The search for truth,
40 years later
David Cunningham
Associate Professor of SociologyPh.D., University of North Carolina
David Cunningham may no longer be a doctoral student in North Carolina, but his time spent living there continues to influence his research.He is in the midst of writing a book on how North Carolina went from the most active Ku Klux Klan state less than 40 years ago to helping elect the nation’s first African-American president in 2008.
“What Sen. Barack Obama symbolized as a candidate makes it extremely timely to revisit our history and see it as an opportunity to think about reconciliation around past conflicts,” Cunningham says.
In that academic vein, Cunningham is connecting his students with their peers at the University of Mississippi on the Mississippi Truth Project, which provides an opportunity for people to tell stories about patterns of racial violence during the civil rights era in Mississippi and think about how what happened relates to lingering inequities there today.
A lifetime of changing perspectives
Jytte Klausen
Professor of Comparative PoliticsPh.D., New School for Social Research, University of Aarhus
“I used to be a European studying American politics,” chuckles Professor of Comparative Politics Jytte Klausen. “Now I’m an American studying European politics.”Danish-born Klausen earned a first Ph.D. at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, a second from the New School for Social Research in New York. Studies in how democracies adjust to social shocks led to a focus on immigration to Europe in general and Muslim immigration in particular.
“People say the problem is the Muslims, but I turn that around and look at how this immigration challenges European institutions, civic life and political organization. Muslims are just the catalyst for big changes in Europe as a result of globalization,” says Klausen, whose fifth book, due out in autumn 2009, chronicles the furor sparked by cartoons of Mohammed published in Europe in 2006.
“I like teaching students how to do their own research,” she says. “I like it when they go off on their own and write back.”