Eugenia W. "Fi" Herbert

1929 - 2025

Eugenia W. ("Fi") Herbert

South Hadley, MA - EUGENIA W. HERBERT,

Historian of Africa and South Asia

Eugenia "Fi" Herbert died peacefully on March 10, 2025, surrounded by her family and friends. Fi was 95. Following her graduation from Wellesley College in 1951, Fi was among the first young scholars to study in Europe on a Fulbright Fellowship, beginning a life of international travel, teaching and scholarship.

Fi Herbert was born on September 8, 1929, in Summit, New Jersey, to Robert B. and Mildred Warren. Her father was an economist and the first social scientist to be hired at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. Fi attended Wellesley College and graduated in 1951. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and studied in Vienna, Austria. During her fellowship year, she travelled widely in Europe, as well as the Middle East. In later years, she vividly contrasted conditions of post-war Vienna and the Middle East to what we see today.

Upon her return to the United States in the Fall of 1952, she entered graduate school to study history at Yale University. She met Robert Herbert, a fellow graduate student in art history and they married in June of 1953. Fi received her Ph.D. in 1957. Her dissertation, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium 1885-1898 (published in 1958), analyzed the roles of prominent French-speaking anarchists in this period. While doing dissertation research in Paris, Fi was first exposed to African history, which captured her imagination.

While raising her three children, Timothy, Rosemary and Catherine, in rural Connecticut, Fi was active in the anti-war movement and local Democratic politics. She continued her exploration of African history, focusing initially on the history of copper. She combined travel and research in the winter of 1969, when she and Bob visited Morocco, Mali, Niger, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. She taught courses on African history at Quinnipiac College and Yale in 1971 and 1972. Taking a scholarly detour from her work on Africa, Fi collaborated with Claude Lopez to write The Private Frankin, which was published in 1975.

Fi joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in the Fall of 1978, where she taught African history for the next nineteen years. She retired in 1997 as the E. Nevis Rodman Professor of African History. Her initial interest in African trading routes, where copper was preferred over gold, led her to explore the world of African metallurgy. This, in turn, led to field work and research into iron smelting and brass casting in Cameroon in 1982 and resulted in her first book on Africa, Red Gold of Africa (1984). She travelled to Togo the following year to research iron smelting, which was documented in the film she made with Candy Goucher and Carlyn Saltman, The Blooms of Banjeli. Further field work and research in Zaire in 1989 culminated in Fi's ground-breaking work on the crucial role of the gender-related rituals which accompanied historical practices of smelting iron, Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (1993). She continued to travel and do research, visiting Botswana and Zimbabwe in 1994 and 1995. During these and subsequent trips, she interviewed retired British officers who had been stationed in Africa during British colonial rule, which resulted in the publication of Twilight on the Zambezi in 2002.

Fi was influential in adding courses in non-western history and culture to the Mount Holyoke curriculum and played an important role in the faculty-lead movement to divest Mount Holyoke from South African stocks during the later days of Apartheid. She also contributed to the creation of the Women's Studies Program.

Fi retired from Mount Holyoke in 1997. She began to shift her academic (and travel) focus to India. From 2003 to 2013, Fi took seven trips to India, accompanied at different times by Bob, various friends and her children (and granddaughter Bethany). A common theme with her interest in African history was the collision of colonial and traditional cultures. In 2011, at the age of 80, she published Flora's Empire, a study of colonial gardens in India, the Indian edition of which was celebrated at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Further into retirement, Fi self-published two books: Serendib: Scenes from Colonial Ceylon, which explored the country's allure to travelers, merchants, and colonists, and Just So (Mostly) True Stories, a collection of stories about colonists' animals.

Following the death of her husband Bob in 2021, Fi remained an integral part of her community in South Hadley. She enjoyed swimming at the Mount Holyoke pool and walks around the campus. Former students, friends and colleagues often stopped by her home for conversation and tea parties over which Fi's cat Leila presided. Fi continued to write and, at the time of her death, had nearly completed a memoir of her travels abroad, which spanned over 50 years.

She is survived by her children, Timothy Herbert, Rosemary Herbert and Catherine Herbert, her daughter-in-law Mara Lytle, sons-in-law John Donovan and Chris Bittenbender, and six grandchildren, Alex Rapport, Claire Kokoska, Bethany Donovan, Sophie Kokoska, Jessie Rapport and Matthew Donovan.