Anthropology

Kay B. Warren, Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Brown University, died on April 17, 2026. She received her BA at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and her MA and PhD in 1974 at Princeton. She joined the faculty first at Mount Holyoke and then at Princeton in 1982, where she was the founding director of Women’s Studies. She served as chair of anthropology at Princeton from 1984-1988, before joining the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Anthropology in 1998. Warren moved to Brown in 2003, jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and the Watson Institute of International Studies. She also served as the director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women from 2010 to 2014. She retired from Brown in 2017.

Warren was a pioneer and an advocate for human rights, women’s equality, and nascent democratic movements throughout Latin America, as well as for the academic study of women’s lives. She excelled at research, teaching, mentoring, and program development. Her major awards include fellowships from Abe (Japan), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

She served as a delegate to the Global Agenda and the Global Redesign Initiatives of the World Economic Forum. In 2005 she gave the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures and was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Stockholm that same year.

Warren was well known for fieldwork among Indigenous groups in Guatemala. She addressed issues of violence, especially state-sponsored terrorism; social movements, in particular pan-Mayan rights organizing; multiculturalism; ethno-racial identity; gender; and anthropological research ethics. Warren’s work also interrogated mid-level theoretical approaches to human rights; her final research project was concerned with global human trafficking and the troubling policy norms that set out to define and combat it by criminalizing women’s movements. She also critically examined the politics of counting victims and ranking countries through a neoliberal audit culture of indicators that seek to measure anti-trafficking efforts.

She produced an impressive publication record in both English and Spanish, including the monographs Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton University Press, 1998), Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns (with co-author Susan Bourque, University of Michigan Press, 1981), and The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town (University of Texas Press, 1978). She also edited or co-edited four books that took on comparative global perspectives on intra-state violence, global development, ethnography during dramatic political change, and Indigenous movements and state representation. While tirelessly working as an advocate seeking to address issues she cared about, Warren often worked to reveal the contradictions and ironies of the way these problems are formulated and debated, both inside and outside academe.

Her research methods were meticulous and comprehensive. She delved into and analyzed documents located in a wide variety of sources and skillfully (and at times fearlessly) conducted interviews with victims of violence, patriarchy, and trafficking, members of international organizations in charge of formulating policies and carrying them out, and officials who at times most definitely did not have victims’ best interest uppermost in their minds or agendas.

Warren’s career was characterized by foresight, advocacy, courage, integrity, diversity, and scholarly rigor. The impact and legacy of her leadership remain visible in the work of the many scholars whom she generously taught and mentored. She is remembered fondly by the many students and colleagues whose lives she enriched through her boundless energy, intellectual curiosity, and overall joie de vivre.