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Isabel Truesdell Kelly earned her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, with a dissertation on the “Fundamentals of Great Basin Culture,” having researched the Northern Paiute and Coast Miwok Indigenous cultures of Northern California. After graduating she led excavations in Mexico and then began a career as an anthropologist with the US State Department, which had a growing interest in assisting the scientific and technological development of countries like Mexico as a way of maintaining a toehold in the region during the growing cold war with the Soviet Union. Joining me this week is Dr. Stephanie Baker Opperman, Professor of History at Georgia College, and author of Cold War Anthropologist: Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Hermoso Mexico,” composed by R. Herrera, arranged and conducted by Guillermo González and performed by Banda González (Victor Band) on May 16, 1919, in Camden, New Jersey; the recording is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is “Isabel T. Kelly portrait,” DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
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Stephanie Opperman is a Professor of History at Georgia College. She earned her doctorate from the University of Illinois Chicago in Latin American History. Her research and publications focus on mid-twentieth century U.S.-Mexico diplomatic and cultural relations. Her book, Cold War Anthropologist: Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico, explores the changing nature of U.S.-Mexican relations, development programs, state efforts of assimilation, the field of anthropology, and gendered experiences in mid-twentieth century Mexico through the international work of Dr. Isabel T. Kelly (1906-1983). As the Principal Investigator and Co-Program Director for the NEH grant, “Flannery O'Connor and Milledgeville: Collecting the Past,” she is working with undergraduate students to interview community members who lived in Milledgeville during the heart of O’Connor’s writing career (1951-1964). The goal of the project is to learn more about experiences with class, gender, race, disability, the Cold War, religious beliefs, commercialism, and old/new South mythologies in 1950s rural Georgia.
