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.