Du Bois's doctoral dissertation, "Girls' Adolescence Observations in North America" covered the topic of puberty and menstrual customs and how they are viewed among Native Americans.

The topic was recommended by a fellow graduate student, but she considered it a very dull and tedious library job.

In the study, Du Bois and her co-author Dorothy Demetracopoulou divided the data into different groups, including the literary aspects of the mythology, the recorded myth, which includes the determination of the time and language factors of recording, and change and stability in Wintu mythology.

In 1935, Du Bois received a National Research Council Fellowship to undertake clinical training and explore possible collaborations between anthropology and psychiatry.

In New York she worked with psychiatrist Abram Kardiner, who became her mentor and collaborator for several projects in cross-cultural diagnosis and the psychoanalytic study of culture.

Du Bois also taught at Hunter College in 1936–1937 while developing a fieldwork project to test their new ideas.

[7] From 1937 to 1939, Du Bois lived and conducted research among the Abui people on the island of Alor, part of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.

Like many other American social scientists during World War II, Du Bois served as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) working in the Research and Analysis Branch as Chief of the Indonesia section.

In 1944 she moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to serve as chief of research and analysis for the Army's Southeast Asia Command.

[9] She left the OSS after World War II and from 1945 to 1949 was Southeast Asia Branch Chief in the State Department's Office of Intelligence Research.

[3] In 1950, she declined an appointment to succeed Kroeber as head of the anthropology department at Berkeley rather than sign the California Loyalty Oath required of all faculty members.

[10] Du Bois asserts that these assumptions have proved valid for the American middle class over the last 300, and expects that to continue in the future.

Barton was believed to be one of his best pieces on the customary laws of the Philippines Tribes in the Mountain Province of Luzon.

[11] In 1957, she reviewed Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History by G. William Skinner, comparing it to works by Victor Purcell and Kenneth Landon.

[1] Cora Du Bois, aged 87, died from pneumonia and heart failure on April 11, 1991, in Brookline, Massachusetts.