi:10.2307/541072. ISSN 0021-8715. JSTOR 541072.
  9. Babcock, Barbara A. (1987). "Taking Liberties, Writing from the Margins, and Doing It with a Difference". The Journal of American Folklore. 100 (398): 390–411. doi:10.2307/540900. ISSN 0021-8715. JSTOR 540900.
  10. Babcock, Barbara A.; Monthan, Guy; Monthan, Doris Born (1986). The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition. University of Arizona Press. ISBN 978-0-8165-0870-9.
  11. "'Pueblo Storytelling' Signing Party Set Sunday at Museum". Arizona Daily Sun. 1986-06-13. p. 8. Retrieved 2020-08-12 – via Newspapers.com.
  12. Haynes, Junella (1991). "Review of Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, 1880-1980. An Illustrated Catalogue". American Indian Quarterly. 15 (3): 403–405. doi:10.2307/1185496. ISSN 0095-182X. JSTOR 1185496.
  13. "Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and Students of the Native American Southwest". The Wenner-Gren Foundation. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  14. Givens, Douglas (1997-11-20). "The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, edited by Marta Weigle and Barbara A. Babcock. The Heard Museum, Phoenix (printed by The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, for The Heard Museum), 1996". Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. 7 (2): 48. doi:10.5334/bha.07214. ISSN 2047-6930.
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