Jean Herskovits
American historian (1935–2019)
Jean Frances Herskovits (May 20, 1935 – February 5, 2019) was an American historian and academic who was a research professor of history at the State University of New York at Purchase specializing in African (particularly Nigerian) history and politics. Herskovits taught at Brown University, Swarthmore College, City College of the City University of New York and Columbia University. She held a D.Phil. in African history from Oxford University.
Early life and education
Jean Frances Herskovits was born in Evanston, Illinois, on May 20, 1935, to anthropologists Melville J. Herskovits and Frances Shapiro Herskovits. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College in 1956, and earned her Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) from Oxford University in 1960 under professor Kenneth Kirkwood, writing her dissertation on freed slaves who returned to Africa and the Lagos Colony.
Career
Jean Herskovits taught at Brown University, Swarthmore College, The City College of New York, and Columbia University. She was a professor at the State University of New York, Purchase, since 1977. Herskovits' thesis, "A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The Sierra Leonians in Yoruba," was written on a 1958 research trip to Nigeria and published in 1965. From 1998 to 2005, she was a director of United Bank for Africa, where she also chaired the Board of Trustees of the UBA Foundation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q19958078. VIAF identifies the subject as 272184522. The Library of Congress control number is n82046089. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2019, 1956 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Herskovits” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.