Herskovits, and Sapir's contributions to cultural anthropology, exposed Dunham to topics and ideas that inspired her creatively and professionally. For example, she was highly influenced both by Sapir's viewpoint on culture being made up of rituals, beliefs, customs and artforms, and by Herkovits' and Redfield's studies highlighting links between African and African American cultural expression. It was in a lecture by Redfield that she learned about the relationship between dance and culture, pointing out that Black Americans had retained much of their African heritage in dances. Dunham's relationship with Redfield in particular was highly influential. She wrote that he "opened the floodgates of anthropology" for her. He showed her the connection between dance and social life giving her the momentum to explore a new area of anthropology, which she later termed "Dance Anthropology". In 1935, Dunham was awarded travel fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad studying the dance forms of the Caribbean. One example of this was studying how dance manifests within Haitian Vodou. Dunham also received a grant to work with Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University, whose ideas about retention of African culture among African Americans served as a base for her research in the Caribbean. After her research tour of the Caribbean in 1935, Dunham returned to Chicago in the late spring of 1936. In August she was awarded a bachelor's degree, a Ph.B., bachelor of philosophy, with her principal area of study being social anthropology. She was one of the first African-American women to attend this college and to earn these degrees. In 1938, using materials collected ethnographic fieldwork, Dunham submitted a thesis, The Dances of Haiti: A Study of Their Material Aspect, Organization, Form, and Function,. to the Department of Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master's degree. However, fully aware of her passion for both dance performance, as well as anthropological research, she felt she had to choose between the two. Although Dunham was offered another grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue her academic studies, she chose dance. She did this for many reasons. However, one key reason was that she knew she would be able to reach a broader public through dance, as opposed to the inaccessible institutions of academia. Never completing her required coursework for her graduate degree, she departed for Broadway and Hollywood. Despite her