If Charles Keyes had been more interested in writing books than he was in working with graduate students he probably would have published quite a library.

“To produce a Ph.D. student is as much work as writing a book,” said Keyes, a professor of anthropology and this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.

However, Keyes made a decision that inevitably allowed him to work with an imposing number of graduate students. Keyes has mentored so many graduate students that it is almost as if he has established his own brand of scholars, many of whom, like their mentor, focus on Southeast Asia. In addition to a sizeable cohort of American students, he has trained more professional anthropologists in Thailand than anyone in the world and more Vietnamese anthropologists than anyone outside Vietnam or the former Soviet Union.

In all he has served on 145 graduate student committees and chaired the committees of 33 students who completed their doctorates in anthropology. In addition, he is currently heading the committees of nine other students who are working on their doctorates in anthropology.

“I decided very early in my career that if you stay in one place you can do more than if you move from campus to campus. “One of the things you can accomplish is to work with graduate students, who are not as mobile,” said Keyes.

His colleague and chair of the anthropology department Miriam Kahn has witnessed firsthand Keyes’ deep commitment to his students.

“He devotes passionate energy to every student, always making himself accessible for them, carefully, thoughtfully and critically reading their work … writing letters of recommendation, assisting them in career preparation, involving them in his conference panels and publications, and bringing career opportunities to their attention.”

Keyes, who is widely known as “Biff” (a prenatal nickname that has stuck throughout his life) to his colleagues and students, did not set out to be an anthropologist. Physics and mathematics seemed to be his destiny as the son of a man who worked for the old Atomic Energy Commission.

“I started with those fields, but by my junior year in college I was more interested in people than matter, so I changed directions. I just kept adding English and anthropology classes and had the equivalent of four majors when I graduated.”

Keyes has been a member of the UW faculty since 1965 and has done extensive fieldwork in Asia particularly working in the bush or rural areas of Thailand and Vietnam. He was stricken by a serious respiratory illness in Vietnam in 1996, which has since limited, but not, stopped his fieldwork.

“Anthropologists,” he joked, “can do fieldwork at conferences.”

Keyes is a leading scholar of Southeast Asian studies and recently was elected president of the Association for Asian studies. Even so he is perhaps best known for mentoring new generations of scholars, many of whom have gone on to careers in socially engaged scholarship that is helping to transform their home nations. He has trained graduate students from China, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Afghanistan, spending countless hours helping them get the necessary funding to come to the UW and the United States to study.

“One thing about mentoring students is that you create the equivalent of genealogy. Last year in Thailand a professor I didn’t know before introduced himself to me as my grandchild. He was the student of one of my students,” Keyes said.

Perhaps the ultimate story that illustrates Keyes’ commitment and respect for his students’ goals concerns one woman who was battling breast cancer while finishing work on her Ph.D. Completing that work was important to her and kept her going, something she achieved several months before dying.

“Biff’s gentle love and concern inspired her to carry on,” said Kahn. “But most touching of all was that he arranged a trip to Thailand and personally carried her ashes for a ceremony at the confluence of the Mun and Mekong rivers. Together with seven of her friends (all former students of Biff’s) he spread her ashes. This is love and respect that goes beyond mentoring, even beyond life.”

– Joel Schwarz

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