Alfred C. Haddon

Alfred Cort Haddon (24 May 1855 – 20 April 1940) was an influential British anthropologist and ethnologist. Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork with W. H. R. Rivers, Charles Gabriel Seligman and Sidney Ray 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.

Early life

Alfred Cort Haddon was born on 24 May 1855, near London, the elder son of John Haddon, the head of John Haddon & Co, a firm of printers and typefounders established in 1814. 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 1881. Shortly after achieving his Master of Arts degree, he was appointed as Demonstrator in Zoology at Cambridge in 1879. For a time he studied marine biology in Naples.

Dublin

In 1880, he was appointed Professor of Zoology at the College of Science in Dublin. While there he founded the Dublin Field Club in 1885.