Memorial event for Professor Sir Jack Goody to be held at St John’s College

A memorial event for Professor Sir Jack Goody, who died last year, will be held at St John’s College on 2 July.

The Master and Fellows of St John’s College will host a memorial event for Professor Sir Jack Goody, Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology, 1961-2015, and Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the College. The symposium will celebrate the life and work of the distinguished anthropologist, and will take place at 3pm in the Palmerston Room, Fisher Building, on Saturday, 2 July.

Professor Sir Jack Goody, who died last July at the age of 95, had been a Fellow at St John’s since 1961. He earned an international reputation in the field of anthropology, which he taught at the College for many years.

He first came to St John’s to read English in 1938, but the outbreak of the Second World War meant that he had to cut his studies short. He served in North Africa, but was captured and spent three years in prisoner of war camps. He returned to St John’s in 1946 to complete his BA, took a Diploma in Anthropology in 1947, and received a PhD in Anthropology in 1954. He then began a long academic career in Cambridge, and during his time teaching at St John’s he held the posts of Supervisor in Archaeology and Anthropology, College Lecturer in Archaeology and Anthropology, and Director of Studies in Social and Political Studies.

Professor Goody’s research interests included West African anthropology, kinship and family, modes of communication and production, and representations and iconoclasm. He is credited with enhancing our understanding of how literacy emerges in different societies. From the 1950s onwards he published extensively; some of his most acclaimed works were Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), The Myth of the Bagre (1972), and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). He was also the recipient of many awards and honours including a Fellowship of the British Academy (1976) and of the National Academy of Sciences (2004), and in 2005 he received a knighthood for his services to social anthropology.

The programme for the memorial event can be found here. Guests are invited to a reception in the Master’s Lodge after the event, and those wishing to attend are asked to inform the Master’s Lodge via http://goo.gl/forms/iEqNTxmrq9, or by emailing s.m.ward@joh.cam.ac.uk.