Notes from the Chair
Stefan Timmermans Accepts Tenure-track Post
"Tuesdays with Morrie"
Departmental Website
Remarks Delivered on the Occasion of the Visit of the Dalai Lama to Brandeis
Thoughts from Andy Levine, B.A. '98
Highlights of a Year in Sociology and Women's Studies
Visiting Professors
Colloquia 1997-98
New MAs
New PhDs
Faculty Notes
Current Grad Student Activity
1997-1998 Dissertation Perspecti
New Jobs
News from Department PhDs
Honors Thesis Symposium
Class of 1998 Prizes and Awards
Incoming Class of 1998
by Peter Conrad
I returned to the department this fall after a year's sabbatical in London. It was a smooth hand-off, since George was leaving for European sojourns and I was settling back into the chairship. Upon return I found the department doing well, and entering what most of us see as a period of transition. Long-time faculty are retiring and new faculty will be joining the department. I see this as an exciting time for the department, but not one without potential pitfalls.
As noted in last year's newsletter, Charlie Fisher has retired and is now living in California. Maury Stein, who completed his 43rd year at Brandeis, will essentially be half-time in the department for the next three years and then retire. It is almost unimaginable to have a Sociology Department at Brandeis without Maury. We are grateful to have him with us for the next three years.
This year we hired Stefan Timmermans to a tenure-track position in medical sociology. He was visiting for three years, and after a thorough national search, we agreed that Stefan was the best candidate and offered him the position. We are delighted he accepted and will by staying on board.
On the other hand, we are saddened that Michael Macy has left the department for the pastures of Cornell University. It was a hard choice for Michael and we wish him well. He made great contributions to our department in his ten years here and he will be missed.
We will be searching for two new faculty this year, a five year post in Aging and a tenure-track position in Quantitative Methods. Along with Stefan, these new faculty will bring new ideas and energy and meld into the spirit of Sociology at Brandeis.
George Ross has accepted a joint appointment in Politics and Marty Krauss of the Heller School has accepted a joint appointment in our department. George will teach two courses in Politics yearly and Marty will teach a course on disability every other year in our department. Carmen Sirianni also now has a joint appointment in the Heller School and will teach the Sociology portion of their core course.
Judy Hanley, our departmental administrator extraordinaire, has managed to convince the university to recarpet and paint our building. This is a major event, given that some of the offices haven't been painted in over twenty years! Along with the new rewiring providing us all with Ethernet connections, Pearlman Hall is moving handsomely into the 21st century.
The entire department will be here this year (only Dessima Williams will be away in Spring after winning a Bernstein Fellowship) which should allow us to nurture and guide the department through the changes.
We always like to hear from our alumni, so send us news and keep in touch.
Stefan Timmermans Accepts Tenure-track Post
After visiting for three years in the Department, Stefan Timmermans has accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. Stefan is originally from Belgium and received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. His areas of expertise include medical sociology, sociology of science and technology, sociology of the body and qualitative methods. He is already well published and has just completed a book, Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR, which will be published by Temple University Press.
The life and philosophy of Morrie Schwartz, a longtime member of this department, continues to resonate and touch people. Mitch Albom, a former student of Morrie's and a Brandeis graduate, has written a book based on his relationship with Morrie and especially his weekly meetings as Morrie was dying. The book, Tuesdays with Morrie (Doubleday, 1997), has become a phenomenal best seller, with over 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, much of that as one of the top three selling nonfiction books. As of this writing there are over 800,000 copies in print and this is before any paperback editions. In July, Ted Koppel had two more "Nightline" shows about Morrie. It is truly amazing and wonderful how Morrie's influence continues long after he has gone.
Under the direction of Carmen Sirianni and graduate student Kay Jenkins, we are revising and developing our departmental Website. It will now contain more information about the department and our faculty, including even some photographs. So check us out at: http://www.brandeis.edu.
Remarks Delivered on the Occasion of the Visit of the Dalai Lama to Brandeis
by Gordon Fellman
We are, many of us, hungry for the opportunity to express our higher natures.
About thirty years ago, Erik Erikson, one of the great psychohistorians and psychoanalytic innovators of the century, wrote a book about Gandhi. Erikson said at that time that if our species is to survive what we have created, nonviolence will have to become the major mode of political confrontation. That, or we will all likely die.
Gandhi's success with nonviolent resistance against the British empire was mixed and complicated. But he established an ideology and a corresponding political psychology which have grown since his time.
Gandhi was inspired by Thoreau as well as classic Hindu texts and traditions. A generation later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Gandhi and Christian texts and traditions. Both Gandhi and King insisted on not dehumanizing the enemy but compromising on seeking full human rights either. This is a crucial tenet of nonviolence.
The sources of the Dalai Lama's nonviolence are in Buddhism. Politically and ethically, though, the Dalai Lama is the continuity and heir to that which Gandhi and King began.
I used to assume, as do many people, that nonviolence is the opposite of violence. Yet the work nonviolence has always bothered me. It sounds so negative, as if we are defining something we desire entirely in terms of what it is not. It took me many years of working in the field of peace and conflict studies and reading the Dalai Lama to realize that the opposite of violence is not nonviolence; the opposite of violence is compassion. How fortunate indeed we are that the foremost theorist and practitioner of compassion as political technique, world view, and trans-human vision graces our university today.
Because this is a university hosting His Holiness, Larry Simon persuasively suggested to me about five months ago, when we learned of the Dalai Lama's impending visit, that we inform our community--at Brandeis and Beyond--of some of the cultural, religious, and political issues associated with the Dalai Lama and Tibet.
I have had the privilege of working with about forty extraordinarily determined, imaginative, gentle, decent, gifted, dedicated students in our campus chapter of Students for a Free Tibet in designing and carrying out a series of sixteen programs we called Seven Weeks on Tibet....
...The construction of the sand mandala in our library, by nuns of the Keydong Tibetan Buddhist nunnery in Katmandu, Nepal, turned out to be the centerpiece of our Seven Weeks on Tibet. This was to be the first group of Tibetan nuns ever to construct a sand mandala in the United States.......It was our enormous honor and pleasure to have the Dalai Lama, at Brandeis yesterday, for the first time in history see a sand mandala made by nuns and take part in dismantling it.
Our community has been graced for 2 1/2 weeks now by the presence of the nuns. They have charmed us with their modest, unassuming ways and taught us more than they perhaps realize about Buddhist integrity, simplicity, and spirituality. They have made the Rapaporte Treasure Hall in our library into what anthropologists c all a sacred space. We have thrilled to feel their serenity, their holiness, their warm, happy, friendly ways...
...Finally, I thank Students for a Free Tibet, both locally and nationally, for their efforts on behalf of human dignity and national self determination. To help support their cause, and also the project of establishing a Tibetan culture center in the Boston area, I urge you all here today to go after this meeting to the Tibet Fair outside, and to buy, for a pittance, the remarkable posters commemorating the Dalai Lama's visit to Brandies and the wonderful tee shirts created for this visit and thereby contribute to those two excellent causes.
This has been surely the most extraordinary semester Brandeis has had in its now 50 years. We are inspired by the presence of a man who has learned to transcend hatred and to feel and live love and compassion, a man who says that enemies are the greatest teachers, for they enable us to learn compassion and patience. May we do more than admire the Dalai Lama. May we learn from his ways and with the growing number of people who accept those ways, may we learn to work for peace within us and for peace around us. Surely there is no nobler of more urgent work in the world.
Thank you.
Thoughts from Andy Levine, B.A. '98
Upon returning to the Brandeis community after seven months abroad in Northeastern Brazil, I took the opportunity to write a senior honors thesis. It stood as an academic endeavor and personal responsibility. The impact of my research on Brazilian death squad homicide and extralegal violence had left a profound and lasting mark on my level of consciousness and awareness. With the guidance of Professor Gila Hayim, an analysis of Brazilian death squads and extralegal violence was attempted to better understand this very complex issue, and to give a voice to those who have died for justice, from injustice, and who pay daily for the absence of justice.
Throughout the year as I progressed with my thesis project, I began to look at my field research in a different light. As a "gringo" living in Brazil, I realized that my own problems are nothing compared to those of the four generation family living in a ten square foot shack, fearing the actions of vindictive law enforcement officers. The research also fostered an understanding that is at the backbone of much sociological and social scientific thought; whereas it is a simple matter to look away from the poor and violated, to ignore their desperate marginality, but to do so is to invent a world that simply does not exist.
As I completed my thesis project, I realized that more sustained analyses must flourish in an academic context. The Jane Travel Grant, sponsored by the Latin American Studies Department, is my opportunity for continued field-based research. The issue of extralegal violence has been a victim of neglect, and by un- responsiveness by the Brazilian government. The consistent violations of basic human and civil rights have been met with political rhetoric and social impasse. Hopefully, as I return to Brazil on the Jane Travel Grant with more questions and more experience, we can all move closer to approaching genuine solutions to the death squad phenomenon.
Highlights of a Year in Sociology and Women's Studies
by Shulamit Reinharz
This year my time was divided between university affairs, the creation of the International Research Institute on Jewish Women (IRIJW), directing the Women's Studies Program, the Department of Sociology, and public speaking. It was a hectic year, filled with conferences I co-organized and conferences I attended.
For example, in December, the IRIJW held an international conference of scholars who do research on Jewish women in other countries. Eleven countries were represented: Morocco, France, England, Hungary, Latvia, Israel, Mexico, Canada, Iran, Germany and the U.S. We plan to hold a similar conference this coming December, with people from additional countries. We produced a video on the conference, and taped about 40 hours of interviews. We are now working on publishing a book based on the conference.
In April, we collaborated with the American Jewish Committee and produced a two-day conference on the Future of the American Jewish Family, which we plan to repeat on a biennial basis. This summer I went to Jerusalem for our third conference - in collaboration with the Hebrew University, on the role of women in founding the State of Israel. This too will be repeated, by a conference at Brandeis this coming March on the role of American Jewish women in helping to create the State of Israel.
The IRIJW was founded in 1997 with a generous grant from Hadassah to the University. I have established a 14 person international board of donors and advisors, with Barbra Streisand serving as honorary chair. The board meets twice a year at Brandeis. We have also established an Academic Advisory Committee of about 50 scholars, activists, and communal leaders, which also meets twice a year.
We have produced our first newsletter, our first working paper (on the role of Jewish women in films), our first survey, have initiated an academic journal called Nashim (Hebrew for women), hired graduate students and accepted interns, and established a monograph series through UPNE (University Press of New England). I will gladly share any of these items with anyone who is interested. Contact me at irijw@brandeis.edy. Because of the exciting work of the IRIJW, the staff has been inundated with speaking requests which have taken us throughout the country
This year I was the Robin Williams, Jr. lecturer of the Eastern Sociological Society. I gave a talk at the Eastern meeting in Philadelphia, and repeated it at George Washington University and at the Russell Sage Colleges in Troy, New York. I received the Myrtle Wreath Award from Hadassah, and next fall I will receive the "Woman of Distinction" award from them. I was also elected to membership in the International Women's Forum, and received the "Spirit of Liberty Award" from People for the American Way.
Because of the enormous growth of the Women's Studies Program, which I direct, I have been authorized to expand into another building (Epstein) if I raise the funds for the renovation. So, that is what I am doing. I hope to be able to inaugurate the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. Please come and visit. It's sure to be beautiful.
Matthew Lawson received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton (1996) where he worked with Robert Withnow and Paul DiMaggio, following an M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He spent the past two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College. For his dissertation, "The Structure of Charismatic Moral Action," he studied a Catholic pentacostal prayer group. He has published several papers from his research and is currently revising it into a book. Matthew's main substantive sociological interests include culture, religion and inequality. In the fall semester he taught Class Structure and Consciousness and a new course Cults, Sects and Modernity. In spring he taught Quantitative Methods of Social Inquiry and a new hybrid course Sociology of Culture. Matt will also be a visiting faculty for 1998-99.
Teresa Brennan, Australian by origin, obtained her Ph.D. from Cambridge University (1990). She has published numerous articles and several books: History After Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993); The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and the forthcoming Beyond Hubris: Elements for a New Economy (in German, Frankfurt: Fis her Verlag, 1997) and The Age of Paranoia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). She has edited Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989) and, with Martin Jay, Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (New York: Routledge, 1996). She has taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Amsterdam and Cambridge University. Teresa was here for a year and taught two course in Spring semester: Women's Studies 205 and Sociology 130a Families.
Kath Weston received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford (1988) and is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University West in Phoenix. She has published Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins... (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and with Estelle Freedman and others, edited The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), as well as numerous articles. She received the Ruth Benedict Prize for Families We Choose. Kath taught two courses in spring semester: Sociology 169 Issues in Sexuality and a new course on Diaspora Communities.
Professors Brennan and Weston were visitors in Sociology and Women's Studies.
Professor Charles Bosk, University of Pennsylvania -- "Irony, Ethnography and Consent"
Professor Teresa Brennan, Visiting Professor, Brandeis -- "Princess Diana and the Sociology of Feelings"
Professor Robbie P. Kahn, University of Vermont -- "The Male Gaze/Female Body: A Slide Presentation"
Professor Marty Wyngaarden Krauss, Heller School, Brandeis -- "Caregiving as a Career: Findings from a Study of Mothers of Adults with Mental Retardation"
Dr. Susan McGee Bailey, Wellesley College Centers for Research on Women -- "How Schools Shortchange Girls: 5 Years Later"
Professor Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley -- "Crisis of Experience in a Post Subjective Age"
Mr. James Peshlakai, Navajo Educator and Community Organizer, Arizona -- "The Navajo: From Culture to culture"
In Sociology:
John Kelly
Hjordis Korsgren
In Sociology & Women's Studies:
Tobin Belzer
Barbara Cassidy
Alison Greene
Haley Huelsman
Christa Kelleher
Debra Osnowitz
Amy Carol Agigian - "Contradictory Conceptions: Lesbian Alternative Insemination"
Betsy Aron - "The Ecology of Trade Unionism in New England"
Benjamin Davidson - "Ecstasy (An Inquiry Into Gay Male Identity and Contemporary Culture)"
Cameron Lynne Macdonald - "Working Mothers and Mother-workers: Nannies, Au Pairs and the Social Construction of Mothering"
Angela L. Thompson - "Unveiled: The Emotion Work of Wedding Coordinators in the American Wedding Industry"
Farzin Vahdat - "God and the Juggernaut: Iran's Intellectual Encounter with Modernity" o-o-o-o-o
Egon Bittner, Professor Emeritus, received the Police Executive Research Forum's 1998 Leadership Award. A nomination letter for the award sent to the department said, in part, "I...believe everyone on the committee will recall immediately the enormous contribution Professor Bittner has made to our individual and shared capacities to understand and to think about policing. Virtually every student of policing since 1970 has stood on his intellectual shoulders." Congratulations, Egon.
Peter Conrad returned from sabbatical in England and published several papers this year, including: "It's Boring: Notes on the Meaning of Boredom in Everyday Life" in Qualitative Sociology, "Anselm Strauss and the Sociological Study of Chronic Illness" (with Mike Bury), in Sociology of Medical Sociology, "Parallel Play in Medical Sociology and Medical Anthropology" in The American Sociologist, and "Why Bioethics Needs Sociology" (with Raymond DeVries) in R. De Vries and J. Sybedi; (eds.), Bioethics and Society: Sociological Investigations of the Enterprise of Bioethics, (Prentice-Hall, 1998). He continues working on his research on genetics in the news, from which he presented papers at the recent ISA and ASA meetings. Following his Fulbright in Spring 1977 to Queen's University of Belfast (Northern Ireland), Peter has been appointed as a continuing Visiting Professor to the Sociology Department at Queen's. He will be spending a week a year for the next four years as a visitor in the department.
Gordon Fellman has been promoted to Full Professor. He invested an enormous amount of energy on the remarkable event bringing the Dalai Lama to Brandeis (see Gordon's comments elsewhere in the newsletter). His book Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival will be published by SUNY press this fall.
Charlie Fisher is now officially an emeritus professor. He is living in California in a house he recently purchased and is remodeling. He welcomes communication from old friends from the Department. His phone is 415-488-4586; e-mail is chollie@hotmail.com; address is P.O. Box 135, Lagunitas, CA 94938.
Karen V. Hansen returned this fall from sabbatical, which included trips to Norway and North Dakota to collect data for her research on the Norwegian homesteader-Native American encounter. She has received a Sloan Foundation Fellowship from the Center on Working Families, University of California, Berkeley, for 1999-2000 to support her work on "Domestic Networks: Race, Class and Kinship." Karen's co-edited book Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Policies was published this year by Temple University Press. This volume included her introduction and a chapter, "Masculinity, Caregiving and Men's Friendships in Antebellum, New England."
Matthew Lawson served as Head of Undergraduate Advising spring semester, and growing enrollments in his classes show that students appreciate his talents. He published a chapter in "Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader" (AltaMira Press) entitled "Struggles for Mutual Reverence: Social Strategies and Religious Stories." He also had a syllabus accepted for publication in an ASA teaching compendium on the Sociology of Religion.
Jo Anne Preston has completed her book manuscript on the feminization of teaching and is talking with publishers. This spring she delivered a paper, "Female Teachers in Austria and the United States: A Life Course Analysis of the Impact of World War II on Women's Well-Being in Old Age" with graduate student Katrin Kris at the Eastern Sociology Meetings in Philadelphia. They are also reporting on their collaborative research at the International Sociology Meetings and the History of Education Meetings. Jo Anne traveled to Belgium this summer to present a paper on the feminization of teaching at the International Association of Education. Over the past year she also published in Contemporary Sociology and the Historical Directory of Women's Education. Her article "Reading Teachers' Mail: Using Women's Correspondence to Reconstruct the Nineteenth-Century Classroom" will be published in an edited volume this summer.
George Ross has been on sabbatical leave for 1997-1998, first in Montreal, Canada, then in Brussels, Belgium where he occupied the Chaire Franqui à titre étranger at the Université Libre de Bruxelles et l'Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve. Since autumn 1997 he has also held a joint appointment between sociology and politics at Brandeis. The Brave New World of European Unions, the product of a research group which he coordinated, is in press at Berghahn Publishers. He has also lectured during the year at Cornell, Harvard, the University of Montreal, IRES in Paris, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, the Max Planck Insitute in Cologne Germany, the Free University of Berlin, IRES in Paris, ARENA in Oslo, the Institute for European Studies at the ULB in Brussels, the Amicale de la Pensée Critique at the EU Council of Ministers, The Employment and Social Affairs Directorate of the European Commission, the European Trade Union Confederation's 25th Anniversary Conference and at the annual meeting of the Francophone Association of University Rectors and Presidents in Beirut Lebanon. Other than that, he published a number of articles and was rained upon incessantly during the Brussels springtime. The other highlight of his Brussels stay, beyond eating too much, was an opportunity to shake the hand of the King of the Belgians. The most interesting moment of the year, however, was a two week stay in China.
Stefan Timmermans recently published "Resuscitating in the Emergency Department: Techno-care or Careless Technology?" in Sociology of Medical Sociology and "Debating Universality: The Case of Closed-Chest Cardiac Massage" in International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. This year he presented papers at the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Social Study of Science, the Society for Social Study of Symbolic Interaction, the American Sociological Association, the British Sociological Association, and the Eastern Sociological Association. He also taught a new course "Illness Narratives" as an intensive writing seminar for first-year students.
Dessima Williams spent the spring involved in diplomatic negotiations and advocacy on the issue of Windward Islands banana trade, the WTO and the Single European Market. She held meetings with EU ministers including the UK's Glennis Kinnock in Brussels, with Caribbean Prime Ministers and Ministers of Trade and Industry, and with heads of regional organizations such as WINFA, WIBDECO, OECS and CARICOM. She was a delegate to the 67th Session of the ACP-EU Ministerial Meeting (Barbados) and attended the 19th CARICOM Heads of Government meeting (St. Lucia, where she met the visiting South African President, Nelson Mandela). For a direct understanding of the changing nature of the banana trade and small producers' responses to the European Union's proposal to the 1995 TO banana ruling, she interviewed (female and male) farmers in St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Grenada. She serves as founder/Director of the Grenada Education and Development Programme, GRENED. She delivered the keynote address to the 27th International Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedon, "Globalization: Going Bananas?"
Kurt Wolff, professor emeritus, has published several papers: "Il sogno e la resa," Italian translation, by Consuelo Corradi, of "Surrender and the Other" (1994), Il Corpo, 1995, ; "A Rejoinder to paperson on O Loma! <1989> by J. Hinkle, J.B. Imber, J. Gordon, and M. Bakan, Which Turns Out to be Loma or the Good Society," Human Studies, July, 1996; "Foreword: Jerry Boime's Longing," in Albert Boime, Ed., Violence and Utopia: The Work of Jerome Boime, Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1996; "On the Way to Simmer," Simmel Newsletter, Summer 1996; and "On the Landscape of the Relation between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger," The American Sociologist, Spring 1997; "Toward Things and the Good Society," in Philosophy and Social Criticism, (in press).
Kurt recently moved to Heritage at the Falls in Newton. He is recovering from a long illness. He welcomes notes and phone calls from old friends. His number remains 617-244-8323. His new address is: 2300 Washington St., # 226, Newton Lower Falls, MA 02462-1451.
Amy Agigian -- Amy finished her dissertation - the biggest news. She also won the Sagan Family Grant for Graduate Women's Studies Research. Next year she will teach "Women in Contemporary Society" and "Women in Struggle in Film" in the Sociology Dept. at Suffolk University.
Tobin Belzer -- Tobin has a book contract with SUNY Press to co-edit an anthology "On the Fringes: An Anthology of Young Jewish Women's Writing" with Julie Pelc of Washington University of St. Louis. She published her first article: "Dorothy Feiner Rodgers: A Jewish Identity at the Intersection of Class, Gender and Race" in Race, Gender, & Class: An Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Journal - Special Edition on American Jewish Perspectives. Tobin is currently the Managing Editor of the Brandeis Women's Studies Newsletter and a Graduate Research Associate at the IRIJW. She received two prizes: Awarded National Women's Studies Association Scholarship for the study of Jewish Women, 1997 and the Kazes Prize for the most substantial contribution to the Brandeis University Women's Studies Program, 1996.
C.J. Churchill -- C.J. published an article, "The Promise of the Postmodern Sociologist" in the spring, '98 issue of the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society (Vol. 11, No. 3). He co-organized a graduate Student symposium in the sociology department of the New School for Social Research and is commenting on a panel discussing the anthropologist Barry Laffan's recently published book "Communal Organization and Social Transition: A Case Study from the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies" at the beginning of August.
Jillian Dickert -- Jillian is currently working with Theda Skocpol at Harvard on a study of organizations advocating for children and families in the 20th Century, examining how they have changed over time.
Jillian completed the report, "Making Family Leave More Affordable: Temporary Disability Insurance and the Need for Paid Family Leave in Massachusetts," for the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy (CWPPP) at UMass - Boston. The report will be released at a legislative briefing for the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators in early fall. Jillian continues as a Visiting Research Associate at the CWPPP, which is part of the McCormack Institute of Public Affairs.
She also co-authored a study of work reorganization and work/family policies for the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute (RPPI), and action research project in collaboration with Fleet Financial Group.
In May, Jillian presented her paper, "States, Politics and the Origins of Maternity Leave Policy in the US," to the Boston-area American Political Development research workshop at Harvard University.
Jean Elson -- Jeany has been awarded a very competitive national dissertation fellowship by the AAUW Educational Foundation, as well as a Grant for Graduate Research in Women's Studies from Brandeis. This funding will enable her to complete her dissertation, "'Am I Still a Woman?': Female Identity and Gynecological Surgery." During the past academic year, Jean has been employed as an Honors Thesis Supervisor in the Department of Social Studies at Harvard University and has also taught a junior tutorial on women's health in the Harvard Women's Studies department. She continues this year as co-chair of the Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services for the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She will take part in the annual meeting in San Francisco this August. This year she was elected student representative to the nominations committee of the Medical Sociology Section of ASA. Jean also attended the SWS conference in Atlanta last winter.
Faith Ferguson had an article published in a new journal, Community Work and Family (vol.1, n.1 April 1998) called "Only One Pair of Hands: Ways that Single Mothers Stretch Work and Family Resources". It is co-authored with Rosanna Hertz, who is a Brandeis Sociology Department undergrad alumna (now a professor at Wellesley).
Victoria Pitts -- Victoria has spent the year in Ireland. She presented a paper, "Provoking the Organic: Representation and Resistance in Extreme Body Marking," at the British Sociological Association conference in Edinburgh in April. She has also published her article " 'Reclaiming' the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance, and the Grotesque" in Body and Society, September 1998.
1997-1998 Dissertation Perspecti
Jeany Elson. "Am I Still a Woman? A Sociological Analysis of Hysterectomy and Oophorectomy Experiences"
Mary Godwyn. "The Emancipatory Potential of Discursive Rationality"
Lawrence Holcomb. "Light, Bright and Damned Near White: Light-skinned Afro-European American Males and the Negotiation of Traditional Racial Categories" Patti Sardella. "Working the System: Voices of the Medically Uninsured"
Tina Taylor. "The New You: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds"
Karen Werner. "Art, Resistance, and the Production of Culture: A Case Study of Mierle Ukeles, Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation"
Monisha Das Gupta, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University (tenure track).
Cameron Macdonald, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut (tenure track).
Sungsook Moon, Department of Sociology, Vassar College (tenure track).
Angela Thompson, Department of Sociology, Texas Christian Univesity (tenure track).
James Ault (PhD 1981) showed us his film "Born Again: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church" last fall at Brandeis. The film has been awarded a Blue Ribbon from the American Film Festival.
Phil Brown (PhD 1979) has published Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area (Temple University Press, 1998). Phil, a professor of Sociology at Brown University, is also co-founder of the Catskills Institute, which has held annual conferences since 1995, as well as publishing a newsletter and collecting archives.
Steve Dandaneau (PhD 1992), University of Dayton, has a book, A Wrong Life: Studies in Lifeworld-Grounded Critical Theory, forthcoming with JAI Press. The book is co-authored with his wife, Maude Falcone.
Mindy Fried (PhD 1996) has published Taking Time: Parental Leave Policy and Corporate Culture (Temple University Press, 1998). She is the project director for the National Work/Life Measurement Project at Boston College Center for Work and Family.
Lewis Friedland (PhD 1984) has been promoted to Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Ruth Harriet Jacobs (PhD 1969) - Harper Collins published 75,000 first printing copies of Ruth's updated, revised book Be an Outrageous Older Woman. Harper Collins also issued an audio abridgement of the book recorded by Ruth who got her Brandeis PhD in 1969 at the age of 45 and is now 73. She is still teaching part time at three colleges and is a researcher at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.
Robbie Pfeufer Kahn (PhD 1989), University of Vermont, received the ASA Jesse Bernard Award for her book Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth. The award is given annually on recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the roles of women in society.
Harriet S. Miller (PhD 1973) is retiring this year from Framingham State College.
Jerry Starr (PhD 1970) currently is on leave from West Virginia University, courtesy of a sabbatical and a grant from the Schumann Foundation (recommended by Bill Moyers) to write a book, tentatively titled Public Television in the Public Interest: How to Make Public Television Accountable to Your Community . A major part of the book will be devoted to the story of Jerry's campaign to reform programming and operations at WQED Pittsburgh and, more recently, to stop the corporation from selling off its second station, a public trust given by Congress to the community for educational.
Jerry published a paper on this issue this year, "The Public Impact of Sociology: Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest," and recently presented a paper at the Media & Democracy Congress II in New York. The paper, "Independent Public Broadcasting: A Proposal," is being used to launch a national campaign to establish permanent, independent and adequate funding for public broadcasting to save it from relentless privatization and conservative programming pressure from corporations and the state.
Winter term, 1998 Jerry will be Visiting Scholar in the Department of Communications of the University of California at San Diego while working on the book. In April, he and wife Judy plan to lead a delegation of social studies teachers to the Peoples Republic of China on behalf of the Eisenhower Citizen Ambassador Program.
Becky Thompson (PhD 1991) was awarded tenure at Simmons College.
Barrie Thorne (PhD 1971) has recently published an autobiographical essay about ways in which the Brandeis milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s nurtured early connections between the women's liberation movement and sociology as an academic field. The essay, titled "Brandeis as a Generative Institution: Critical Perspectives, Marginality, and Feminism," appears, along with autobiographical essays by twelve others, in Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne, eds., Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement (Rutgers Univ. Press paper, 1997). Barrie moved to the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment in Sociology and in Women's Studies, in 1995. She is currently involved in a comparative ethnographic study of childhoods in three California communities which vary in social class, ethnicity, histories of immigration, and processes of racialization. It is a collaborative project funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Middle Childhood.
Katerina Wegar (PhD 1993) of Old Dominion University has published Adoption, Identity and Kinship: The Debate over Sealed Birth Records (Yale University Press, 1997)
A number of this year's senior concentrators conducted research and wrote fine theses. The process, for the first time, culminated in a symposium of students' work to the department faculty and guests. Topics covered socialization, the law, medical sociology, women and politics, and identity. Congratulations to these honors graduates!
Inessa Libman - "Social Mobility and Body Image: A Study of College Women"
Leo Fuchs - "Disciplines of Persuasion"
Andrew Levine - "The Death Squad Phenomenon: An Analysis of Brazilian Extralegal Violence"
Melissa Rock - "Tracing Discrimination Within Police Enforcement: Research from the 1960's to the 1990's"
Julekha Choudhury - "Analysis of the Transition of Health Care Organizations into Integrated Health Systems"
Anne Pollock - "Complicating Power in High-Tech Reproduction: Narratives of Anonymous Paid Egg Donors"
Monica Roberts - "The Effect of Economic Integration on Women in the Caribbean"
Sharon Abramowitz - "Women, Power, and Leadership in American Politics: A Case Study of Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright"
Naomi Jacobson - "Women and Forms of Marital Law: Common Law and Community Property in the United States"
Brian Leiken - "Culture, Identity and Nationalism: The Canadian Identity Quest"
Abigail Siegel - "Orthodox Jewish Women at Brandeis: A Study in Group Dynamics and Self Perception"
Class of 1998 Prizes and Awards
Monica Roberts - Meyer J. and Cecelia R. Kamen and Moses A. Kamen Award; McNair Scholar Karen Barone - Frank Leslie Honor Award in Sociology
Rachel Cox - Frank Leslie Honor Award in Sociology Andrew Levine - Jane's Travel Grant
Inessa Libman - McNair Scholars
Anne Pollack - Richard Saber Undergraduate Grant in Women's Studies; Undergraduate Journal
Michele Greenwald - Student Affairs Prize
Incoming Class of 1998
Jennifer Ginsburg -- B.A. in psychology (1992) from University of California - Berkeley; post baccalaureate study (1997-98) in sociology at Portland State University. Presently Jennifer is working on research with various faculty at Portland State University.
Heather Jacobson -- BA, BFA in history and Drama (1993) from Carnegie Mellon and M. Phil (1995) from Trinity College Dublin. Presently Heather is teaching English at a Taragi Senior High School in Japan. Her interests include gender, sexuality and feminist research methodologies.
Jennifer Zoltanski -- BA in French (1986) from the University of Denver, MS in sociology (1995) from Portland State University and Research Interviewer at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland Oregon.
Hilla Israeli -- BA in Social Work (1991), MA in Sociology (1997) from Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel where Hilla also taught courses in the department of Social Work at the University. Hilla presently lives in Brookline, MA. and is entering the joint PhD program (NEJS & Sociology).
Meg Lovejoy -- BA in Sociology (1984) from Bryn Mawr College, MA in Education (degree pending) from Harvard University.
Joint MA Program
Heidi Kruckenberg -- Candidate for the joint MA with Women's Studies. AA from Ricks College and BA from University of Idaho with major in English and minor in Women's Studies. Presently Heidi works at the University of Idaho as a Research Assistant for the Literacy Technology Project.
Devon Fitzig -- Candidate for the joint MA with NEJS. BA in American Studies and Sociology (1997) from University of Kansas. While a student there Devon worked in the Office of Affirmative Action.
This edition of the newsletter was compiled and edited by Peter Conrad and Judy Hanley. Please send us your news by e-mail now at either: conrad@.brandeis.edu or hanley@brandeis.edu). If you haven't got e-mail, 'snail mail' will do: Peter or Judy c/o Brandeis Univesity, M.S. 071, Waltham, MA 02454-9110.
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IMPORTANT: If you have some news now, please send it along right away (so you don't forget). We'll hold it for the summer 1999 edition. Of course, we welcome input any time of year!