Jean Briggs

Jean L. Briggs (May 28, 1929 – July 27, 2016) was an American-born Canadian anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and professor emerita at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her best known works included the 1970 landmark book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, based on 18 months of research and field work in Inuit communities on the Arctic coast during the 1960s.Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, which documents Inuit language, culture and practices, remains an landmark publication in the fields of ethnography and Arctic studies to this day. In 2015, Briggs helped to complete and publish a dictionary of Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuktitut, also called Utkuhiksalik, which preserves 34,000 words and contributes to the preservation of the Utku language.

Most of her fieldwork and research focused on the Canadian Inuit, but she also visited communities of Alaskan Inupiat and Siberian Yupik as well.

Briggs was born in Washington D.C. on May 28, 1929, the eldest of four children of Margaret (née Worcester) and Horace W. Briggs, member of the clergy of the The New Church, also known as Swedenborgianism. She was raised in the state of Maine and Newton, Massachusetts. Jean Briggs received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1951. She then completed a master's degree from Boston University in 1960 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967.

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