IN MEMORIAM

Abstract

Audrey Goldman Spiro died of cancer on July 30, 2011, at home with her family in La Jolla, California. Audrey was born in St Louis, Missouri. She attended the University of Louisville where she earned a BA in 1948, and at Washington University in St Louis where she earned a MSW in 1950. At Washington University, she also met her husband, the anthropologist Melford E. Spiro. Their departments were located in the same building where, every afternoon at 5:00 P.M., coffee was served to the faculty and graduate students. They met one day when, as Mel stood in line ahead of Audrey, he expressed a political opinion to a friend. From behind him, he heard a voice pipe up: “That’s just wrong!” That was Audrey. They married three months later and went to Israel the same year (1950) to study children raised collectively in a kibbutz. In 1961–1962 they lived in Burma, studying Burmese Buddhism and society. During the 1950s and 1960s, they migrated according to Mel’s teaching career, spending years in Seattle, Chicago, and Honolulu before settling permanently in La Jolla, California in 1968, where Mel was founding chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. While they were in Seattle and Hawai’i, Audrey’s visits to the Seattle Art Museum and Honolulu Art Museum sparked her lifelong passion for Chinese art and art history. She studied Chinese language at UCSD and Chinese art history at UCLA, earning a PhD in 1986 in Chinese Art History from UCLA where her major advisor was Professor Martin Powers. She taught Chinese Art History at UCLA, UC Riverside, UCSD, USC, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Among many contributions to the field, she served on the board of directors of the Early Medieval China Group. Audrey is survived by her husband and her two sons, Michael Elliot Spiro, a musician and professor of music at Indiana University, and Jonathan Peter Spiro, a professor of American history at Castleton College in Vermont, and three grandchildren.