General RIP Thread

Her death was announced by the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.

Weakened by a leg injury and a failing heart and lungs, but resistant to returning to the United States for treatment, Mrs. Dupree had been focusing on what would become her final project: cataloging thousands of photos, some from the early years she and her archaeologist husband, Louis Dupree, spent traveling Afghanistan — she writing guidebooks, he excavating its ancient past.

Mrs. Dupree wrote five books, and more than 100 articles and pamphlets, on Afghanistan. Her legacy, which she often described as the completion of her husband’s vision, is an academic oasis: the Afghanistan Center, a state-of-the-art research hub that houses more than 100,000 items of primary and secondary sources.

Mrs. Dupree bore witness to decades of history, but perhaps the greatest dangers she overcame were during the period of Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001.

Omara Khan Massoudi, the former director of Afghanistan’s National Museum, who knew Mrs. Dupree for 43 years, recalled her making trips to Kabul during those years. The Taliban set out to destroy cultural artifacts as un-Islamic; Mrs. Dupree helped install 32 metal doors in the museum’s galleries to protect what had survived.

“There is a line which I learned from her, and I added it in the calendar when I was the head of the National Museum, and we later inscribed it on a stone at the museum,” Mr. Massoudi said. “The line reads: A nation stays alive if its culture stays alive.”

President Ashraf Ghani, who knew the couple for decades, first crossing paths with them as a young scholar of anthropology, called Mrs. Dupree “a great servant of Afghan history and culture.” Hugo Llorens, the top United States diplomat to Kabul, said that “her love for this country and dedication to its culture and history will be forever remembered.”

Her wife, Judith Kasen-Windsor, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. They were married in 2016.

Four decades after the Stonewall Inn uprising fueled the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in America, Ms. Windsor, the widow of a woman with whom she had lived much of her life, became the lead plaintiff in what is widely regarded as the second most important Supreme Court ruling in the national battle over same-sex marriage rights.

The Windsor decision was limited to 13 states and the District of Columbia. But in 2015, the Supreme Court held that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry anywhere in the nation, with all the protections and privileges of heterosexual couples. Its historic significance was likened to that of Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, which decriminalized gay sex in the United States.