Martha Warren Beckwith
American folklorist and ethnographer
Martha Warren Beckwith (January 19, 1871 – January 28, 1959) was an American folklorist and ethnographer who was the first chair in folklore at any university or college in the U.S.
Early life and education
Beckwith was born in Wellesley Heights, Massachusetts, to George Ely and Harriet Winslow (née Goodale) Beckwith, both schoolteachers, before the family moved to Maui, Hawaii, where they had relatives descended from early missionaries. There, Beckwith made friends with many locals including members of the wealthy Alexander family who later sponsored her folklore work, and she developed an early interest in Hawaiian folk dancing.
Beckwith graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1893 and returned to Hawaii, working as a teacher in Honolulu. She moved to Chicago in 1896 and began teaching English and Anthropology at the University of Chicago before taking a position as an English instructor at Elmira College the following year. After her father's death in 1898, Beckwith studied various languages, including Old English, French, and German, at Cambridge University and the University of Halle. She returned to the States and taught English at her alma mater.
Her formal education in anthropology did not begin till the 1900s, as her interests in Hawaiian folk customs and literature felt out of place in the English academic curriculum. In 1906, Beckwith obtained a Master of Arts degree in anthropology after studying under Franz Boas at Columbia University and completing a thesis on Hopi and Kwatiutl traditional dances. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from the same institution in 1918.
Academic career
In 1909, Beckwith first joined the faculty at Vassar College as an instructor in the English Department, recommended by William Witherle Lawrence.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martha Warren Beckwith” 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.