Emily Vermeule

Early life and education Emily Dickinson Townsend was born on August 11, 1928, in New York City to Clinton Blake Townsend and Eleanor Mary Meneely. She was named for her grandmother, a relative of the poet Emily Dickinson. Three years later, in 1953–1954, she studied at St Anne's College, Oxford as a Catherwood Fellow. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964–1965. She delivered a presidential lecture at the 1995 annual meeting in San Diego entitled "Archaeology and Philology: The Dirt and the Word."

Vermeule excavated at many sites in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Libya, including Gordion in the early 1950s, and Kephallenia, Messenia, Coastal East Libya, Halicarnassus, and Thera-Santorini in the 1960s. She was director of the excavations at Toumba tou Skourou, Cyprus, from 1971 to 1974.

Excavation at Toumba tou Skourou Considered her most significant excavation, Vermeule was the director of an excavation project co-sponsored by the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, Harvard University, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Toumba tou Skourou, near Morphou, Cyprus, was a Late Bronze Age town that Vermeule uncovered which represented three different cultures coming together: Palestinian, Egyptian, and Minoan.

Due to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Vermeule was forced to abruptly end her excavation and leave the island. This expedition led to her publishing two books about the excavation and the artifacts found, Toumba tou Skourou: The Mound of Darkness (1974) and Toumba tou Skourou: A Bronze Age Potter's Quarter on Morphou Bay in Cyprus (1990).

Awards and honors Vermeule was awarded the Radcliffe Graduate Society Gold Medal in 1968. In 1980, she received the American Philological Association's Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit for her book Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry.

In 1982 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Vermeule for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Her lecture was entitled "Greeks and Barbarians: The Classical Experience in the Larger World," and dealt with the relationship between the Greeks and their "less civilized" neighbours. She was the first woman to hold Jane K. Sather Professorship of Classical Literature (1974-75), an endowed chair for the study of classics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Vermeule received several honorary degrees from institutions throughout the United States. In 1968, Douglass College, Rutgers University, awarded her a D.Litt.; 1970, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a D.F.A; 1970, Regis College, LL.D; 1971, Smith College, D.Litt.; 1973, Wheaton College, D.Litt.; and 1974, Trinity College, Hartford, L.H.D.

Vermeule was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

A festschrift in her honor was published in 1998: The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule.

Personal life and legacy

She married the archaeologist Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III in 1957.

Selected publications

The Trojan War in Greek Art (1964) Greece in the Bronze Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) with Martin P. Nilsson Toumba Tou Skourou. The Mound of Darkness. A Bronze Age Town on Morphou Bay in Cyprus (Boston: Harvard University–Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cyprus Expedition, 1974) with Florence Z. Wolsky Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) – Won the 1980 Philological Association's Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit Mycenaean Pictorial Vase Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) with Vassos Karageorghis