Gananath Obeyesekere, an anthropologist whose teaching at Princeton spanned from Buddhism to Freud, died March 25 at his home in Sri Lanka. He was 95. Obeyesekere spent two decades on the faculty, beginning in 1980, and twice chaired the Department of Anthropology, which described him in an online memorial as “luminous and always daring.” His 1992 book, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, used history and anthropology to challenge the notion that Cook was initially received as a god by Hawaiian islanders, only to be murdered on a return visit.
Jeremiah P. Ostriker, an influential astrophysicist and former Princeton provost, died April 6 at age 87. Ostriker joined the faculty in 1965 and made lasting contributions in several areas, including dark matter, galaxy formation, black holes, and the interstellar medium. He received the National Medal of Science in 2000. In his time as provost from 1995 to 2000, Ostriker worked on Princeton’s transition to a no-loan, grant-based financial aid program — the first of its kind in American higher education. In 2017, five years after transferring to emeritus status, Ostriker received an honorary doctorate at Princeton’s Commencement.
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