Dr Sue Benson, anthropologist and social scientist, who was an inspiration personally and intellectually to generations of students, died on July 4 2005, after a period of illness.

Her work focused on issues of race, gender and the body, with field sites ranging from London to Nigeria and Ghana. Her most recent work was a humane and challenging critique of the history and memory of the slave trade in Ghana, and in particular the memorial practices associated with former slave forts along its coast.

She was one of the first scholars to talk to all participants in this conflicted historical problem. A great loss to scholarship is her planned book, which would have combined the historical facts of the slave trade with the memory, real and imagined, of Africans in the diaspora, especially in the United States.

Dr Benson taught widely, for Social and Political Sciences as well as Social Anthropology; her teaching was so exceptional that Varsity made her their ‘Star of the Week’ in a column that rarely featured senior members. She had been a Fellow of New Hall since 1979. Her optimism, good humour and sympathetic yet robust good sense made her an outstanding tutor to hundreds of students over the years. She will be remembered with great admiration, warmth, and affection.

The funeral will be held at the Cambridge Crematorium at noon on Tuesday July 12, with a private gathering afterwards. The family has asked friends not to send flowers, but would welcome donations to a New Hall fund to be identified in due course. Details of a memorial gathering in New Hall will be announced later.

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