Biographical Notes
Joel Martin Halpern
Joel Martin Halpern was born April 8, 1929, in New York City. Halpern received a B.A. in History from the University of Michigan in 1950, and in 1956 earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He started his teaching career in 1955 as a lecturer in anthropology at Columbia; he then served as assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1958 to 1963, and as associate professor of anthropology at Brandeis University from 1963 to 1965. From 1965 to 1967 Halpern was an associate at the Harvard University Russian Research Center. From 1967 until his retirement in 1992, he was first associate professor and then professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His ethnographic research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, the Canadian Government, the National Academy of Sciences, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as by the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Throughout his career, Halpern has traveled widely and conducted extensive field research. In the summer of 1950, he studied Eskimo settlements on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. In 1953-54 and during several other times throughout his career (1961-62, 1964, 1978, 1986), Halpern, and his wife traveled to and resided in various parts of the former Yugoslavia, where they studied Serbian village folklife. In the mid-1950s, the Halperns also conducted fieldwork in Laos, while visiting Thailand and Vietnam. At that time, Halpern was employed as a Field Service Officer with the Community Development Division of USOM (the American aid mission). He returned on research trips to Laos in 1959 and 1969. Other research trips took him to Sweden, the Soviet Union, Greece, Israel, India, Bulgaria, and Canada. Although he conducted research in various global locations, the majority of the primary source materials in this collection was gathered in Yugoslavia, Laos, and Canada.
Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern
Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern was born in 1931. She received her B.A. in geography-geology from Barnard College in 1953, her M.A. in linguistics, and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1979. Initially, her career focused on socio-linguistics, though she later specialized in medical anthropology. During her career, Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern has served a research associate and adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts. She has traveled and lectured in Australia, India, Pakistan, and Hungary among other areas. In 1974, she conducted fieldwork among South Slavic Canadians in Ontario under the auspices of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Her research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.