Background

Emily Townsend Vermeule was born on August 11, 1928, in New York City. She was the daughter of Clinton Blake and Eleanor (Meneely) Townsend.

Education

Emily Vermeule attended the Brearley School in New York City from 1934 to 1946. In 1950, she received an undergraduate degree in Greek and philosophy from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in 1956. She also earned a Master of Arts in classical archaeology from Radcliffe College in 1954.

Career

From the time of her stint as a Fulbright Scholar in Greece in 1950 - 1951, Emily maintained close ties with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, serving on its Managing Committee and encouraging students to spend formative years there as well. She was as rigorous in the field of archaeology as in her studies of Greek language and literature at Bryn Mawr College from 1956 to 1957, and her excavations in Greece, Libya, Turkey, and particularly at the site of Toumba tou Skourou in Cyprus. From 1957 to 1970, Emily also worked at Wellesley (Massachusetts) College as well as at Boston University from 1958 to 1965.

From 1970 to 1994, Emily also was an educator at Harvard University. She was appointed to the Department of the Classics and Fine Arts, now History of Art and Architecture. There, she taught classes on Greek lyric poetry, on the Aegean Bronze Age, on Classical Greek vase painting. She also taught the first half of the legendary Fine Arts 13, the art survey that began with the Paleolithic and went on to the early Renaissance. She was passionately committed to all aspects of ancient studies, and it was her splendid rhetoric in this very room that effectively argued to establish the Standing Committee on Archaeology at Harvard in 1988. A lecturer at Harvard for over twenty years, she retired with professor emeritus status in 1994. During her time at Harvard, she also was a Geddes-Harrower professor of Greek art and archaeology at the University of Aberdeen through 1980 - 1981.

Emily was an able synthesist. Her first book, Greece in the Bronze Age, written in 1964, has gone through numerous printings, and remains a basic text today. The Semple Lectures, delivered at the University of Cincinnati in 1973, were published in 1975 as The Art of the Shaft Graves of Mycenae. The lectures she gave as Sather Professor of Classical Literature at Berkeley in 1975 appeared in 1979 as Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. This book remains one of the most insightful and erudite studies of the ancient world, successfully weaving archaeological evidence and textual reference into whole cloth unsurpassed in the field.

Although her own special interest was the Aegean of the second millennium BCE, her range of interests and the impact of her work on other periods is reflected in the plural title: The Ages of Homer, given to the substantial Festschrift published in her honor in 1995.

Achievements

• Vermeule is known as an archaeologist who taught classical philology and archaeology at Harvard University. She contributed with distinction to the intellectual fabric of the university, taking her place on the faculty with dignity at a time when there were far fewer women than today.
  
  Vermeule was responsible for the discovery and excavation of an ancient Mycenaean tomb early in her career, and it was then she established herself as a scholar of the Grecian Bronze Age. In 1968 the Radcliffe College Graduate Society gave Vermeule a gold medal for her distinguished achievements. Her book The Art of the Shaft Graves of Mycenae received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit of the American Philological Association in 1980. In 1982, Emily was named by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the Jefferson Lecturer, the principal recognition in this country for intellectual achievement in the humanities.
  
  Emily’s legacy is in no small part measured by the outstanding scholars in whose formation she played a key role, and who are now associated with institutions such as Berkeley, Dartmouth, UCLA, the University of Chicago, UT Austin, the University of Toronto and Tulane.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mycenaean Pictorial Vase Painting

    (This study tells us much about Bronze Age civilization, a...)

    1982
  • Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry

    (The ancient Greeks devoted a significant portion of their...)

    1979
  • Toumba Tou Skourou 1974
  • Greece in the Bronze Age 1964

Membership

Emily was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and the German Archaeological Institute. She also served as Vice President of the American Philosophical Society (now Society for Classical Studies) and was for many years on the Governing Board of the National Geographic Society.

Personality

Of nimble wit and rapier-sharp tongue, few could rival Emily in speed or depth of comprehension. To watch her scan a text, pencil tracing lines almost faster than one could follow, was a lesson in humility.

Emily's house was open to students and colleagues, as long as one could navigate around the dalmatians. She was an inspiring teacher if one could take the heat and keep up the pace.

An avid mystery reader and baseball fan, she transferred allegiance from the Yankees to the Red Sox on arrival in Cambridge and agonized through the Sox’s many close encounters.

Physical Characteristics: Emily Vermeule fought against heart disease for many years and died of related problems in her Cambridge home at age 72.

Interests

• books

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball

Connections

On February 2, 1957, Emily married Cornelius C. Vermeule III. They had two children - Emily Dickinson Blake and Cornelius Adrian Comstock.

Father:

Clinton Blake Townsend

Mother:

Eleanor (Meneely) Townsend

Spouse:

Cornelius C. Vermeule III

August 10, 1925 – November 27, 2008

Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III was an American scholar of ancient art and curator of classical art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1957 to 1996.

child:

Blakey Vermeule

Born on July 14, 1966

Emily Dickinson Blake "Blakey" Vermeule is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind. She is a Professor of English at Stanford University.

child:

Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule

Born on May 2, 1968

Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule is an American legal scholar, currently a law professor at Harvard Law School. He founded the book review magazine The New Rambler.

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, TV, & Other Fields, Vol. 193 In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the worlds most-popular authors.
  2010