Dr. Kenneth A.R. Kennedy

Kennedy, Dr. Kenneth Adrian Raine

Dr. Kennedy is remembered as the husband of Margaret Carrick Fairlie Kennedy, to whom he was married for 44 years, as a Professor at Cornell University since 1964, and as a research scholar in the discipline of Anthropology with extensive field and laboratory studies of the prehistoric peoples of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. He died on April 23, 2014, in Ithaca, New York.

Dr. Kennedy's pioneering academic studies in South Asia as well as his consultation practice in forensic sciences brought him numerous honors. He was awarded the T. Dale Stewart Award in Forensic Anthropology (1987), was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992) and held offices on the executive committees of the American Anthropological Association, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He regarded his greatest honor to have been his privilege of being the student of the late Dr. Theodore D. McCown, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was his mentor. And, as he frequently stated, his marriage to his beloved Margaret. Dr. Kennedy was a prolific as well as highly respected scholar. In addition to scores of published articles, symposia, and editorial writings, Dr. Kennedy authored several books, including God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology of South Asia (Univ. of Mich. Press, 2000), recipient of the William W. Howells Book Award from the American Anthropological Association, and his work co-authored with Dr. McCown, Climbing Man’s Family Tree: A Collection of Major Writings on Human Phylogeny, 1699-1971 (Prentice-Hall, 1971). The only child of Walter Burkhart Kennedy and Margaret Mirium Madge Kennedy, Kenneth was born June 26, 1930, in Oakland, California. He was raised in San Francisco and
attended the academic high school of Lowell High where he was a science major. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He was an Episcopalian since childhood and was an Associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Anglican Benedictine monastic order, making regular retreats to the mother house of Holy Cross at West Park, New York. He was a communicant of St. John’s Church, Ithaca, and served as a lay
Dr. Kennedy leaves behind him his many undergraduate and graduate students for whom he acted as graduate committee chairman or advisor. His courses in Human Paleontology, Human Biology and Evolution, History and Theory of Biological Anthropology, and Laboratory
and Field Methods at Cornell were recognized for their rigor and high standards, tempered by Kenneth's love of his students and his continuing interest in their careers. He conceived of a love of learning as the means to seek God and to bring others into the joy of a life in scholarship.

Dr. Kennedy is survived by his sister in law, Lucia Walker Fairlie Pulgram and her husband, William L. Pulgram of Atlanta; by his brother in law Andrew Miller Fairlie, Jr. and his
wife Mary Ann Fairlie of St. Petersburg, Florida; and twelve nieces and nephews.

The service will be held on June 14, 2014, at 3:00 p.m. at St. John's Episcopal Church, Ithaca, with Father Richard Towers presiding. Donations are encouraged to the SPCA of Tompkins County, Ithaca, to St. John's Episcopal Church or to the charity of the donors choice.