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President
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
| Appointee | Sydel Silverman |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research |
| Domain | Sciences |
| Start | 1 January 1987 |
| End | 31 December 1999 |
| Notes | President of the principal anthropology / archaeology grant-making foundation |
Institutional context
The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, founded in 1941, is the principal private grant-making foundation for anthropological and archaeological research in the United States. It funds individual research grants, conferences, and the publication of professional journals across the four-field discipline (cultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic anthropology). The President of the Foundation is the senior administrative officer.
Career path
Sydel Finfer Silverman (1933–2019) earned a BA from Brooklyn College and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1962. She held faculty positions at Queens College from 1962 to 1975, including service as department chair from 1970, and at the City University of New York Graduate Center from 1975 to 1986, where she served as Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Anthropology and elevated the programme to one of the top ten anthropology doctoral programmes in the United States.
Appointment
She was appointed President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 1987 and served until 1999, a tenure of twelve years.
Tenure
Twelve years. Tenure included substantial expansion of the Foundation's international fellowship programmes, the organisation of twenty-five international anthropological symposia, and the establishment of the Foundation as a public spokesperson for the discipline during the 1990s reorganisation of US anthropological-society structures.
Cluster context
Silverman's 1987 appointment is the dataset's first private-research-grant-foundation entry. Her tenure spans the period during which the Wenner-Gren Foundation's grant-allocation patterns shifted notably toward funding women researchers and toward research on gender, kinship, and women's roles in non-Western societies — a pattern documented in subsequent disciplinary historiography.
The grant-making leadership trajectory she anchors is treated in the archaeological-grants analysis, alongside the National Geographic Society's Tiefenthaler appointment thirty-three years later.