Billie Jean Isbell married a fellow undergraduate student, William H. Isbell III and they served in the Peace Corps together and served in Columbia until 1965
Billie Jean Isbell
1937-
Billie Jean Isbell was born on April 23,1937 to William Riley Richerson and Mildred Wyatt, who are both deceased. Neither of her parents schooled past the eighth grade but both of them were creative and intelligent. Her father published several short stories while her mother was an artist. William passed away at the age of 59 after battling TB for 10 years. Her mother passed away at the age of 70 from emphysema. Billie Jean had three half sisters, Alice Richerson, Pauline Thomas, and Clynell Thomas. All three are now deceased.
Billie Jean married a fellow undergraduate student, William H. Isbell III. They were in the Peace Corps together and served in Columbia until 1965. William is currently teaching at SUNY Binghamton. When she returned from the Peace Corps, she completed one year at the University of Illinois where she earned her Ph.D.
Billie Jean was offered a scholarship to study Chemistry at the University of Texas at the age of 16, but she was unable to attend due to her father's illness. After her father passed away, her mother came to live with her and they travelled to Peru on two occasions.
Dr. Isbell has one child, Diana Isbell, who was born in 1965 in Bogotá, Colombia while Billie Jean was serving in the Peace Corps. Diana is now Cid Isbell, a Systems Engineer working in New York City. He is active in politics and is a transsexual who is beginning research with his mother on the transsexual community in New York City.
Billie Jean Isbell is fluent in Spanish and she can read and function on the street of France but she is unable to lecture in French. She lectures in Spanish and has intensively studied Quechua on a Department of Education Grant at Cornell University. She fell in love with the campus and she never imagined that she would end up teaching there for 25 years. She became the first woman tenured in the Department of Anthropology and she very actively participated in the creation of a Women's Studies program there.
Billie Jeans has assisted in the advancement of Andean studies, but she believes her best work has been on gender. She turned to working on Human Rights issues when violence ripped apart the Andean region of the Rio Pampas of Ayacucho, Peru where she had done all of her research. She has also written a play that she is very proud of entitled "Public Secrets from Peru" that has been performed but not published.
Her teaching has been important to her and most recently she has concentrated on Human Rights, Peace and Reconciliation and Social Movements in Latin America. She is retiring next year and she will greatly miss teaching but she will continue to be the Director of the Latin American Studies Program at Cornell. She wants to promote the research and writing of indigenous intellectuals from Andean countries.
Billie Jean lives an exciting life and even though she is retiring next year she is still so involved in so many things. Next fall she is traveling to Peru and then on to Argentina to work with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Sources
http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/grad/fields_1/lat-am-st.html
Isbell, Billie Jean. Email correspondence. 24 Apr. 2001
by Amy Henrichs
