John Pemberton Papers

John Pemberton III (1928-2016) was a professor of religion at Amherst College and a scholar of Yoruba art, culture and religion. Pemberton completed his undergraduate work at Princeton University in 1948 and graduate work at Duke University, where he received a Bachelor of Divinity Degree in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1958. He joined the faculty of Amherst College in the fall of 1958. For the first two decades of his teaching career, Pemberton primarily taught courses on Christianity and western religious traditions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the Religion Department broadened its scope to include a wider diversity of religious thought and traditions, Pemberton shifted his scholarly focus to Africa, particularly the art, culture and religion of the Yoruba people in Nigeria.

Pemberton served as Associate Fellow of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (1970-71) and as Visiting Research Associate at the University of Ife (1981-82 and 1986). His work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Instution, the Forn Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, among others. He was elected to the Advisory Board of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in 2006. Pemberton was author, co-author or editor of fourteen books and catalogues and many articles and reviews. He retired from Amherst College in 1998. He died on November 30, 2016.

Source: "Memorial Minute for John Pemberton III", Amherst College, Faculty Meetings, Memorial Minutes, [2017]