Luria in 1979

the great professors

Zella H. Luria

When she retired in 2002 after forty-three years, Zella H. Luria was honored by Tufts’ Department of Psychology for her “impassioned teaching and her political activism,” as well as her insistence on exposing students to lessons not just of academia but of life. “The psychology department always rather enjoyed shocking the Bursar’s Office with its request for checks cut to the Association of Boston Prostitutes, to pay for Zella’s guest lecturers,” Luria’s retirement resolution said.

As a researcher, Luria, now a professor emerita, focused on human sexuality, especially how children develop notions of gender. Luria especially recalls the impact she had on female students in her first decades at Tufts. “They were attracted to me because I was young,” says Luria, who often joined students on the front lines of the era’s activism. “I told them they should find ways of making a living so that if things didn’t work out, if they never married, or got divorced, they could still find joy in their lives and work.” In her latter decades, Luria says, “I provided students with a look at what it was to be a woman of an older sort and an intellectual who loved teaching and her students.”

Zella Luria “was the most intellectually impressive teacher I had at Tufts, and I had plenty of good ones,” says Richard Nisbett, A82, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. “Students thought of her as exceptionally strong and mentally healthy and nurturant. Zella denied those things. Which of course made us believe them all the more.”