Fellowship / Fellows

Mary Margaret Steedly

  • 2004–2005
  • Social Sciences
  • Benjamin White Whitney Scholar
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Mary Steedly
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Mary Margaret Steedly is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work to date has focused on issues of history, memory, and narrative in Indonesia. Her forthcoming book, Rifle Reports: Gender, Nationalism, and Peasant Revolution in the Karo Area, 1945–1950 (University of California Press), is a history of the war of Indonesian liberation from Dutch colonial rule, told from the perspective of a Sumatran upland minority community, the Karo Bataks.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Steedly will begin a book manuscript based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in 2000 at The Citadel Military College of South Carolina. One of the few remaining publicly supported military colleges in America without formal ties to any branch of the United States Armed Forces, The Citadel has cultivated a highly disciplined lifestyle of physical challenge, ceremonial display, and cultural conservatism that is described in publicity materials as “the road less taken.” The daughter of a Citadel graduate who remained until his death a professor on the school’s faculty, Steedly brings to this project the ambivalent perspective of a partial insider as well as the trained attention of an experienced ethnographer.

She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1989 and her MA in folklore and BSSA in business education from the University of North Carolina. Her first book, Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland (Princeton University Press, 1993), won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnography. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Social Science Research Council and a fellowship year at the Bunting Institute. Steedly has taught in the Harvard University Department of Anthropology since 1990 and was promoted to tenure in 1998.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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