Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule  (August 11, 1928 – February 6, 2001) served as the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray -Stone Radcliffe Professor at Harvard between 1970 and 1994. She received an undergraduate degree in Greek and philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1950, a masters degree in classical archaeology from Radcliffe College in 1954, and a Ph.D. in Greek from Bryn Mawr in 1956. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Richmond Lattimore, was entitled "Bacchylides and Lyric Style."

Vermeule attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as a Fulbright Scholar in 1950–1951, where she took part in the excavation of a Mycenaean tomb. Three years later, in 1953–1954 she studied at St Anne's College, Oxford, Oxford University, as a Catherwood Fellow. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964–1965.

She taught at Bryn Mawr and Wellesley College from 1956 to 1958, became an assistant professor of classics in 1958, and was hired as an associate professor at Boston University in 1961. In 1965 she returned to Wellesley, holding the position of Professor of Art and Greek until 1970. She was the James Loeb Visiting Professor of Classical Philology at Harvard University in 1969. In 1970, she was appointed the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Harvard University, where she taught in both the Department of Classics and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She retired from teaching in 1994.

In 1995, Vermeule served as the president of the American Philological Association (now Society for Classical Studies). She delivered a presidential lecture at the 1995 annual meeting in San Diego entitled "Archaeology and Philology: The Dirt and the Word."

Vermeule excavated at many sites in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Libya, including Gordion in the early 1950s, and Kephallenia, Messenia, Coastal East Libya, Halicarnassus, and Thera-Santorini in the 1960s. She was director of the excavations at Toumba tou Skourou, Cyprus, from 1971 to 1974. Considered her most significant excavation, Touma tou Skourou, near Mourphou, Cyprus, was a Late Bronze Age town that Vermeule uncovered which represented three different cultures coming together: Palestinian, Egyptian, and Minoan.

Due to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Vermeule was forced to abruptly end her excavation and leave the island. This expedition led to her publishing two books about the excavation and the artifacts found, "Toumba tou Skourou: The Mound of Darkness" (1974) and "Toumba tou Skourou: A Bronze Age Potter's Quarter on Morphou Bay in Cyprus" (1990).

Vermeule was awarded the Radcliffe Graduate Society Gold Medal in 1968. In 1980, she received the American Philological Association's Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit for her book "Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry."

In 1982m the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Vermeule for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Her lecture was entitled "Greeks and Barbarians: The Classical Experience in the Larger World," and dealt with the relationship between the Greeks and their "less civilized" neighbours.

Vermeule has received several honorary degrees from institutions throughout the United States. In 1968, Douglass College, Rutgers University, awarded her a D.Litt.; 1970, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a D.F.A; 1970, Regis College, LL.D; 1971, Smith College, D.Litt.; 1973, Wheaton College, D.Litt.; and 1974, Trinity College, Hartford, L.H.D.

A festschrift in her honor was published in 1998 titled "The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule."