Spouse(s) Theodore SchwartzJohn Ross, MD Education Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy People also search for George A. De Vos, Takeyuki Tsuda, Daniel Moerman, Laurence Tancredi | ||
Lola Romanucci-Ross is an American cultural anthropologist who has authored and co-authored a number of works on medical, social, and cultural anthropology, with fieldwork in Melanesia (Manus), rural Mexico, and her mother's home town in Italy. She was a long-time friend and collaborator of Margaret Mead, having done fieldwork with her in Manus, and later worked with her then-husband Theodore Schwartz on a team of social science researchers under the guidance of Erich Fromm in rural Mexico.
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Birth, early family life, and education
Lola Romanucci was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania to first-generation Italian immigrants, Ignazio Romanucci (14 Apr 1894 – 18 Feb 1990) and Josephine (née Giovanozzi, 30 Sep 1899 – 22 Apr 1999). She earned her bachelor's degree at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, her M.A. from the University of Minnesota, and Ph.D. from Indiana University. She also studied at the University of Chicago, and did post-doctoral study with Claude Levi-Strauss at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes.
Personal life
Like her friend and sometime mentor Margaret Mead, Lola Romanucci was married three times. Her first husband was a businessman. Her second husband was Theodore Schwartz, with whom she had a son, and with whom she did fieldwork in both Manus (with Mead) and Mexico (with Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann). She later married John Ross, MD, a cardiologist at UCSD.
Several members of Lola Romanucci-Ross's family also became successful professionals and academics. She has collaborated on several projects around social science and ethics of medicine with her cousin Laurence Tancredi. Her late brother Demostene Romanucci (February 19, 1927 – April 11, 2012) was a prominent physician in New York state.
Career and later life
Lola participated in Erich Fromm's Chiconcuac Study in Mexico from 198 to 1961, with her then-husband Theodore Schwartz; this fieldwork resulted first in her dissertation under the supervision of David Bidney and later in her classic ethnography Conflict, violence, and morality in a Mexican village.
Romanucci-Ross has spent most of her professional career at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she was among the early faculty in the social sciences and at the School of Medicine. She is professor in the department of Family Medicine and a long-time affiliate of the Department of Anthropology.
In the early 2000s, she and her husband established the John and Lola Ross Award in the Sciences and Culture of Medicine, which is given annually at UCSD School of Medicine to a "graduating medical student who has shown high capability and dedication to the medical sciences as well as demonstrable interest and involvement in scholarly or professional activities that are concerned with cultural influences on medical practice and research."