Ruth Behar
Ruth Behar (born 1956 in Havana, Cuba) is a Jewish Cuban American anthropologist, poet, and writer who teaches at the University of Michigan.[1][2][3]
After receiving her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1977, she studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University. Her dissertation (1983), based on her first fieldwork in northern Spain, became the basis for her first book.[4] She is a noted feminist, and her personal life experiences as a Jewish Cuban-American woman are frequently an important part of her writing. Her second book, Translated Woman (1993), was based on ten years of fieldwork in a rural town in Mexico. Her controversial book The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart examines the role that the personal can play in ethnographic writing. Since 1991 her research and writing have largely focused on her native country, Cuba, which she left at the age of four. Her research on the dwindling yet vibrant Jewish community in Cuba is the focus of her film Adio Kerida (2002), which featured camerawork and editing by her son Gabriel Frye-Behar. Jewish Cuba is also the topic of her latest book, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (2007).
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[edit] Awards
In 1988, she became the first Latin woman to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship "genius grant."
[edit] Selected bibliography
[edit] Books
- The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte (1986)
- Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (1993; second edition, Beacon Press, 2003 ISBN 9780807046470)
- Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba, editor, University of Michigan Press, 1995, ISBN 9780472066117
- Women Writing Culture Editors Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon, University of California Press, 1995, ISBN 9780520202085
- The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, Beacon Press, 1996, ISBN 9780807046319
- An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, Rutgers University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780813541891
- The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World, Editors Ruth Behar, Lucía M. Suárez, Macmillan, 2008, ISBN 9780230604773
[edit] Film
- Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love): A Cuban-American Woman's Search for Sephardic Memories (2002)
[edit] References
- ^ Women's Studies
- ^ Ruth Behar Michigan Writers Collection
- ^ A Public Lecture by Ruth Behar
- ^ Writers of the Caribbean
[edit] External links
- 1956 births
- Living people
- American anthropologists
- American anthropology writers
- Anthropology educators
- Cuban anthropologists
- Women anthropologists
- Cultural anthropologists
- Latin Americanists
- MacArthur Fellows
- Wesleyan University alumni
- Princeton University alumni
- University of Michigan faculty
- Cuban Jews
- American Jews
- American writers of Cuban descent
