Deborah Pellow (March 21, 1945 – May 29, 2025) was an American anthropologist. She was a professor and later, a professor emerita at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She was known for her work on urbanization and the anthropology of space and place in West Africa, particularly in Ghana.
Pellow was a founding director of the Space and Place Initiative at the Global Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School. She also taught in the school's Master of Social Science course. Her research was at the intersection of proxemics, ethnicity, micro-politics and conflict, feminist thought, women and gender. From 2009 to 2011, she served as the president of the Society for Urban National and Transnational Anthropology, a wing of the American Anthropological Association. She chaired the University Senate Library Committee and Chancellor Search Committee of Syracuse University. She was a Senior Research Associate at the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict & Collaboration. She also lived in northern Nigeria where she studied Hausa. Later, she conducted fieldwork in China and Japan.
Personal life and death
Deborah Pellow was first married to the American philosopher, Irving Thalberg Jr. (1930–1987), the son of 1920s and 1930s Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and Academy Award-winning actress Norma Shearer. After her husband's death, Pellow married in 1991, the American mystery writer, David Cole (1936–2015). She served on the boards of The Friends of Chamber Music, and the non-profit, Francis House, a home for the terminally-ill.
Pellow died in Syracuse on May 29, 2025, at the age of 80. A memorial service for Deborah Pellow was held at the Hendricks Chapel on the campus of Syracuse University on September 12, 2025.
Selected awards and honors
Lifetime Achievement Award, Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA) (2021)
William Wasserstrom Prize for the Teaching of Graduate Students (2019)
