Prof. George-Vid Tomasevic, PhD (1927 – 2009), anthropologist, professor at Buffalo College, University of New York and the member of the Crown Council.
He was one of our most important intellectuals in the diaspora, professor, translator, polyglot, poet, man of exceptional erudition, humanist, pedagogue.
His long university career began in the 1950s at the University of Chicago. Since then, he had taught physical anthropology, human paleontology, theories of evolution, social and cultural anthropology, comparative and structural linguistics, psychological and psychiatric anthropology, as well as comparative religion, myth and magic at several American universities (Berkeley, California, Washington, Buffalo), history of social thought, philosophical anthropology, sociology and other related subjects.
He is the author and co-author of several university textbooks. He had published a number of articles, essays and reviews in American, Australian, Canadian, Italian, Yugoslav and Serbian newspapers and magazines. He finished his career at the University of Buffalo in 1995, which awarded him the honorary title of Professor Emeritus due to his merits. The Department of Anthropology at Buffalo State College even established the Collins/Tomasevic Award, named after their two most deserving professors – June Collins, the first head of the Department of Anthropology, and George Vid Tomasevic, who was the second professor of anthropology at the department.
In addition to the educational work, translations of works by Serbian philosophers into English occupy an important place in the opus of George Vid Tomasevic, as well as his life’s philosophical work, the monumental poem “Millennium”, published several years before the author’s death.
Professor Tomasevic died in 2009 in San Francisco.