User:Caroldelaney

Carol Lowery Delaney (born December 12, 1940 - ) author, former professor

Carol Delaney attended Simmons College 1958-1960 and was expelled for staying out afterhours set by the parietal rules, then earned an A.B. in philosophy at Boston University, 1962. After a ten year hiatus, she entered Harvard Divinity School and received an M.T.S. and went on to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, 1984.

Her anthropological fieldwork was conducted in Turkey, 1979-82, two years of which were spent in a relatively remote mountain village. She won the Galler prize for the most distinguished dissertation in the Division of the Social Sciences which was transformed into a book, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society.

After spending a year in Belgium on a Fulbright Fellowship conducting research among immigrant Turks, she was recalled to Harvard where she became Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, 1985-87, and taught several courses at the Divinity School.

In 1987 she was hired as an Assistant Professor by the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University and received tenure in 1995. One popular course, Investigating Culture, became the basis for an innovative textbook, Investigating Culture: an Experiential Introduction to Anthropology, now in its second edition.

While at Stanford she wrote Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (category scholarship) and special mention for the Victor Turner Prize of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. It was also the inspiration for an opera of the same title, which had its world premier in England, 2005.

Her latest book is Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. She writes that she had not thought much about Columbus until the fall of 1999 when she was teaching a course called "Millennial Fever" intended to observe the frenzy gripping the United States over the turn of the millennium and to study the history of apocalyptic, millenial thinking. In one of the readings, she came across a reference to Columbus's apocalyptic, millennial beliefs. Neither she nor any of her colleagues had ever heard of them. This drew her to the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University where she spent the summer of 2003 and then returned with an NEH fellowship in 2004-05. Her research was so compelling that she decided to retire from Stanford in order to work on her book about Columbus. For two years, she also taught half time in the Religious Studies Department at Brown.

In addition to numerous articles and lectures she has also had, as of this date, 32 letters published in the New York Times, and others in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Providence Journal, Harvard Magazine, and Harper's. She often told her students to try this venue to express their opinions and a number of them also had success.

Fellowships: In addition to the NEH, noted above, Carol Delaney has been awarded a number of prestigious fellowships including one at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; three Fulbright Fellowships; a research fellowship at Harvard Divinity School; Ford Foundation Initiative for Undergraduate Education, several traveling fellowships including Ford Foundation (Europe); Joseph Malone Fellowship (Iraq and United Arab Emirates); and American Schools of Oriental Research (Turkey).

In addition to the following books she has numerous articles in a variety of scholarly journals: Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 2011. Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology, Blackwell, 2003; second edition with Deborah  Kaspin, 2011. Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, Princeton, 1998; paper 2000. Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, co-edited with Sylvia Yanagisako, Routledge, 1995. The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society, Berkeley, hardover and paper 1991. It was translated into Turkish as Tohum ve Toprak, Iletisim, 2001, second printing 2009.