Joseph B. Casagrande Papers, 1938-82 | University of Illinois Archives

Joseph Bartholomew Casagrande (1915-82) was professor of anthropology (1960-82); head of the Anthropology Department (1960-67); director of the Center for International Comparative Studies (1968-82); associate director of the Office of International Programs and Studies (1975-82); and director of Campus Research Services (1979-82) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He was known for his administrative achievements and his scholarly research on the indigenous peoples of the southwestern United States and Ecuador.

Casagrande was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 14, 1915, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and Wisconsin. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin in 1938 and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1951. He was instructor of anthropology at University of Rochester (1949-50); staff member at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (1950-60); and lecturer and adjunct associate professor of anthropology at American University (1953-57) prior to joining the UIUC faculty in 1960. Casagrande was interested in sociocultural and linguistic approaches to anthropology, and his publications include "Comanche Linguistic Acculturation" (1954) and In the Company of Man (1960), a volume he edited and compiled. From 1962, Ecuador became his primary area of research and fieldwork, and he published "Strategies for Survival: The Indians of Highland Ecuador" in 1973. Casagrande also served as vice president and president of the American Ethnological Society (1962â??64) and president of the American Anthropological Association (1973).

Sources:

Thompson, Stephen I. "Obituary: Joseph Bartholomew Casagrande," in AnthroSource, December 1985, accessed April 16, 2020, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.1985.87.4.02a00110.

Wikipedia, s.v. "Joseph B. Casagrande," accessed April 16, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_B._Casagrande.