Caroline Bledsoe
by LaRay Denzer, newsletter editor-in-chief, Program of African Studies, Northwestern University
Caroline Bledsoe, professor of anthropology and the Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies, retired from Northwestern at the end of August, capping a 37-year career on the faculty.
Bledsoe came to Northwestern from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. She focused her research and teaching on demography, kinship and family, marriage, reproduction and fertility, and gender. Her dissertation research on Kpelle culture in Liberia formed the basis of her first monograph, Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society (1980). When civil strife in Liberia made it impossible for her to continue research there, Bledsoe turned her attention to Sierra Leone, where she pursued research on child fostering. Political conflict and violence there pushed her to develop her next project in The Gambia. Her various West African projects examined cultural visions of kinship and marriage, the life course, and child fosterage, several of which were followed by corresponding studies in the US.
Throughout her career, Bledsoe has been a stalwart member of the PAS community. When John Paden resigned as PAS director in the mid-1980s, she stepped in as acting director in 1986–87 and continued as associate director in 1988–89. Her West African research interests led to a PAS lecture series on AIDS in Africa, workshops, and other events. In 1993 she co-convened the Institute on Health and Demography under the auspices of the Program on International Cooperation in Africa, which examined factors linking women’s health, fertility constraints, and population planning.
Her work in PAS and her home department culminated in her appointment as the Herskovits Professor in 1994. Her inaugural lecture was titled “African Fertility and the Dynamics of Time and Space.” In 2001, she led the PAS conference “Discovering Normality in Health and the Reproductive Body,” which investigated how the western medical and academic establishments create, remember, and forget ideas about normality. The proceedings were published in 2002 in the PAS Working Papers series.
Bledsoe’s numerous publications have garnered international recognition. She has held Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships and received grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Wenner-Gren Foundations, among others.
Bledsoe’s seminal work examines western and African views of normality and the life course. Of particular importance is her work in The Gambia, which resulted in Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2002). The book received the Amaury Talbot Prize. Bledsoe’s most recent project, “Transnational Vital Events: Birth, Law, and Migration between Africa and Europe,” considers how people allocate major life moments, particularly birth and marriage, across international boundaries and against shifting rights to work and residence.