Emily Dickinson Townsend was born on August 11, 1928 in New York City to Clinton Blake Townsend and Eleanor Mary Meneely. She was named for her grandmother, a relative of the poet Emily Dickinson. She attended the Brearley School in New York City from 1934 to 1946. She received an undergraduate degree in Greek and philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1950. She earned a master's degree in classical archaeology from Radcliffe College in 1954, and a Ph.D. in Greek from Bryn Mawr in 1956. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Richmond Lattimore, was entitled "Bacchylides and Lyric Style."
Career
Vermeule attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as a Fulbright Scholar in 1950–1951, where she took part in the excavation of a Mycenaean tomb. Three years later, in 1953–1954 she studied at St Anne's College, Oxford, Oxford University, as a Catherwood Fellow. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964–1965. She taught at Bryn Mawr and Wellesley College from 1956–1958, became an assistant professor of classics in 1958, and was hired as an associate professor, at Boston University in 1961. In 1965 she returned to Wellesley, holding the position of professor of Art and Greek until 1970. She was the James Loeb Visiting Professor of Classical Philology at Harvard University in 1969. In 1970, she was appointed the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Harvard University, where she taught in both the Department of Classics and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She retired from teaching in 1994. In 1995 Vermeule served as the president of the American Philological Association. She delivered a presidential lecture at the 1995 annual meeting in San Diego entitled "Archaeology and Philology: The Dirt and the Word." Vermeule excavated at many sites in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Libya, including Gordion in the early 1950s, and Kephallenia, Messenia, Coastal East Libya, Halicarnassus, and Thera-Santorini in the 1960s. She was director of the excavations at Toumba tou Skourou, Cyprus, from 1971 to 1974.
Excavation at Toumba tou Skourou
Considered her most significant expectation, Vermeule was the director of an excavation project co-sponsored by the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus, Harvard University, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Touma tou Skourou, near Mourphou, Cyprus, was a Late Bronze Age town that Vermeule uncovered which represented three different cultures coming together: Palestinian, Egyptian, and Minoan. Due to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Vermeule was forced to abruptly end her excavation and leave the island. This expedition led to her publishing two books about the excavation and the artifacts found, Toumba tou Skourou: The Mound of Darkness and Toumba tou Skourou: A Bronze Age Potter's Quarter on Morphou Bay in Cyprus.
She married the archaeologist Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III in 1957. Together they had two children: Blakey Vermeule, a professor of English literature at Stanford University, and Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School. Vermeule was an avid supporter of the Boston Red Sox, and frequently compared the efforts of the Red Sox to the mythical Greek heroes from her studies as evidenced in three newspaper articles she published: "It Is Not a Myth—They're Immortal: Gallant Red Sox Did Not Really Fail" ; "Odysseus at Fenway" ; and "Why Boston Still Hates the Yankees". She died of heart disease-related issues in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 6, 2001 at the age of 72. Vermeule was one of the earliest female academics at Harvard University and helped shape the faculty. Vermeule was also a published poet, whose poems appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry Magazine.
