Genevieve Bell

Biography
In many ways, Genevieve Bell has been an anthropologist all her life. “We always joke in our family that anthropology isn’t so much a career as a lifestyle,” Bell says. As a young child she and her brother lived in an Aboriginal community in Australia while her anthropologist mother did fieldwork. “I went hunting and gathering every day with people who remembered seeing their first white person.”

When it came time to go to college, Bell left her native Australia to go to school abroad at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Taking anthropology courses helped her get over being homesick, she says. She stayed on at Bryn Mawr for a Master’s degree. Bell obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford, where she wrote a history of the first non-reservation boarding school in the United States at the end of the last century. She later taught anthropology, Native American studies and a range of other courses in the Anthropology Department at Stanford.

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