The Foreign Service Journal, November 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2013 63 n Katharine (“Kay”) Payne Mose- ley , 70, a retired Foreign Service officer, died on Oct. 4, 2012, near her family home in Grafton, Vt., following a sudden illness. Ms. Moseley was born at Fort Ben- ning, Ga., on Nov. 6, 1941, to George Van Horn and Katharine Payne Moseley. She spent her childhood in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia during the war years. The family moved back to their Vermont family home in 1945, and she finished her schooling at the Woodstock Country Day School, where she became an accomplished horsewoman. After a year in Japan during the Korean War, she and her mother returned to the United States on an around-the-world cruise on the French Line. This proved to be a very special event for Ms. Moseley, for it began a period of restlessness that lasted throughout her life. Later she would take every opportunity to travel to exotic and exciting corners of the world. Ms. Moseley studied at Barnard Col- lege and Columbia University, earning her Ph.D. in sociology. She started her academic career teaching at Vanderbilt University, moving on to the Univer- sity of Connecticut (Storrs). She then undertook an exciting combination of teaching and Fulbright Scholarships across Africa, serving in Morocco, Nige- ria, Chad, Dahomey, Niger, Sierra Leone and Mali. In 2000 Ms. Moseley entered the Foreign Service, serving in Ndjamena, Nouakchott and Khartoum before retiring in 2006. She continued to work intermittently for the State Depart- ment in the Bureau of African Affairs, returning to Mauritania several times on official assignment as public diplomacy officer in Nouakchott. She also traveled throughout Mauritania doing research on water wells. Friends recall that, although she could let her hair down, Ms. Moseley possessed an innate sense of dignity and style. She had a passion for art, literature and movies, and a special affinity for languages, music and dance, and gath- ered admirers and made deep friend- ships wherever she landed. Ms. Moseley was visiting family and friends in Grafton at the time of