Barbara Tedlock to Head UB Anthropology Department

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D., of East Aurora, professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo, has been named chair of the Department of Anthropology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

Tedlock is a nationally distinguished specialist in psychological, symbolic and cognitive anthropology, the anthropology of art and aesthetics, and ethnomedicine in the American Southwest and Mesoamerica.

The immediate past editor of American Anthropologist, a journal of the American Anthropological Association, she is a widely published author of many abstracts and journal articles, and magazine and newspaper pieces. She also has published three books, "Time and the Highland Mayan," "Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations" and "The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Zuni Indian Encounters."

She and her husband, ethnopoeticist Dennis Tedlock, McNulty Professor of English at UB, edited the scholarly anthology "Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy," and she is at work on a book titled, "Women as Shamans: The Hidden Tradition."

Tedlock's field research has taken her among the Zuni Indians of New Mexico; the Quiché Mayan Indians of Guatemala; the Iwo, Ife, Oshogbo and Ibadan peoples of Nigeria, and to Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Belize. Her book reviews and contributions to anthologies and reference books are prodigious and she is a popular lecturer at universities and conferences here and abroad and before such bodies as the National Academy of Sciences.

Tedlock has received many of the most notable fellowships and grants in her field.

A cum laude graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in rhetoric, she earned a master's degree with distinction in anthropology and ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and a doctorate in anthropology from SUNY Albany. She also holds a certification in painting from the Art Student's League of New York.

She taught at Tufts University, Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of British Columbia before joining the UB faculty in 1987.