Frederick Starr

Born in 1858, Frederick Starr was an American anthropologist, teacher, and writer whose career helped shape the early years of anthropology in the United States. He joined the University of Chicago in the 1890s, where he taught for many years and also served as curator of the Walker Museum.

Starr was especially known for energetic fieldwork and for his strong interest in the everyday lives, cultures, and physical anthropology of the people he studied. His travels took him to Mexico, Central Africa, and Japan, and those experiences fed into a large body of books, articles, lectures, and collecting work.

He died in 1933 in Tokyo, a fittingly international end for a scholar whose life was defined by travel and curiosity. Today he is remembered as a vivid, sometimes controversial figure in the history of anthropology, and as a writer who tried to bring distant places and cultures before a broad reading public.