Alfred Cort Haddon

Alfred Cort Haddon
Alfred Cort Haddon
Born	24 May 1855 London
Died	20 April 1940 (1940-04-21) (aged 84) Cambridge
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	anthropology
Alma mater	Christ's College, Cambridge
Influences	Thomas Henry Huxley
Influenced	W. H. R. Rivers Caroline Furness Jayne
Notes
one of the first people to record animal sounds in Australia and in Borneo

Alfred Cort Haddon, Sc.D., FRS,FRGS (24 May 1855 – 20 April 1940, Cambridge) was an influential British anthropologist and ethnologist. Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork, with W.H.R. Rivers, C.G. Seligman, Sidney Ray, Anthony Wilkin on the Torres Strait Islands.

He returned to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he had been an undergraduate, and effectively founded the School of Anthropology. Haddon was a major influence on the work of the American ethnologist Caroline Furness Jayne.

In 2011, Haddon's 1898 The Recordings of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits were added to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia's Sounds of Australia registry. The original recordings are housed at the British Library and many have been made available online.

Alfred Cort Haddon was born on 24 May 1855, near London, the elder son of John Haddon, the head of a firm of typefounders and printers. He attended lectures at King's College London and taught zoology and geology at a girls' school in Dover, before entering Christ's College, Cambridge in 1875.

At Cambridge he studied zoology and became the friend of John Holland Rose (afterwards Harmsworth Professor of Naval History), whose sister he married in 1883. Shortly after achieving his Master of Arts degree, Haddon was appointed as Demonstrator in Zoology at Cambridge in 1882. For a time he studied marine biology in Naples.