Faculty Guide

Title

Professor of Sociology, and Women's and Gender Studies

History
Sociology
Women's and Gender Studies

Expertise

Contemporary families; historical sociology; feminist theory; sociology of gender, class & race/ethnicity; community studies.

Profile

Professor Karen V. Hansen combines sociology and history in her research and teaching. Her latest project, ENCOUNTER ON THE GREAT PLAINS: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This year she is working on the book while at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. The book explores life on a remote Indian reservation in the early twentieth century where Scandinavians began homesteading, with the sanction of the U.S. government. In effect, they dispossessed Dakota Sioux while living as their neighbors ON the reservation. Based on oral histories with elders and extensive landownership records, the book reveals the struggles of women and men – farmers, domestic servants, and day laborers – of two profoundly different cultures as they seek to maintain their language, practice their culture, and honor loyalties to more than one nation.

Professor Hansen’s scholarship also focuses on contemporary families. She authored NOT-SO-NUCLEAR FAMILIES: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care, which received the William J. Goode Book Award, Honorable Mention, and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. Combining theoretical frameworks and rich empirical accounts, she has edited two anthologies with Anita Ilta Garey, AT THE HEART OF WORK AND FAMILY and FAMILIES IN THE U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics.

Awards and Honors

Fellow, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University (2012)

Faculty Scholar, Student-Scholar Partnership Program (2009)

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2006)

William J. Goode Book Award, Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association, Family Section (2006)

Dean of Arts and Sciences Mentoring Award for outstanding mentoring of students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005)

Finalist, C.Wright Mills Award for Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care (2005)

Associate Senior Researcher, Berkeley Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley (1999 - 2000)

National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship (1999)

Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Emigration Fund of 1975 (1998)

Visiting Scholar, Henry A. Murray Research Center, Radcliffe College (1994 - 1996)

American Philosophical Society Grant (1992)

Marver and Sheva Bernstein Faculty Fellowship (1992 - 1993)

Bunting Institute Fellow (1991 - 1992)

Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities (1991 - 1992)

National Endowment for Humanities (summer) (1991)

Woodrow Wilson Research Grant in Women's Stuides (1988)

Gertrude Jaeger Prize, Most Outstanding Graduate Student Essay Written by a Woman in the Sociology Department (1987 - 1988)

University of California-Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award (1984 - 1985)

Courses Taught

AMST/SOC	125a	History of United States Feminisms
GSAS	302d	Interdisciplinary Dissertation Seminar
SOC	130a	Families, Caregiving and Kinship
SOC	131b	Biography, Gender, and Society
SOC	132b	Social Perspectives on Motherhood and Mothering
SOC	206b	Advanced Topics in Family Studies
SOC	210b	Gender, Class, and Race

Scholarship

Hansen, Karen V. Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. (forthcoming)

Hansen, Karen V.. ""Ask Me": Dowsing for Stories on the Great Plains." Open to Disruption: Practicing Slow Sociology. Ed. Rosanna Hertz, Margaret K. Nelson, and Anita Garey. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013 (forthcoming)

Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen. "Introduction: An Eye on Emotion in the Study of Families and Work." At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. Ed. Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 1-14.

Hansen, Karen V. "Land Taking at Spirit Lake: The Competing and Converging Logics of Norwegian and Dakota Women, 1900-1930." Norwegian-American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities. Ed. Betty Berglund and Lori Ann Lahlum. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011. 211-245.

Hansen, Karen V. "The Asking Rules of Reciprocity." At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. Ed. Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 112-123.

Hansen, Karen V. and Ken Chih-Yan Sun. "Localizing Transnational Norwegians: Exploring Nationalism, Language, and Labor Markets in Early Twentieth-Century North Dakota." Norwegian-American Essays, 2011 13. (2011): 73-107.

Hansen, Karen V., co-ed. Anita Ilta Garey, ed. At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Hansen, Karen V. "The Powers of Parental Observation: Constructing Networks of Care." Who's Watching? Daily Practices of Surveillance Among Contemporary Families. Ed. Margaret K. Nelson and Anita Ilta Garey. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. 175-191.

Hansen, Karen V. and Mignon Duffy. "Mapping the Dispossession: Scandinavian Homesteading at Fort Totten, 1900-1930." Great Plains Research 18. Spring (2008): 67-80.

Hansen, Karen V. Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Hansen, Karen V. "The Asking Rules of Reciprocity in Networks of Care for Children." Qualitative Sociology 12. 4 (2004): 421-437.

Hansen, Karen V., co-ed. Anita Garey. Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics. Temple University Press, 1998.

Hansen, Karen V. "‘No Kisses Is Like Youres’: An Erotic Friendship between African-American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century." Gender and History 7. 2 (1995): 153-182.

Hansen, Karen V. A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Hansen, Karen V., co-ed. Ilene Philpson. Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990.