Fundos F0672 - Marilyn Silverman fonds

Marilyn Silverman, anthropologist and professor, was born in Montreal in 1945. She received an honours BA in anthropology and sociology from McGill University in 1966, where she also completed an MA (1967) and PhD (1973) in the Department of Anthropology. She started her academic career as an assistant professor in York University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology (later the Department of Anthropology) between 1973 and 1976 and was promoted to associate professor in 1976 and to full professor in 1996. She also served as the coordinator of York University’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Programme between 1975 and 1978.

Silverman is the author of four books: Rich People and Rice: Factional Politics in Rural Guyana (1980), In the Valley of the Nore: A Social History of Thomastown, County Kilkenny, 1840-1983 (1986), Merchants and Shopkeepers: An Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town, 1200-1986 (1995), and An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800-1950 (2001). She is the co-editor of A House Divided? Anthropological Studies of Factionalism (1978) and Approaching the Past: Historical Anthropology Through Irish Case Studies (1992), and editor of Walking into the Past (1995) and Ethnography and Development – the Work of Richard F. Salisbury (2004).

She received the 2002 William A. Douglass Book Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and the American Anthropological Association for her book An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800-1950. In March 2008, she held the Henrietta Harvey Distinguished Lectureship at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.