department of sociology newsletter

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DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY NEWSLETTER
News from the Chair
David Cunningham
Fall 2013 Volume 23
Edited by
Professor Peter Conrad,
Judith Hanley ‘00 and
Charlotte Erb ‘14
Index:
Alumna Patricia Hill Collins
Wins Gittler Prize
3
Donald Light Receives ASA
Award
4
Remembering Philip Slater
5
Ruth Harriet Jacobs 1924 2013
6
Faculty Notes
7
PhD Alumni
11
BA and MA Alumni
18
Current Graduate Student
Activity
20
Welcoming New Grad
Students
24
Bits About Undergraduates
25
2013-2014 Colloquia Series
27
Page 1
Whether receiving this issue
of the newsletter in paper
copy or on a screen, the first
thing that you might
reasonably notice is its heft.
Weighing in at 27 pages, this
edition is - by far - our most
substantial to date. Of course,
academics are acutely aware
that quantity doesn't always
signal quality, so I'm
especially pleased to report
that in this case the extra
pages are, first and foremost,
a direct proxy for the good news emanating from Pearlman Hall and the
Brandeis campus!
2013 is a year of anniversaries, as our graduate program enters its second
half-century, and Gordie Fellman (now embarking on his 50th year in the
depart-ment!), Gila Hayim (entering her 40th year!), and Judy Hanley (25
years of invaluable service in the Sociology office!) approach significant
milestones as well. All the while, Sociology continues to produce books at a
fast and furious rate, with our most recent addition being Karen Hansen's
Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of
Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, published this fall by Oxford University Press.
Wendy Cadge's Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine (University of
Chicago Press) and her co-edited volume Religion on the Edge: Re-Centering and
De-Centering the Sociology of Religion (Oxford University Press), Sara Shostak's
Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment and the Politics of Population Health
(University of California Press), and my Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of
the Civil Rights-Era KKK (Oxford University Press, and a finalist for the SSSP's
2012 C. Wright Mills Award) all came out over the past year, with Carmen
Sirianni's Varieties of Civic Innovation: Deliberative, Collaborative, Network, and
Narrative Approaches (co-edited with Sociology PhD student Jennifer
Girouard, and featuring contributions from a number of department alumni)
now forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press. Peter Conrad and
Valerie Leiter's (PhD '01) seminal reader Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical
Perspectives was also released in its ninth (!) edition in 2013. Among our
Sociology affiliates, Ted Sasson's The New American Zionism (NYU Press) and
Mitra Shavarini's Desert Roots: Journey of an Iranian Immigrant Family (LFB
Scholarly Publishing) were both recently published, with Charles Kadushin's
Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford
University Press) quickly becoming the foremost synthetic text for network
analysts.
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To no one's surprise but everyone's delight, this past spring Sara Shostak was both promoted with tenure and
awarded the prestigious university-wide Michael J. Walzer '56 Award for Excellence in Teaching, which honors,
fittingly enough, "an individual who is involved in the co-curricular and extracurricular life of the campus, and more
importantly, has had a significant impact on students' lives as an exceptional teacher, mentor, adviser and friend." We
are also exceedingly pleased to have Jillian Powers joining us as the joint Sociology/American Studies Kay
Postdoctoral Fellow in Immigration and American Society. Jillian's research focuses on three cases of diasporic
tourism (Taglit-Birthright tours to Israel, slavery/heritage tours to Ghana, and adoption heritage tours to China) to
examine the social dimensions of ancestry, heritage, and American identity. During her two-year term on campus, she
will be working on a related manuscript, titled Traveling to Belong.
Sociology continues to expand its role as a major hub for innovative interdisciplinary engagement on campus. Both
Wendy Cadge and Sara Shostak have begun chairing major university programs – Women’s and Gender Studies and
Health: Science, Society, and Policy (HSSP), respectively - while Sociology faculty also continue to lead programs in
International and Global Studies (Chandler Rosenberger), Peace, Conflict and Coexistence Studies (Gordie Fellman),
and Social Justice and Social Policy (David Cunningham). Sara's move to the chair-ship of HSSP brings to a close Peter
Conrad's decade of outstanding stewardship over that program, now one of the university's largest and most visible.
Departmentally, additional notes of appreciation go to Wendy and Sara as they conclude highly successful terms
directing our graduate and undergraduate programs. This fall, Laura Miller takes over as Director of Graduate
Studies and Karen Hansen as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Their energy and able leadership has already been
felt around Pearlman, especially during one of the best-attended "Meet the Majors" events in recent memory and in
packed-house colloquia this semester by Matt Kaliner (BA '00), Mary Bernstein, and Liah Greenfeld.
Both faculty and graduate students have also continued to rack up various awards. Wendy Cadge received one of the
five inaugural Bronfman Brandeis-Israel Research Collaboration grants awarded this spring. The grant will support
her work with Michal Pagis, Associate Professor of Sociology at Bar Ilan University, as they "investigate the
penetration of religious practices, discourses and agents into secular medical spheres in Israel." Tom Mackie, an
advanced student in our Joint PhD program in Sociology and Social Policy, was named the "outstanding student
poster" recipient by a formal selection committee convened by the Public Health Services System Research Interest
Group at Academy Health. Amanda Gengler's paper “‘Keep Your Hope, Keep Your Faith’: Hope Work and
Emotional Threat Management Among Families of Seriously Ill Children” was honored with the 2013 Herbert
Blumer Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Amanda also received an NSF Dissertation
Improvement Grant and has just begun a new position as Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University, joining other
newly-minted PhD's Dana Zarhin (at Ben-Gurion University in Israel) and Tom Piñeros Shields (at UMass-Lowell).
Finally, this newsletter's heft is, happily, also a direct function of a Brandeis Sociology community that continues to
grow - in size, productivity, and most importantly, engagement. Our bookshelf display of works produced by
members of our department's extended family continues to expand, seemingly exponentially, and we've enjoyed
receiving all of the news from PhD and BA alums that we share in this volume. Nearly fifty of you came out for our
exceptionally lively second annual gathering at this year's ASA meetings in New York City (a clear sign of the fun had
by all was that, when I had to leave for another unavoidable engagement an hour after our scheduled end time, the
party remained in full swing!), so keep an eye out for an invitation to next year's edition in San Francisco.
Additionally, we continue to feature alums in our colloquium series, including engaging events by Doug Harper (PhD
'76) last spring and Matt Kaliner (BA '00) this fall. And the department has recently embarked on an initiative focused
on the department's Chicago School traditions, centered on the contributions of Everett Hughes and the range of
collaborative intellectual projects developed during his fifteen-year association with what he referred to as “the
Brandeis enterprise and experiment in higher education of first quality." We look forward to reaching out to you as
that project develops in the coming year, and as always, we appreciate your ideas, contributions, energy, and support.
With best wishes for 2013-2014,
Page 2
Alumna Patricia Hill Collins (’69, PhD ’84) Wins Gittler Prize
Patricia Hill Collins, an eminent scholar and Brandeis alumna who has
dedicated her career to understanding the intersections of race, gender and
class, will receive the fifth annual Gittler Prize for lasting and outstanding
scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and religious relations.
Collins (’69, PhD’84), is the author of seven books including the seminal
Black Feminist Thought and is currently a Distinguished University Professor
of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She served as the
100th president of the American Sociological Association and was the first
African American woman to hold that office.
Collins presented a lecture entitled "With My Mind Set on Freedom: Black
Feminism, Intersectionality and Social Justice" and received the $25,000
award October 29 in Rapaporte Treasure Hall at Brandeis.
“It is difficult to overstate Professor Collins’ contribution to our
understanding of the intersection of race, gender and justice in this country,” notes Brandeis President Fredrick M.
Lawrence.
“It is especially meaningful to award the Gittler Prize to a Brandeis alumna, who traces her intellectual roots back
to this institution and one of its pioneering faculty members.”
A Philadelphia native, Collins came to Brandeis University in 1965 where she was deeply influenced by Pauli
Murray, a civil rights leader and the university’s first professor of African American and women’s studies.
Collins received her master’s degree in teaching from Harvard University and directed the African American
Center at Tufts University before coming back to Brandeis to earn her PhD in sociology. In 1982, she joined the
University of Cincinnati faculty where she taught for more than 20 years.
Her first book, Black Feminist Thought, was published in 1990 and won numerous awards, including the Jessie
Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the
Study of Social Problems. Her other works include the widely used textbook Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology,
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism and Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search
for Justice. She has also authored more than 50 articles and essays, and dozens of film and book reviews.
Collins has furthered society’s understanding of the experiences of black women and oppressed communities. In
Fighting Words, Collins explored how black women are often marginalized within the black community and she
tackled representations of black women in rap culture in her 2006 work From Black Power to Hip Hop.
The prize is a legacy of Joseph B. Gittler, also a sociologist, who taught at Cardozo Law School and several other
leading universities including Duke University, George Mason University and Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev. It also honors professor Gittler’s mother, Toby Gittler. Past winners include Stanford sociologist Doug
McAdam, Emory Professor Emerita Frances Smith Foster, Stanford historian Clayborne Carson, Seyyed Hossein
Nasr, The George Washington University Professor of Islam, and Princeton University Professor Kwame Anthony
Appiah.
Article by Leah Burrows. Excerpted from BrandeisNOW, http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2013/september/gittler.html.
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Donald Light (1970) Receives ASA Award for Distinguished
Career in the Practice of Sociology
Over the past 35 years, Professor Don Light has applied his training in medical and organizational sociology toward the
goal of reducing barriers to health care among disadvantaged populations. After leaving the sociology department at
Princeton in 1975, he became a senior social scientist with the Sophie Davis School for Biomedical Education in Harlem
that was dedicated to teaching students to assess the health needs of a community and address those not being met. The
program provided integrated college and medical school training at low cost to many talented minority and lowerincome high school students and was and continues to be successful in graduating most of its students with BS and MD
degrees.
This work led to an appointment in 1980 as professor and director of community
medicine at the School of Osteopathic Medicine, University of Medicine &
Dentistry of New Jersey, where Professor Light taught community medicine to
medical students and two federally funded health centers were established.
During this time, he discovered that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey
was violating its charter to provide community-rate, level premiums to
individuals and small groups through rates that discriminated by race, gender,
and age. He organized a campaign to stop the increases. NOW, NAACP, and
AARP joined in a large, statewide coalition. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund
took the case to the Public Advocate and eventually won, rolling back premiums
for 600,000 people. In the following 2 years, Blue Cross tried other tactics and
successful campaigns were organized against each. For these efforts, Professor
Light won the President’s Award from the New Jersey Public Health Association,
a University Excellence Award for Community Service, and a Certificate of Merit
from the American Public Health Association.
Because of this advocacy work, Professor Light began to write about the ethics of
health insurance, and in 1990 he was accepted as a visiting fellow at Oxford
where he studied social ethics. At the time, Margaret Thatcher launched a radical
restructuring of England’s National Health Service (NHS) from a public service to a series of contracts between
purchasers and providers in order to create managed competition, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. Professor Light
wrote a series of critical articles on how these changes would increase management costs as well as inequalities. He
coined the term “pernicious competition” to characterize how competition in health care usually increases barriers to
access and drives up costs, rather than increasing efficiencies. He applied his expertise to various parts of the NHS and
was invited to be the overseas member of the planning committee for the 50th anniversary of the NHS. He also coauthored an anniversary monograph with Tony Blair. Over the years, Professor Light campaigned against managed
competition reforms in Europe. This work led to a special issue of Social Science & Medicine in 2001 describing the
troubling experiences that many countries face from the pernicious effects of competition policy which threaten to
create barriers to access.
As a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, Professor Light also became
concerned about price barriers for access to drugs and vaccines among lower-income patients. Since 2000, he has
undertaken critical research on claims by the pharmaceutical industry that huge R&D costs force companies to charge
high prices, and further that U.S. prices are so high because European prices are too low to recover costs. One campaign
with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) set out to document that global companies had lower research
costs than they claimed for important new vaccines against rotavirus and ultimately recovered these costs within two
years. PAHO successfully used this research to reduce prices for infant vaccination by 75 percent in the Pan American
countries.
Most recently, Professor Light’s work has focused on the harmful side effects of prescription drugs. His latest book, The
Risks of Prescription Drugs, which was commissioned by the Social Science Research Council, assembles evidence which
shows that such side effects are a leading cause of accidents, hospitalization, and the 4th leading cause of death in the
United States. The AARP Bulletin made the risks of drugs its cover story in the September 2011 issue that went out to 42
million seniors. He demonstrated that the barriers to access need to be higher, by approving drugs that are clinically
superior and safer. This work led to a fellowship for Professor Light this year at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra
Center for Ethics.
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For these accomplishments which highlight only a portion of an extraordinary career over the past 4 decades, the
committee is proud to name Professor Donald W. Light as the recipient of the 2012 ASA Distinguished Career for the
Practice of Sociology Award.
Prepared by the American Sociological Association.
Remembering Professor Philip Slater
Philip E. Slater, a social critic and author, pursued success in the conventional way in the first half of his life. He studied
hard, graduated from Harvard, became a tenured professor of sociology and wrote a best-selling book, The Pursuit of
Loneliness.
The book, published in 1970, warned that a national cult of individualism and
careerism threatened to turn America into a country of hyper-competitive loners
ruled by tyrants. It sold some 500,000 copies, established Mr. Slater’s reputation
and earned him hefty publishers’ advances. It also marked the beginning of the
second half of Mr. Slater’s life. Having re-examined his life through the lens of his
own book, Mr. Slater decided in 1971 to resign as the chairman of the sociology
department at Brandeis University, where he had taught for 10 years, and take a
different path. He took up acting, wrote novels and began culling his personal
possessions down to the two boxes he left when he died at 86 on June 20 at his
home in Santa Cruz, Calif. The cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said his
daughter, Dashka Slater.
He founded Greenhouse, a personal growth center, in Cambridge, Mass., with
Jacqueline Doyle, a writer, and Morrie Schwartz, a fellow sociology professor at
Brandeis (later known as the subject of the Mitch Albom best seller Tuesdays With
Morrie).
He gave up his car, learned to live on one-fourth the income he was used to and
began pursuing a life he would describe in a 1980 book, Wealth Addiction, as
“voluntary simplicity.” “It was not all pleasant,” he said in a 2002 interview with The Dallas Morning News, which
described him as a “slender, handsome, active” 75-year-old living on Social Security and renting a 350-square-foot
efficiency apartment in Santa Cruz. “Yet I hadn’t lost anything precious. I’d lost money. I’d lost security.”
It was not all voluntary, either. He was once sued, successfully, by his publisher for the return of an advance on an
unfinished book. And he admitted that he sometimes struggled to pay the bills.
But from 1971 until his last weeks of life, when he finished a play, Mr. Slater wrote or co-wrote six of his eight volumes
of sociological criticism and dozens of plays and novels. He performed as an actor, taught playwriting and was the
president of a theater company. Some of his books, including The Pursuit of Loneliness, were updated and republished as
enduringly timely. In interviews, Mr. Slater said life after 1971 was more adventure-filled, chaotic, emotionally satisfying and harrowing than he could have known when he decided to leave Brandeis. Which was why he was glad he did
it. “The experience of losing everything and finding I was having a wonderful time,” he said, “opened me to experiences I otherwise would not have had. I would have protected myself from them if I had known.”
Philip Elliot Slater was born on May 15, 1927, in Riverton, N.J., the youngest of three children of Pauline Holman Slater
and John Elliot Slater, a shipping executive. After serving in the merchant marine at the end of World War II, he
graduated from Harvard as a government major in 1950 and received his PhD in sociology from Harvard in 1955.
Mr. Slater, who married four times, is survived by his wife, Susan Helgeson; three children besides his daughter
Dashka, Wendy Palmer, Scott Slater and Stephanie Slater; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
From 1952 to 1954, Mr. Slater participated in clinical experiments conducted by Dr. Robert Hyde and Dr. Max Rinkel on
the effects of the hallucinogenic drug LSD. The experiments, in which about 100 graduate and undergraduate students
took the drug numerous times to test its effects, changed Mr. Slater’s life — and for the better, he later said. “We saw
the world differently from people who had not had the experience,” he told Don Lattin, the author of The Harvard
Psychedelic Club, a 2010 book primarily about later Harvard experiments with LSD led by Timothy Leary; the book
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briefly described Mr. Slater’s role in the earlier tests. “It definitely felt like we were expanding our consciousness,” he
added.
Though it was just one of a tidal wave of sociological blockbusters published in 1970, including Charles A. Reich’s The
Greening of America and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, The Pursuit of Loneliness earned Mr. Slater rave notices. In The New
York Times Book Review, the Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston called it “a brilliant, sweeping and relevant critique
of modern America.” Like many of his later works, the book explored the tension between the Lone Ranger individualist who occupies center stage in American myth and the communal interdependence that defines democracy in reality.
He was an optimist, predicting in The Temporary Society, written with Warren Bennis in 1968, that democracy would
triumph worldwide within 50 years. But he worried that democracy in his own country was declining, and that a
combination of self-absorption and distrust of their government made Americans vulnerable to the appeal of authoritarianism. Todd Gitlin, a sociologist and author, who wrote an introduction to the 1990 edition of The Pursuit of
Loneliness, described Mr. Slater as a sociological “sage.”
“He was the first American sociologist to develop the idea that the personal is the political — that our domestic
arrangements and our foreign policy are the inside and outside of the same phenomenon,” Mr. Gitlin said in an
interview on Wednesday. “That there was a connection between social ills and the average citizen’s lack of involvement
in the community.”
In his 1991 book, A Dream Deferred, Mr. Slater wrote that democracy at its best was not a principle or a “yearning for
freedom” but a social movement. The problem with democracy, he added, was not Congress or corporate influence, but
its own citizens’ “inability to cooperate, to negotiate actively about the things that concern us.” “That’s what leaves
room for — and makes necessary — the systems against which we rail, and upon which the individualist heaps so
much impotent scorn.”
By Paul Vitello, Excerpted from The New York Times
Ruth Harriet Jacobs, 1924 - 2013
Ruth Harriet Jacobs (Miller), PhD (1969) - of Wellesley, died on September 5, 2013, age 88. Ruth Harriet Jacobs, PhD was
a gerontologist, sociologist, educator, poet, and author of nine books. She had many years of teaching experience and
provided continuing education courses for professionals. In addition, she held workshops throughout the US and
abroad, and for 20 years was a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. Dr. Jacobs' books
include: Be An Outrageous Older Woman, Women Who Touched My Life: A Memoir, We Speak for Peace: An Anthology (as
editor), Older Women Surviving and Thriving: A Manual For Group Leaders, Button, Button,
Who Has the Button?: A Drama About Women's Lives Today, Out of Their Mouths, Life After
Youth: Female, Forty What Next?, ABC's for Seniors: Successful Aging Wisdom from an
Outrageous Gerontologist , and Re-engagement in Later Life: Re-employment and Remarriage.
While raising her family, Dr. Jacobs received her BS at age 40 from Boston University and
her PhD at age 45 from Brandeis University. She was a sociology professor for 13 years at
Boston University before going to Clark University in 1982 as chair of the sociology
department. After retiring from Clark University, Dr. Jacobs taught regularly at Regis
College, Springfield College School of Human Services, and in the Life Long Learning
Program at Brandeis University. She was the recipient of grants and awards to pursue
aging studies from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental
Health, the United States Department of Education, the Stone Center, the Southport
Institute for Policy Analysis and many other institutions. In 1993 she received the Pioneer
Award of the New England Sociology Association and has also received the Distinguished Gerontologist Award from the University of Massachusetts. Over the years she served as a consultant to several
government and voluntary agencies, including the AARP's National Task Force on Aging and Mental Health. Dr.
Jacobs contributed chapters to many scholarly books, poems to many poetry anthologies and magazines, and numerous
articles to academic journals. She had residencies at eight major art colonies. An online showcase of her work is
intended by her children to be created during this month of September at www.RuthHarrietJacobs.com. Please check
this internet address from time to time for initial content and for additions of text, audio, and video. An audio
recording of Dr. Jacobs discussing "Older Women as Mentors" is available at www.wcwonline.org/Audio-Archive2009/ruth-harriet-jacobs-older-women-as-mentors. Ruth is survived by her daughter Edith and her son Eli.
Excerpted from The Wellesley Townsman September 9–16, 2013
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Faculty Notes
From left to right: Jillian Powers (Kay Fellow), Wendy Cadge, David Cunningham,
Laura Miller, Gordon Fellman, Peter Conrad, Ana Villalobos, Sara Shostak, Mitra
Shavarini (lecturer), Kristen Lucken (lecturer)
Wendy Cadge's book Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine was published in
January 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. Her co-edited volume Religion on the
Edge: Re-Centering and De-Centering the Sociology of Religion was also published by Oxford
University Press. She wrote several journal articles, magazine articles and blogs that are
available in full text at www.wendycadge.com. She continues to speak widely for audiences of religious and healthcare professionals as well as for academic groups. She is
currently starting several new projects focused on the prayers offered in the U.S. Senate,
the presence of religion in the Israeli medical context, and chaplains working in a range
of settings. She will be the Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program starting
this fall.
Peter Conrad stepped down from chairing the interdisciplinary program Health: Science, Society and Policy
(HSSP) after ten years at the helm. As of July 1, Sara
Shostak has become the chair of HSSP. This year Peter
has published “Marketing of Neuropsychiatric Illness
and Enhancement,” (with Allan V. Horwitz), in A.
Chattergee and M. Farah (eds.), Neuroethics in Practice, Oxford University Press, 2013
and “Medicalization” (with Miranda Waggoner) in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health
and Society. The 9th edition of his widely adopted text-reader, Sociology of Health and
Illness: Critical Perspectives (Worth Publishing, 2013) was published this past year, coedited with Valerie Leiter. Peter gave a talk this spring at the University of New Mexico
on “The Medicalization of Society.” Here is the link (it’s about an hour long):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l8LJjy5B2g.
David Cunningham’s book Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK was published in late 2012 by
Oxford University Press. The book was a finalist for the SSSP’s 2012 C. Wright Mills Award and featured in an Author
Meets Critics session at the 2013 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society. It was also profiled in a variety of
media outlets, including NPR’s “Fresh Air,” CBS Saturday Morning, the Washington Post, and WGBH TV’s “Greater
Boston with Emily Rooney.” His related talk at the University of Virginia was broadcast on PBS and C-SPAN as part of
the Miller Center Forum series. Other recent and forthcoming publications include an Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology
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entry on “Civil Rights” (with Nicole Fox) and “Infiltrators,” a book chapter co-authored
with Roberto Soto-Carrion and prepared for Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged,
edited by Jan Willem Duyvendak and James Jasper.
Gordie Fellman’s course “Deconstructing War, Building Peace” was named one of the
top courses at American universities in Time magazine’s article “The Hottest Seats in
Class.” Time surveyed students to discover the top 17 courses in the country and named
Gordie one of these “teaching stars.” Gordie organized a memorial gathering for Egon
Bittner who taught in the department from 1968 to 1991. A concentration camp
survivor, Egon concentrated on sociology of law, the police, and ethnomethodology.
His work with graduate students both in seminars and in dissertation supervision was
legendary. The memorial was on October 28, 2012 in Pearlman Lounge and drew about
thirty faculty from Brandeis and elsewhere and former graduate students, some local
and some from other parts of the country. Egon’s wife Jean and their daughter Debora
came too, from California, and Debora added many wonderful and illuminating stories
to the collective remembering. There were no speakers at the gathering; people
reminisced from their heads and hearts about Egon the scholar, Egon the teacher, Egon
the inspiration, Egon the mensch, Egon the father, Egon the friend. The easy flow of
associations and memories seemed to help all attending to come to terms with their memories and their loss. Gordie
Fellman’s undergraduate student Andrea Verdeja won one of the two Elise Boulding essay awards from the Peace, War
and Social Conflict section of the American Sociological Association, which honored her for this at its August meetings.
A Sorensen fellow, Andrea spent last summer on the West Bank and wrote about Palestinians refugees there, the topic
of her award winning paper.
Hansen chronicles the intertwined stories
of Dakotas and immigrants — women
and men, farmers, domestic servants, and
day laborers. Their shared struggles reveal
efforts to maintain a language, sustain a
culture, and navigate their complex ties to
more than one nation. The history of the
American West cannot be told without
these voices: their long connections,
intermittent conflicts, and profound
influence over one another defy easy
categorization and provide a new perspective on the processes of immigration and
land taking.
“I wish more scholars were as open as Karen Hansen in sharing the personal ties that
draw them to their subject matter, and I’m so glad she followed the trail of her childhood curiosity. Her sensitive, multifaceted, gracefully written portrait of the interactions
between Dakota Indians and Scandinavian immigrants — both peoples feeling far from
their native lands — is fascinating. I’m not surprised she received a postcard from one of
her interview subjects saying, ‘Thanks for making our lives more interesting.’ Readers of
this book will feel the same.”
— Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and To End All Wars
“Most ‘multicultural’ histories fail to capture how different groups have mutually shaped
the conditions for each other’s existence. In marked contrast, this remarkable account
offers a layered and nuanced understanding of how the lives of indigenous Dakotas
and Norwegian immigrants were deeply intertwined. Both groups resisted prevailing
pressures to assimilate, but the distinct ways they were racialized led to dramatically
different outcomes.”
— Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley
“Karen V. Hansen’s study links Scandinavian immigrant history and American Indian
studies in ways never before attempted. Defined by federal acts, these cultures established
parallel lives on the reservation across new and delicate ideas of landownership. Hansen
evinces a profound sense of how stories contribute to a shared past, and Encounter on the
Great Plains deserves a firm position in the canon of American Studies.”
Encounter on the Great Plains
Karen V. Hansen is delighted to report that after years of gestation, her new
book Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian
Settlers
andonthe
Dispossession
of
Advance acclaim
for Encounter
the Great
Plains
HANSEN
Dakota Indians is in print (Oxford University Press). Last year, Karen
combined her sabbatical with a Brandeis Senior Faculty Leave, spending her
time with a dynamic group of fellows at the Charles Warren Center for
Studies in American History at Harvard, where she remains a visiting scholar.
This year, she is the chair of the Family section of the ASA, and continues to
co-edit the Families in Focus series for Rutgers University Press (keep those
scintillating manuscripts coming!).
Laura J. Miller published her article, “Whither the Professional Book Publisher in an Era of Distribution on Demand” in The International Encyclopedia of
Media Studies, Volume II: Production (Wiley-Blackwell 2013). She presented
papers stemming from research on vegetarian cookbooks, co-authored with
former Brandeis grad student, Emilie Hardman, at conferences of The Center
for the History of Print & Digital Culture and The Eastern Sociological Society. Laura organized a panel on “Consumption and the City” at the American
Sociological Association Annual Meeting in New York City. There, she also
began her term of office as Secretary-Treasurer of the brand new Section on
Consumers and Consumption.
— Oyvind T. Gulliksen, Telemark University College, Norway
“A compelling account of the Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation, Encounter on the Great
Plains narrates the interaction of massive Indian dispossession under the Dawes Act with
the Homestead policy that drew land hungry Scandinavian immigrants West. Entangled
with this place by her own family’s past, Karen Hansen reconstructs an immensely complicated moment through the lenses of family history, land, citizenship, and culture.”
— Jean O’Brien, Professor of History, University of Minnesota
Karen V. Hansen is Professor of
Sociology & Women’s Studies at Brandeis
University. Her books include Not-SoNuclear Families: Class, Gender, and
Networks of Care and A Very Social Time:
Crafting Community in Antebellum
New England.
“How did it happen that Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants came to live
together on a Dakota Indian reservation? Here is the story, profoundly human, of dispossession and occupation: deftly nuanced, deeply sourced, engagingly written.
A first-rate history.”
— Walter Nugent, author of Into the West: The Story of Its People
K A R EN V. H A NSEN
Encounter
on the
Great Plains
Scandinavian Settlers and the
Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890 – 1930
Jacket design: Martyn Schmoll
Cover image: Courtesy Garcia Photo
Collection, Tokio, ND
Author photo: Mike Lovett
With a joint appointment in American Studies and Sociology, Jillian L.
Powers (PhD, Duke University, 2011) is a Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Immigration and American Society, and Lecturer in the American Studies Program, and in the Department of
Sociology. Jillian’s research and teaching interests include cultural sociology, comparative/historical sociology,
sexuality and gender, and race and ethnicity. Before coming to Brandeis, she was a postdoctoral fellow in American
Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. In Fall 2013 she is teaching the course AMST 55a, “Race,
Ethnicity, and Immigration in American Culture.”
hansen_encounter_great_plains_mech_ID5.indd 1
Shula Reinharz raised about $300,000 to support various programs she has created at the Women’s Studies Research
Center. Some highlights of these new programs are an annual semester-long seminar each spring, in which the Center
brings scholars from around the world to delve into a topic deeply. This year the focus was on the conflict between civil
and religious law as a factor in the oppression of women. Next spring it will be “Gender Issues in Hebrew Instruction,”
headed by Professor Vardit Ringvald. The following year it will be “Jews, Gender and Film,” headed by Sharon Rivo.
Page 8
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3
With funding from individual donors and the Tikvah Foundation they will have
the funds they need for next year. A second project involved finding a way to
attract a scholar from the Soviet Union to participate in their work. With funding
from the Genesis Foundation, they have done just that. A third project concerns a
translation competition that they began a few years ago. They are now going to
take the 5 winning scholarly books and publish them as ebooks on the Brandeis
University Repository. As always, the Women’s Studies Research Center offered
four art shows this year, one of which was a photography exhibit sponsored by the
HBI. Focusing on Jewish Women with a History of Transgender, the photographer
was an artist-in-residence for a month and produced the show while here. The
current show is by alumna Suzanne Hodes, and has garnered a lot of media
attention. The HBI has published several books this year and won the National
Jewish Book award for a study of the reasons Jewish men participate in egalitarian
services when, in these services, their power is relatively diminished. In the fall
they are publishing four books, including a study of Mothers and Daughters during
the Holocaust, Gender Issues in Jewish Day School Education, A Study of Jewish
Infant Girls’ Initiation Ceremonies, and a study of the best Jerusalem school for
Jewish girls in the 20th century. In her own life, Shula traveled to Ukraine with a
group of women this fall, and to Israel to give a paper in early January, and then
Myanmar with Jehuda and Brandeis friends later in the month. Her granddaughter is 14 ½ months and is the cutest,
smartest, nicest child in the world – objectively. Her new book will be a collection on Jews, Gender and Art, with a
colleague from Glasgow.
Theodore Sasson is Visiting Research Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University. He is also Professor of
International Studies at Middlebury College, Senior Research Scientist at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies,
and consultant to the Mandel Foundation. Author of scholarship in the fields of political sociology, international
studies and criminology, Professor Sasson's current work examines Israel-diaspora relations, American Jewish identity
and Israeli political culture. He is author of The New American Zionism (New York University Press, 2013) and “Divided,
Not Distant: the Politics of Israel in the American Jewish Community,” in Contemporary Israel: New Insights and
Scholarship (Fredrick Greenspahn, editor, New York University Press, forthcoming). Professor Sasson’s recent scholarly
articles include: “Understanding Young Adult Attachment to Israel: Period, Lifecycle and Generational Dynamics” (coauthor, Contemporary Jewry, 2012); “Guest-Host Encounters in Diaspora-Heritage Tourism”
(co-author, Diaspora, Indigenous and Minority Education, 2011); "Framing Religious Conflict:
Popular Israeli Discourse on Religion and State" (co-author, Journal of Church and State,
2010); "Trends in American Jewish Attachment to Israel: an Assessment of the ‘Distancing'
Hypothesis” (co-author, Contemporary Jewry, 2010); "From Mass Mobilization to Direct
Engagement: The Changing Relationship of American Jews to Israel" (Israel Studies, 2010);
and "Converging Political Cultures: How Globalization is Shaping the Discourses of Israeli
and American Jews” (co-author, Nationalism and Ethnic
Politics, (2010). Professor Sasson serves as co-principal
investigator of evaluation research for the educational
program Taglit-Birthright Israel, and as co-principal
investigator for the Jewish Futures Project, a
longitudinal study of Jewish young adults. He is a
member of the Board of Directors of the Association for
Israel Studies.
Mitra Shavarini's new book, Desert Roots: Journey of an
Iranian Immigrant Family, was released in June of last
year. Desert Roots offers an intimate view of one family’s immigration story and
reminds us how potent the call of the homeland is to those who leave theirs behind.
Desert Roots offers readers a rich tapestry of personal, familial and political history,
woven into the vivid background of the author’s family immigrant experience.
Sara Shostak had a remarkable year, beginning with the publication of her book
Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment and the Politics of Population Health (University
of California Press). The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive,
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4
and Sara has been happy to hear that it is being taught in a diverse
range of classes, from medical sociology courses to graduate
seminars to sociological theory. In April, Sara was awarded the
Michael J. Walzer, ’56, Award for Excellence in Teaching. Because
this award originates with nominations from students, it was
especially meaningful to her. In July, Sara was promoted to
Associate Professor, with tenure. At the same time, she became Chair
of Health: Science, Society, and Policy (HSSP) Program. She is
looking forward – with great happiness – to doing research,
teaching, and being of service at Brandeis for the foresee-able future.
Sara continues to give talks (including the keynote presentation at a
Qualitative Methods Showcase at the University of Colorado,
Medical Campus) and publish (including a forthcoming book
chapter with HSSP alumna '09, Margot Moinester) on
conceptualizations of the environment in the post-genomic
moment. Likewise, her NIH funded collaboration with Ruth Ottman
(Columbia University) on the social dimensions of genetic testing in
the epilepsies is ongoing. Sara is beginning a new project that uses
efforts to transform food systems in urban and rural communities as
a lever that reveals complex relationships between identity, culture,
and health. She also collaborates with researchers at the Social
Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern
University, directed by Phil Brown (1979). When not busy with all of
this exciting research, she is learning Brazilian Portuguese, going for
long bike rides, and trying (and trying!) to grow tomatoes in her
backyard.
Champions of Change: Open Government and
Civic Hacking, White House July 23, 2013.
Jennifer London (1992), Carmen Sirianni,
and Ari Schwartz (1992)
Carmen Sirianni has been co-lead on the project, “Non-State Actors in Environ-mental Governance,” funded by NSF
through the University of Maryland’s Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), with Dana Fisher and Kenneth
“Andy” Andrews, and will be editing a book on this after the October 2013 meeting. He continues as Faculty Fellow at
the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and
has joined the Tufts University IGERT symposium on “Civic Engagement and Water Diplomacy.” This past summer he
was part of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, project on the National Action
Plan for Open Government of the Obama administration and co-led a workshop (with Tina Nabatchi) on scaling
innovation as part of the Champions of Change conference hosted by the White House. He will also be joining the
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, next spring. His
“Movement for Democratic Renewal” was translated and published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His
edited col-lection with Jennifer Girouard (Varieties of Civic Innovation: Deliberative, Collaborative, Network, and Narrative
Approaches) is in press at Vanderbilt UP. He gave plenary talks at the Eastern Sociological Society, American Political
Science Association, and the Garrison Institute’s Climate, Mind, and Behavior conferences. His major ongoing book
project is Self-Governance in American Political Development.
Ana Villalobos is completing revisions on her book Motherload, a 3-year longitudinal study of early motherhood, which
received a book contract this year at University of California Press. Her research on stay-home mothers was accepted to
an anthology on stay-home mothering around the world, where her chapter, “The Free Gift: How U.S. Stay-Home
Mothers Sustain Themselves in a Culture of Nonreciprocity,” will comprise the U.S. chapter, highlighting what is
distinctive about mothering within the U.S. cultural ideology of independence. She also completed a draft article
entitled: “Compensatory Connection: Mothers’ Own Stakes in an Intensive Mother-Child Relationship,” which is
currently in the revision process at the Journal of Family Issues. At the ASA annual meeting, she presented a piece of her
book research entitled, “Mothering Without the Ordeal: The Benefits of Not Trying To Impart Ultimate Security in
Children.” She was also invited to be a book critic for Sarah Damaske’s For the Family?: How Class and Gender Shape
Women’s Work, organized by Kathleen Gerson at the ESS annual meeting. In her teaching, Professor Villalobos piloted
and co-taught a well-received graduate seminar entitled “Motherhood and Mothering: Theory, Discourse, Practice, and
Change” for the Gender Consortium for Women’s Studies, housed at MIT. She also innovated around student research
in her Sociology of Gender, Race and Class course, with two research teams doing collective field research projects,
pooling data, and writing individual analyses, which was an exciting and successful teaching model she hopes to
pursue further in future courses.
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PhD Alumni
Jim Ault (1981) recently released his two-part African Christianity
Rising documentary film series shot mainly in Ghana and
Zimbabwe. He is developing a book on that project with Oxford
University Press, which will, in its e-book edition, have links to
project video embedded in its text. He also recently completed
documentaries on Latino and Latino/ Anglo congregations in the
Episcopal Church (USA) where similar issues in culture and
theology arise. Looking back, he thanks his good friends and
colleagues from his graduate studies in sociology at Brandeis,
Karen Fields and the late Nancy Jay, for their original counsel to
him on how best to portray the religious lives of people across
cultures. Both served as consultants on his first film, the awardwinning documentary Born Again, an intimate portrait of a
fundamentalist Baptist church in the US, broadcast on PBS and
around the world. On a personal note, Jim was recently married to
Margaret Keyser, a theologian and conflict transformation
practitioner from South Africa, who brought her mediation skills,
shaped in the Truth and Reconciliation process, to work in this
Jim Ault and Margaret Keyser at their wedding
country. Their wedding was at their home in Northampton, MA,
but they were connected to the officiating pastor and Margaret’s family outside Cape Town by Skype—an historic first
(according to Google), in fact! For more about Jim’s work visit his website: www.jamesault.com.
Susan Bell (1981) is a 2013 Summer Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has
been awarded a Bunting Fellowship for her project "Permeable Hospitals, Transnational Communities: A Global
Hospital Ethnography in Maine."
Alison Better (2010) co-organizes the Women’s Studies Faculty Interest Group at CUNY Kingsborough Community
College and is a member of the Brooklyn Public Scholars. Her article “Redefining Queer: Women's Relationships and
Identity in an Age of Sexual Fluidity” is forthcoming in Sexuality & Culture. She also has a book chapter "Painting Desire
Pink: Meaning-Making at a Romance Sex Store" in Selves, Symbols and Sexualities: Contemporary Readings edited by Staci
Newmahr and Thomas Weinberg (Sage 2014). Alison was honored to serve as the keynote speaker at the 5th Annual
SASS Sexualities Conference at Brandeis in April where she gave a talk "Come Again: Sex Stores, Relationships, and the
Future of Sexualities." At Kingsborough, Alison received a
President's Faculty Innovation Award to incorporate civic
engagement in her women's and gender studies courses. She has
presented papers and organized sessions at ESS and ASA, and
serves as an appointed member to the ASA Task Force on
Community College Faculty in Sociology.
Janet Mancini Billson (1976) conducted a year-long study on
"Pathways to a Healthy Economy" for Population Connection
(formerly ZPG). She presented the data and facilitated a national
symposium, "Population Stabilization and a Healthy
Economy," in Washington, DC, June 21.
Winifred Breines (1979) retired from teaching at Northeastern
University over five years ago and has become a watercolor
painter. See her website, www.winifredbreines.com.
Winifred Breines’s “Heirloom Tomatoes”
Phil Brown (1979) finished his first year at Northeastern
University, having moved there in 2012. His new Social Science
Environmental Health Research Institute now numbers 18 people, including graduate students, faculty, and postdocs.
They have written many grant proposals this year and so far heard back on two awards: a postdoc research fellowship
to study the proposed massive Pebble Mine in Alaska, and a renewal of the Brown/Northeastern/SUNY-EFS program,
the Northeast Ethics Education Project; the renewal adds new partners at Northeastern – the College of Engineering
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and the Department of Marine and Environmental Science. The new doctoral specialty in Environmental Sociology
admitted five students in September. Phil’s National Science Foundation-funded “New Directions in Environmental
Ethics: Emerging Contaminants, Emerging Technologies, and Beyond” training program began operation this fall, with
five doctoral students and two postdocs. Among Phil’s recent articles are: Bindu Pannikar, Natasha Smith, and Phil
Brown, “Reflexive Research Ethics in Fetal Tissue Xenotransplantation Research” Accountability in Research: Policies and
Quality Assurance 2012. 19(6): 344-369; Alissa Cordner and Phil Brown, “Moments of Uncertainty: Ethical
Considerations and Emerging Contaminants” Sociological Forum 2013. 28 (3): 469-494; Phil Brown “Integrating Medical
and Environmental Sociology with Environmental Health: Crossing Boundaries
and Building Connections Through Advocacy” Journal of Health and Social
Behavior 2013 54 144 - 163; Alissa Cordner, Phil Brown, and Margaret Mulcahy,
“Chemical Regulation on Fire: Rapid Policy Successes on Flame
Retardants” Environmental Science & Technology 2013 47(3): 7067–7076.
Levon Chorbajian (1974) was interviewed on the history and current status of the
Armenian/Azeri conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh and the recent
Istanbul protests over Gezi Park. The interview was published in Agos, the newspaper founded by Hrant Dink, martyred Turkish-Armenian journalist and human
rights activist.
Karen Fields (1977) was interviewed in November for the podcast New Books in
Sociology about her recent book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, coauthored with her sister, historian Barbara Fields. The full 45-minute interview is
available at: http://newbooksinsociology.com/2012/11/11/karen-e-fields-andbarbara-j-fields-racecraft-the-soul-of-inequality-in-american-life-verso-books2012/.
Betina Freidin (2008) is a tenured researcher at the CONICET and Assistant
Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Buenos Aires,
Argentina. She published many pieces related with her research on alternative medicine this year including
“Acupuncture in Argentina”, in Hinrichs, T.J. and L. Barnes (Eds.) Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press). She co-authored numerous articles as well including: En búsqueda del equilibrio:
salud holística, bienestar, y vida cotidiana entre seguidores del Ayurveda en Buenos Aires, Serie Documentos de Trabajo No.65,
IIGG, Universidad de Buenos Aires with Matías Ballesteros and Mariano Echeconea. Last year she, M. Mercedes Di
Virgilio, and M. Guillermina D´Onofrio, co-authored “Défis que présente le processus d’analyse des données dans la
recherche qualitative: réflexions néées de la recherche pratiquée en différents contextes de travail”, Revue Recherches
Qualitatives, Special Issue: La recherche qualitative en Argentine: des acquis et des questionnements », 31(2):12-43. She and
Matías Ballesteros also co-authored “La difusión transnacional de medicinas alternativas: la presencia del Ayurveda en
la prensa argentina”, Papeles de Trabajo, 9: 1-32 last year. Betina is currently working on a new research project on the
healthization of everyday life and how laypeople negotiate the "imperative of health.” She was awarded a Global
Travel Grant by the Wenner Gren Foundation to present her work at the Inter-national Conference, Encounters and
Engagements: Creating New Agendas for Medical Anthropology, organized by the Society of Medical Anthropology of
the AAA in Tarragona, Spain, in June 2013, and presented a paper at the 2013 ASA Meetings in New York.
Lew Friedland (1985) teaches in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of WisconsinMadison. He is also affiliated with the Departments of Sociology and Educational Psychology. He has been appointed
Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (a career appointment) as well as
Leon Epstein Fellow in Letters and Sciences (2013-16) http://insideuw.wisc.edu/newsletter/milestones/new-post-formilestones-162/. In this past year he co-edited Communication, Consumers, and Citizens, a special issue of the Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (also a Sage book), including several co-authored articles. He has
a forthcoming chapter "Civic Communication in a Networked Society" in Varieties of Civic Innovation edited by Jennifer
Girouard and Carmen Sirianni, and a forthcoming article, "Cultivating Success: Youth Achievement, Capital, and Civic
Engagement in the Contemporary U.S." in Sociological Perspectives, led by Shauna Morimoto. Lew is working on a book
on communication and civil society, and is on sabbatical this year. He will be at Hebrew University in Spring 2014 on a
Lady Davis Fellowship, and the University of Tampere on a Fulbright later in the spring.
Amanda Gengler's (2013) article entitled "Defying (Dis)Empowerment in a Battered Women's Shelter: Moral Rhetorics,
Intersectionality and Processes of Resistance and Control" was published in the November 2012 issue of Social Problems.
She also presented papers at the annual meetings of SSSI (the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction) and ASA.
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Her paper "Keep your Hope, Keep your Faith: Hope Work and Emotional
Threat Management among Families of Seriously Ill Children" won SSSI's
2013 Herbert Blumer award. She defended her dissertation entitled "Cultural
Health Capital, Emotion Management, and the Reproduction of Inequality in
the Case of Life-Threatening Childhood Illness" in August, and is thrilled to
join the department of sociology at Wake Forest University as an Assistant
Professor this fall.
Chris Gillespie (2010) continues his postdoc at the Bedford (MA) Veterans
Hospital. He is currently involved with several different research projects,
including how physicians manage decisions about clinically indeterminate
pulmonary nodules, and how those with Hepatitis C, but not currently
receiving treatment, experience this place where they have a condition that is
not causing symptoms or being actively managed. This allows him to
continue to work in an area of clinical and individual uncertainty.
Harris Gleckman (1982) was for 20 years a staff member of the UN serving as
Chief of the Environmental Unit at the Centre on Transnational Corporations,
Chief of the New York Office of United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development, and senior staff at the Financing for Development Office of the
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. In 2010, he was named a
Senior Fellow at the Center on Governance and Sustain-ability at UMass-Boston. With UMass-Boston 2011 he published
a 200 page interactive website (www.umb.edu/gri) that critiqued the proposals of the World Economic Forum for a
post-nation-state global governance system. The Davos proposal introduces multi-stakeholder governance (MNCs,
nation-states, and civil society leaders) as a crucial replacement for multilateral governance. He is currently presenting
his assessment of Davos’ recommendations and state of global governance at university seminars here and abroad, via
the Carnegie Council Policy Innovation Journal, and in briefings to UN delegates and civil society leaders. He is also
continuing to advise international organizations on climate change policy options. In addition to his affiliation with the
UMass -Boston Program, he is a Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting and an adjunct faculty member at
the University of Maine Law School and Ramapo College in New Jersey. For pleasure, Harris has coordinated a project
that is documenting the history of Maine’s Jewish communities (www.mainejews.org).
For her sabbatical this year, Mary Godwyn (2000) is working on a book contracted with Springer Germany on how
business ethics is taught in various business schools around the world. She plans to include interviews from students,
faculty and alums from the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, India and Ghana. In the last two years she has
received two awards for women’s leadership: in 2013, the Women’s Leadership Award, World CSR (Corporate Social
Responsibility) Congress, Mumbai, India, and in 2012, the Nan Langowitz Women Who Make a Difference Award,
Babson College. In 2012, Nan Langowitz and Mary received a Best Paper Award from the Equality, Diversity and
Inclusion Conference in Toulouse, France for “Challenging Stereotypes: The Impact of Organizations in Shaping Individual Responses to Prejudice,” (coauthored with Nan S. Langowitz). This paper was the basis of their forthcoming
chapter: “Reducing the Influence of Gender Prejudice on Perceptions, Performance and Aspirations” in UN PRME
(Principles for Responsible Management Education) book series Gender Equality as a Challenge for Business and Management Education, Maureen Kilgour, Kathryn Haynes and Patricia Flynn (Eds.) Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, Ltd. In
2013, along with A. Elaine Allen, Mary also published “Early-Career Outcomes and Gender: Can Educational Interventions Make a Difference?” (co-authored with Nan S. Langowitz, D.B.A. and I. Elaine Allen) Gender and Management: An
International Journal Volume 28, Issue 2, pp. 111-134.
www.emeraldinsight.com/fwd.htm?id=aob&ini=aob&doi=10.1108/17542411311303248.
Lynda Lytle Holmstrom (1970) is still at Boston College, but now as Professor Emerita and part-time faculty. Recently,
she and a colleague, Ann Wolbert Burgess, were invited to write an encyclopedia entry on “rape trauma syndrome,” a
concept they created and presented in 1974 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. They described the development of this
now-classic concept, its later use, and related research appearing over the years. She has also been working with a
group of semi-retired colleagues in the Eastern Sociological Society to develop the ESS Opportunities in Retirement
Network (See their section on the ESS website essnet.org).
Robert Horwitz (1983) is professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
Having written on the deregulation of American communications and on the transition from apartheid to democracy in
South Africa, he has recently published his third book: America's Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism From Goldwater
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to the Tea Party (Polity Press, 2013).
Katrin Kriz (2003) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Emmanuel
College in Boston this year. Kati continues publishing on U.S. poverty-alleviation
policy and pursuing comparative studies in the field of child welfare. This year, she
had two articles accepted for publication: together with colleague Catherine Simpson
Bueker, she co-authored an article entitled "How Domestic Public Policy Goes
Global: Immigrants’ Transnational Allocations of the Earned Income Tax Credit
(EITC),“ which was accepted by the Journal of International Migration and Integration. Kati also had an article entitled “Risk Assessment in England, Norway and the
United States (California): A Comparative Case Vignette Study“ accepted by Children
and Youth Services Review (with her long-time co-author Marit Skivenes). This
summer Kati also reviewed dissertations (in various stages) of mid-career PhD candidates at the United Nations University UNU-Merit in Maastricht and gave a guest
lecture at Bergen University College, Norway. She's currently co-editing a book entitled Child Welfare Systems and Migrant Families.
Rachel Kulick (2010), Assistant Professor in Sociology at University of
Massachusetts Dartmouth, has been working on a new research project, Community
Models of Social Change, with a focus on sustainability and food justice initiatives. She contributed a chapter, entitled,
"Learning from Each Other: Collective Practices in Making Independent Youth Media" in the 16th volume of the book
series, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth which was edited by Sandi Nenga and Jessica Taft. She will also have an
article, "Making Media for Themselves: Strategic Dilemmas of Prefigur-ative Work in Independent Media Outlets" in
the upcoming 2013 fall volume of the journal, Social Movement Studies. In June, she and her colleague, Julie Poncelet cofacilitated a workshop entitled, "Mapping Our Vision: Making it Happen" at the Urban Planners Conference, Beyond
Resilience Actions for a Just Metropolis” in New York.
Valerie Leiter (2001) has been promoted to full professor at Simmons College as of July 2013. She was chair of the ASA
Disability and Society section last year. Valerie is working on a new project that examines female urinary incontinence
and its medicalization through vaginal mesh surgery.
Donald Light (1970) continues his award-winning work (see article in this Newsletter). His current campaign is to
sound the alarm about the epidemic of harmful side effects from properly prescribed drugs. The case is pulled together
in a forthcoming article that concludes the permissive criteria of the FDA and lack of effort to protect the public lie at
the heart of the problem: “Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals, and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs.”
JLME 2013 by Light, Lexchin, and Darrow http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2282014. There was a
pre-publication notice of his article, and Forbes Magazine decided to blast it, just around the time of the ASA meetings.
Their pharma columnist got so angry that he wrote a second critique, telling readers that his findings are "preposterous"
and that guy Light is "comic." (www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/07/30/are-90-of-fda-drugs-approved-inlast-30-years-no-more-effective-than-existing-drugs/and www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/08/07/is-thefda-being-compromised-by-pharma-payments/). One of his team’s replies can be found on page 6 of the Comments. A
related piece was published after Labor Day on the unaffordable prices charged for cancer (and other specialty)
drugs. It's also slated to come out in the AARP Bulletin in November, which has a print run of 34 million! That is probably the largest periodical in the world.
Peter Ludes (1983) is Professor of Mass Communication at the international Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Recently he became the program coordinator of Integrated Social Sciences. In 2011, he published two books, Elemente
internationaler Medienwissenschaften (Elements of International Media Studies), Wiesbaden: VS, and as editor, Algorithms
of Power, Berlin: Lit. In 2012, he published the book chapter “Key Visuals and Key Invisibles: Brazilian, Chinese,
German, and US-American Televisual World Views“ (“Schlüsselbilder und Schlüssel zu Unsichtbarem: Brasilianische,
chinesische, deutsche und US-amerikanische Fernsehsichten“), in: Joachim Knape / Anne Ulrich (Eds.): Fernsehbilder im
Ausnahmezustand. Zur Rhetorik des Televisuellen in Krieg und Krise. Berlin: Weidler 2012 (neue rhetorik 11), pp. 65-96
and “Updating Marx’s Concept of Alternatives,“ tripleC 10(2)/2012, pp. 555-569. In 2011 to 2013, he gave the following
presentations: September 2011, 10th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Geneva, “Social Relations in
Turbulent Times”: “TV World Views: Culture-specific and Transcultural Narratives“; September 2011, Innsbruck, “The
New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”, a three-nations conference of the German, Austrian and Swiss
Sociological Associations: “Für einen ‘Visual Turn’ in den Sozialwissenschaften” (For a Visual Turn in the Social
Sciences); November 2011, Bremen, U.S. Day 2011: “Mass and Network Media: Your YouTube”; March 2012,
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Heidelberg, “Imaging Disasters”: “Key Visuals of Catastrophes in Chinese and
German TV Annual Reviews since 2008” (with Jianxiu Hao, Jacobs University
Bremen); June 2012, Bremen, “More cultural diversity than global integration: A
response to Göran Therborn”, at the opening conference of the new research center
Humanities, Modernity, Globalization, Jacobs University Bremen; June 2012,
Amsterdam, “Chinese, German, and US Televisions: Long-Term Power Shifts”, at
the conference on Reinventing Norbert Elias: For an open sociology; July 2012,
Leipzig, on “Knowledge and Power”, in the Master-class Parallaxes of
Knowledge; October 2012, Bilbao, “Long-Term Power Shifts or Short-Term Crises?
Beyond €uro-Centrism,“ Research Network 18 of the European Sociological
Association, Conference “Communication, Crisis and Critique in Contemporary
Capitalism”; April 2013, Jacobs University Bremen, “Semantic Tagging for Classical
Social Theories”, Workshop “Lost or Re-Gained in Translations and Online?
Semantic Tagging” with Otthein Herzog. On October 29 and 30, 2013, he chaired,
together with Consuelo Corradi, Rome, an international workshop on "Kurt H.
Wolff and Existential Truths" in the Villa Vigoni, funded by the German Research
Foundation.
Jonathan Martin (2001) continues as an Associate Professor at Framingham
State University. In June of 2013 he published an article in New Political Science journal. Entitled "Hegemonic Duopoly at
the Grassroots: Why Progressive Third Parties Rarely Win State House Elections," it highlights how the lack of social
and cultural connection to local communities is a critical reason that minor party candi-dates of the left seldom get
elected to state legislatures. Also, Jonathan currently has under review for publication a related anthology tentatively
entitled "Defeating Duopoly, Advancing Democracy: The Future Empowerment of Progressive Third Parties in the
United States." Lastly, in the past year he has been a key advisor to both a progressive independent candidate for state
legislature in Cambridge and Somerville, MA and a non-partisan progressive candidate for city council in Cambridge.
Nsolo Mijere (1986) retired from the Walter Sisulu University in South Africa. He and his wife Judith decided to relocate to Zambia in 2012, and have been there for one year. He writes that they are still relearning the Zambian political
economy as Zambian affairs have dramatically changed since they left in 1990. The Zambian Open University appointed Nsolo as Professor of Sociology so that he can assist them in teaching postgraduate students.
Victoria Pitts-Taylor (1999) published "I Feel Your Pain: Embodied Knowledges and Situated Neurons," in the journal
Hypatia (2013). She is organizing a mini-conference for the ESS in February 2014. She will be a Visiting Fellow at the
Hastings Center for Bioethics beginning in January, while she is on sabbatical from CUNY.
Debbie Potter (2007) finished her fourth year in the tenure track at the University of Louisville where she teaches a variety of courses in Medical Sociology, Research Methods, and Evaluation Research. She has a co-authored article, which
is forthcoming in the Journal of Intercultural Communication, that is based on inter- disciplinary research from an NIHsponsored project examining cultural and structural factors affecting diet and health among African-Americans in
Kentucky. A sole-authored article, "Acting Up and Acting Out: Conduct Disorder and Competing Media Frames" has
been accepted for publication in Deviant Behavior. She also has received intramural
funds to support the one-year pilot phase of her latest qualitative research project
on health-seeking patterns among women with both a chronic physical (diabetes)
and mental health (clinical depression) condition. She plans on using data from this
project to support a grant application for a multi-year project.
Miriam Raabe (1975) went to nursing school while on the path to her PhD and
graduated in 1972 from the Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing. She
worked in various settings as a nurse for the next 35 years. She retired in 2007 and
published her first book of poetry in December 2012, Bite into the Day.
Ashley Rondini (2010) was recently awarded the American Sociological
Association's 2013 Carla B. Howery Teaching Enhancement Grant. For more
information on her award, see the announcement in the May/June 2013 issue of
Footnotes. www.asanet.org/footnotes/mayjun13/howery_0513.html.
Brad Rose (1994) continues in his role as an applied sociologist at Brad Rose
Consulting, Inc., a program evaluation and organization development consulting
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firm founded in 1996, based in Wellesley, MA (bradroseconsulting.com). BRC’s clients have included the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, City Year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and a number
of other non-profit, education, and philanthropic organizations. BRC recently completed a research study on behalf of
Partnerships for a Skilled Workforce, Inc. of the feasibility of utilizing smartphones and other hand-held electronic
technologies to reach and deliver career readiness information for vulnerable, at risk Metro West youth. When not
occupied as a program evaluator and researcher, Brad writes fiction and poetry. Recent publications appear in the
Baltimore Review, Boston Literary Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Off the Coast, Third Wednesday, The Potomac; Santa Fe
Literary Review, and more than 30 other print and on-line journals. Links to published poems and fiction can be found
at: http://bradrosepoetry.blogspot.com/. Brad’s daughter Hannah is a freshman at Columbia University. His wife
Linda is Professor and Vice Chair of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical
School in Worcester.
Ruben Rumbaut (1978) and his co-author Douglas S. Massey recently published “Immigration and Language Diversity
in the United States” in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 142(3). Last year he and Enrique
Martínez Curiel published “The Leavers and the Stayers: A Comparative Longitudinal Study of Educational Achievement and Transitions to Adulthood among Youth in Mexico and the
United States “ [“Los que se van y los que se quedan ante la
educación: Un studio comparativo-longitudinal de jóvenes en
transición a la adultez en México y Estados Unidos”] in the Gazeta de
Antropología 38(3). This year, Ruben was elected to the National
Academy of Education and Nominated to the Vice-Presidency of the
American Sociological Association. He also gave the keynote address
to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
in 2013 and the invited address to the Global Salzburg Seminar’s
Immigration Symposium in Austria in 2012.
After many years as a stonemason, and raising two sons (Forrest and
Kai), Ingrid Shockey (1996) returned to environmental sociology and
is working in the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Program at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She teaches research methods and
Ingrid Shockey near her home in Western MA
cultural sensitivity to third year students that go on to work on twomonth projects at various sites around the world. The program is
designed to encourage engineering and science students to consider the interface of environment, technology, and
society. She is currently posted in Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India, and also directs a student site in Wellington, NZ.
Her son, Forrest, is a junior studying physics at Brandeis – but could not resist an opportunity to take a class with Gila
Hayim!
Helen L. Stewart (1980) moved from northern California to sunny Hawaii in 2012.
Her book entitled Seven Seconds or Less: Gut Feeling to Bottom Line in Challenging
Areas of Business will be published this fall through Balboa Press, a division of Hay
House. The subject matter is "seven second decision making," which is a blend of
intuition-on-demand and futures studies in the areas of new product development, strategic partnerships, and human resource management. What a far cry
from the mesmerizing discussions with Egon Bittner, Kurt Wolff, and impressive
classmates, and yet this new work is also infused with sociological thinking and
multilayered experience. Now retired from a long career as a faculty member and
academic-administrator, Helen provides intuitive information to individuals and
companies in the U.S. and abroad on a wide range of business subjects, all in the
company of great friends and perfect weather. The sunset years are fabulous!
Ken Sun (2011) presented his work “Logics of Social Right: How Senior Taiwanese Immigrants Think About Public Benefits Available in the United States” at the
Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society this year. In 2012, he presented
“Transforming Cultural Logics of Care: How Aging Returnees in Taiwan Think
About Intergenerational Reciprocity” at the International Symposium for Young
Sociologists, Kobe University, Japan. He also presented “Remaking Reciprocal
Rules of Geriatric Care: The Case of Aging Taiwanese Immigrants” at the Annual
Meeting of the 2012 Eastern Sociological Society. This year he published his article
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“Rethinking Migrant Families from a Transnational Perspective: Experiences of Parents and their Children in Sociology
Compass 7(6): 445-458. His and Wendy Cadge’s co-authored article “How Do Organizations Respond to New
Immigrants? Comparing Two New England Cities” was published in the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 11(2):
157-177. Last year he published his article “Fashioning Reciprocal Norms of Aging in the Trans- Social Field: A Case of
Immigrants in the U.S. and their Parents in Taiwan” in the Journal of Family Issues 33(9): 1240-1271. He has two forthcoming publications: “Transnational Healthcare Seeking: How Aging Return Migrants Think About Public Benefits in
Taiwan,” in Global Networks, and “Transnational Kinscription: A Case of Parachute Kids and Their Parents in Taiwan”
in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
T.L. Taylor (2000) published a new book (with co-authors Boellstorff,
Nardi, and Pearce) entitled Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A
Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press, 2012 http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9882.html). During the year she
gave a number of invited talks on the subjects of e-sports, livestreaming, and methods at Temple University, Drexel University,
NC State, University of Oregon, and the Business in Games and
Futures of Entertainment conferences. She was keynote speaker at
the second Feminists in Games conference in Vancouver. Finally, she
was thrilled to be a part of the PBS Offbook episode on competitive
computer gaming which picked up on a several themes she explored
in her book on the subject (Raising the Stakes, MIT Press, 2012). The
video, as well as a number of fantastic episodes in the series, is
available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpO76SkpaWQ.
Becky Thompson (1991) RYT-500 continues to teach yoga at the
Dorchester YMCA and at a feminist Buddhist retreat center in
northern Thailand (in the summers). Her new book is coming out
next year, Survivors on the Mat: Yoga Stories for Healing from Trauma
(published by North Atlantic books, distributed by Random House).
She continues to be Chair of the Sociology Department at Simmons
College where she also teaches in the education, and gender and
cultural studies graduate programs. This past year, she worked with
faculty, students, and staff to support the cafeteria workers at
Simmons College in their successful struggle for union
representation (Unite Here local 26). That was thrilling. Some of her
most recent poetry has been published in Sinister Wisdom and The
New Sound. She lives with her marvelous chosen daughter in Jamaica
Plain and continues to be a grateful student and adoring friend of Maury Stein.
Bert Useem (1980) is professor and head of the Department of Sociology, Purdue University.
Miranda Waggoner (2011) is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton. In 2013, she published the following papers: “Parsing
the Peanut Panic: The Social Life of a Contested Food Allergy Epidemic” in Social Science & Medicine 90: 49-55; “Motherhood Preconceived: The Emergence of the Preconception Health and Health Care Initiative” in Journal of Health Politics,
Policy and Law 38(2): 345-371; and, “More and Less than Equal: How Men Factor in the Reproductive Equation” forthcoming in Gender & Society (with Rene Almeling). Additionally, she organized the Section on Medical Sociology’s
session on “Emerging Medical Epidemics” for this year’s ASA meetings and a mini-conference on the “Sociology of
Reproduction” at the ESS meetings (with Susan Markens). Finally, Miranda was elected as an incoming nominations
committee member for the ASA’s Section on Medical Sociology.
Dana Zarhin (2013) has successfully defended her dissertation “Obstructive Sleep Apnea as a Patient Contested Disease:
Pathways To And Away From Medicalization” in July 2013. She has been awarded the Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship from Ben-Gurion University in Israel. Her host department will be the Department of Health Systems Management.
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BA and MA Alumni in Sociology
Downing Cless (BA 1978) took nine years after coursework to finish his dissertation because he left sociology for theatre. After getting a drama MA, he briefly was at Cal Arts thanks to Maury Stein, but then taught and directed plays for
seven years at Antioch College. For the last 34 years, he's been in the Drama Department at Tufts University and on the
side has directed professionally, mainly with the Underground Railway Theater which is Boston's major producer of
socially-conscious plays. He also taught a graduate seminar for PhD students of Drama titled Sociology of Theatre that
morphed in the 1980s into Modern and Postmodern Theory. In 1989 through his involvement with the Tufts Environmental Literacy Institute, he veered off into ecology, heading his directing and scholarship toward natural themes and
environmental issues during the last 25 years. Right now he is doing the dramaturgical research for next April's world
premiere of a play about climate change in the Arctic, produced by the Underground Railway Theater. Retiring from
Tufts next May, he looks forward to having more time for environmental and political activism. Brandeis sociology-especially the teaching and mentoring of Maury, Gordie, and Morrie--has been a constant inspiration and foundation
for all of his work in theatre.
Janice Johnson Dias (BA 1994) received her PhD from Temple University. This year she
received tenure in the Department of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at
CUNY. She is also the creator of a foundation whose mission is to support girls as they grow
up to be healthy women: http://www.grass-rootsfoundation.org/.
Carole Joffe (BA 1967) received her PhD from University of California Berkeley and is
professor emerita at the University of California Davis. Carole is a professor at the Bixby
Center for Global Reproductive Health in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and
Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. This year, Carole has
been awarded the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Family Planning.
For more information, visit: http://www.societyfp.org/about/awardees/joffe.asp.
Alice Julier (BA 1984), Associate Professor at Chatham University, has published Eating
Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality (University of Illinois Press, 2013). She is also director
of the food studies program at Chatham.
Rachel Gordon Loube's (BA 2006) School of Visual Arts MFA thesis documentary film, "Every Tuesday: A Portrait of
The New Yorker Cartoonists," won a Student Academy Award. The New Yorker Magazine is famous for its pithy,
witty, and occasionally incomprehensible single-panel cartoons. The cartoons are well known, but the cartoonists are
not. This film follows four of them - Sidney Harris, Emily Flake, Drew Dernavich, and Zack Kanin - through their
creative process and their weekly shared lunch. She sees documentary filmmaking as a continuation of her sociology
studies.
Susan Markens (BA 1989; Postdoc 1999-2000), Assistant Professor Sociology at Lehman College, CUNY, was a Keynote
Speaker at the Mothering, Science and Technology Conference in October 2012 Toronto, Canada where she presented a
paper titled "From Gendered Altruism to Gendered Empowerment: Media Framings of Transnational Surrogacy in the
21st Century." This year she also co-organized (with Miranda Waggoner, 2011 PhD) a Sociology of Reproduction MiniConference at the ESS 2013 meetings in Boston, and co-organized a Sex & Gender Section Session at the August 2013
ASA meetings in New York titled "Gender and Reproduction in a Global Context.”
During this last year she has also published a co-authored article (with Dr. Susan E. Rubin
and Giselle Campos), "Primary Care Physicians’ Concerns May Affect Adolescents’
Access to Intrauterine Contraception" in Journal of Primary Care and Community Health
(2013) 4, 3, 216-219, and she has two forthcoming solo-authored articles from her recent
study of genetic counselors: “Is This Something You Want?”: Genetic Counselors’
Accounts of their Role in Prenatal Decision Making. Sociological Forum (2013), 28, 3, 431-45
and “It Just Becomes Much More Complicated”: Genetic Counselors’ Views About
Genetics and Prenatal Testing in New Genetics & Society.
Carl Milofsky (BA 1970) is professor of sociology at Bucknell where he has taught for 30
years. His time as second head of the Waltham Group at Brandeis involved an intense
student research experience working with Roland Warren (then head of the ASA Urban
and Community Section), which motivated him to seek out Phil Selznick at Berkeley.
After Brandeis he received his PhD at Berkeley in Sociology in 1975, taught at CUNYPage 18
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Richmond College for a year (until NYC went bankrupt), and then did a postdoc in Education at University of Chicago
for two years. He then taught at Yale for four years with a primary appointment in the Institutional for Social and
Policy Studies and with a teaching appointment in Sociology. Carl then went to Bucknell. While at Yale Carl was one of
the founding members of the Program on Nonprofit Organizations there and for a long time he was the "community
guy." Carl edited a volume of Yale/PONPO working papers published by Oxford. More recently he did a handbook
titled Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations with Ram Cnaan of Penn and published by Springer in
2006. He did a somewhat theoretical book with Al Hunter of Northwestern titled Pragmatic Liberalism, Constructing Civil
Society published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2007 and then published Smallville: The Institutionalization of Community in
Twenty-First Century America with the University Press of New England in 2008. Much of what Carl teaches is the sociology of medicine and he often uses Conrad’s reader as material. His focus now is heavily on community health, recreating Waltham Group in central PA with lots of institutional partnerships, community mobilizations, and projects that
seek to fill the huge gap in public health research in terms of community health ethnography (of course public health
would never accept things we might submit so we'll have to go after sociological publishing outlets!)
Damir Mirkovic (MA 1968) received his PhD at University of Alberta in 1975 and went on to become a professor at
Brandon University, Manitoba. He became Professor Emeritus in 2001. He continued a modest amount of research,
publishing a few articles and a number of book reviews mainly on the topic of Holocaust and genocide in the Journal of
Genocide Research; South SlavJournal; and the Canadian Journal of Peace Research. Among others are: `The Historical Link
Between the Ustasha Genocide and the Croato-Serb Civil War`` (JGR, 2000) and ``NATO`s Genocidal War to Prevent
Genocide: A Critique``: (PR, 2001). Damir’s reviews include: Goldstein Ivo and Goldstein
Slavko: Holocaust in Zagreb (JGR, 2003); Zatezalo Djuro: Jadovno: A Complex of Ustasha
Camps (SSJ, 2010); Aralica Djuro: Ustasha Massacre of Serbs in Glina Church, (SSJ,
2011); Gibbs David N.: First Do No Harm (PR, 2009); Goldstein Slavko: 1941: The Year
which Keeps Coming Back (PR, 2011): Mojzes Paul: Balkan Genocides (PR, 2013) and
Christopher Powell: Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide, Montreal,
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol.14, No. 1, 2012.
Anne Pollock (BA 1998) received her PhD from MIT in 2007. This year she published an
essay in The Atlantic, “Enbrel and the Autoimmune Era: How a banner biotech drug
made in Chinese hamster ovary cells is changing disease even as it treats it - An Object
Lesson.” She taught at Rice University for a year and then moved to teaching at Georgia
Tech. This is her fifth year as an assistant professor of science, technology, and culture at
Georgia Tech. The 2012-2013 academic year also marked the publication of her first book,
and her first TV appearance. Her book was listed on Brandeis Magazine’s “On the
Bookshelf” page as well: www.brandeis.edu/magazine/2013/spring/bookshelf.html. It's
been quite a year!
Chris Rhomberg (BA 1982) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Fordham University.
His book, The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor
(Russell Sage Foundation, 2012) received the Distinguished Scholarly Book award from
the Section on Labor and Labor Movements of the American Sociological Association.
The book was also featured in an Author Meets Critics session at the North American
Labor History Conference in October 2012 in Detroit, Michigan. In September 2012, he
published an op-ed on CNN.com on why "America would be better off with more
strikes." www.cnn.com/2012/09/10/opinion/rhomberg-unions-strikes/
Janine Berkowitz Schipper (BA 1992), Associate Professor of Sociology at Northern
Arizona University, is now editor of the journal Humanity and Society. Among her
recent publications is: “Toward A Buddhist Sociology: Its Theories, Methods, and
Possibilities," The American Sociologist Vol. 43(3):203-222 (2012).
Jonathan White (BA 1990) recently was named Director of the Bentley ServiceLearning Center at Bentley University in Waltham. He has worked with Brandeis
administration to create a partnership to create community-based initiatives in the
Waltham area. His book The Engaged Sociologist: Connecting the Classroom to the Community (co-authored with Kathleen Korgen) came out in 4th Edition this year, and his book Sociologists in Action:
Sociology, Social Change, and Social Justice (co-edited with Kathleen Korgen and Shelley White) came out in 2nd Edition
this year.
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Current Graduate Student Activity
From left to right: (Back Row) Jill Smith, Nick Monroe, Sarah Taghavi-Soroui, Margaret Clendenen, Semra Malik,
Alexandria Vasquez, Thomas Bertorelli, Catherine Tan, Jaleh Jalili, Yan Guo, Rachel Bernstein, Brian Fair, Casey
Clevenger, Sara Chaganti, Stephanie Bonvissuto, (Front Row) Sierra Schnable, Caitlin Taborda, Kim Lucas,
Julia Bandini, Alexis Mann, Talia Abramson, Rachel Madson, Alison Stagg
Meredith Bergey received a Mellon Grant and is this year's recipient of the Berkowitz Award. She co-authored the
following articles this past year: I Singh, A Filipe, I Bard, MR Bergey, L Baker. "Globalization and Cognitive Enhancement: Emerging Social and Ethical Challenges for ADHD Clinicians." Current Psychiatry Reports (forthcoming); W
Cadge, MR Bergey. "Negotiating Health-Related Uncertainties: Biomedical and Religious Sources of Information and
Support." Journal of Religion and Health. 2013; and IC Lin, MR Bergey, SS Sonnad, JM Serletti, LC Wu. "Management of
the Ptotic or Hypertrophic Breast in Immediate Autologous Breast Reconstruction: A Comparison Between the Wise
and Vertical Reduction Patterns for Mastectomy." Ann Plast Surg. 2013. She also co-authored a piece with Peter Conrad,
titled "Medicalization" for the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (forthcoming). During the last
year, she taught a “Statistics for the Social Sciences” course, and an “Introduction to Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and
Population Health” course.
Margaret Clendenen presented a paper on prayer in the US Senate with Wendy Cadge as part of a joint ASA/ASR
panel this August. She is currently working on a project about the role of religion in same-sex marriage campaigns in
Maine and Maryland, and was selected to participate in the 2013 HRC Summer Institute for Religious and Theological
Study, which brings together theologians, historians, and sociologists interested in religion and LGBTQ issues. Additionally, Margaret received an "Outstanding Teaching Fellow" award for the 2012-2013 academic year.
Casey Clevenger was awarded the Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship and Fitcher Research Grant to support the
completion of her dissertation research. Casey has a co-authored paper with Amelia Seraphia Derr, Wendy Cadge, and
Sara Curran, “How Do Social Service Providers View Recent Immigrants? Perspectives from Portland, Maine, and
Olympia, Washington,” forthcoming in Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. She also presented “Being and Belonging in Transnational Women’s Religious Communities: Catholic Sisters as Transnational Actors” at the Eastern Sociological Society 2013 Annual Meeting in Boston, and “Two Cities, Two Responses: Exploring Variation in Immigrant
Reception” at the American Sociological Association 2013 Annual Meeting in New York. This past spring semester,
Casey taught a new course, “Gender and Human Rights,” at Brandeis.
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Brian Fair was awarded a grant from the Research Circle on Democracy and Cultural Pluralism to support work on his
dissertation, which is a community study of the urban neighborhood of South Boston. Brian presented papers at the
Eastern Sociological Society and the Society for the Study of Social Problems; both came from his dissertation research,
exploring the community dynamics of a local ice rink in South Boston.
Nicky Fox has two articles forthcoming this year: one co-authored with Carla De Ycaza titled, “Narratives of Mass
Violence: The Role of Memory and Memorialization in Addressing Human Rights Violations in Post-Conflict Rwanda
and Uganda” in Societies Without Borders and another co-authored with David Cunningham titled “Civil Rights” in
Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. Ed. by Jeff Manza. She presented research, “Mechanisms in Remembering and Forgetting a Difficult Past: Memory Projects in Present Day Rwanda,” at the Sociologists for Women in Society Annual Meeting, in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico. She also presented research on “The Aftermath of Human Rights Abuses in the
Great Lakes Region” at the John Jay International Conference: Global Perspectives on Justice, Security and Human
Rights in New York City.
Jaleh Jalili presented two papers this year: “Vigilantism Reconsidered: Threat, Networks, and KKK Membership in
Natchez” (with Professor David Cunningham) at the ASA, and “Women’s Bodies in (R)evolution” at the biannual
GCWS conference, titled “Clash Zones.” Over the summer, she taught a course, “Urban Life and Culture,” at Brandeis
Summer School.
Tom Mackie received a graduate student scholarship from the Public Health Systems Research Interest Group to
present a poster, entitled "National Examination of State of State Psychotropic Oversight Mechanisms for Children in
Foster Care;" his presentation received the Outstanding Student Poster Award. Tom also served as lead author on an
article published in CW 360˚: A Comprehensive Look at Prevalent Child Welfare Issues, entitled "Fostering Appropriate Psychotropic Medication Use among Youth in Foster Care: The Problem, Policy Response, and Resources." Tom presented
findings from his dissertation research at a variety of conferences for state policymakers and practitioners, including
the “Because Mind Matters Summit: Collaborating to Strengthen. Management of Psychotropic Medications for
Children and Youth in Foster Care” (sponsored by the ACF, CMS, and SAMHSA), the Children's Justice Conference (sponsored by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services), and the Three Branches Institute on
Social and Emotional Well-Being (sponsored by National Governor's Association, and Casey Family Programs). Tom
also presented a paper, 'Examining the Role of Mental Health Values and Beliefs in Field Formation among ChildServing Public Sector Agencies,' based on findings from his dissertation research at the Society for the Study of Social
Problems in New York City, August 2013.
Alexandra Revis will be receiving her MA in Sociology from Brandeis and starting her MA in Sustainable International
Development at Heller in the fall of 2013. She is presently working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Heller's Institute
on Assets and Social Policy as part of an evaluation team for a pilot project funded by the Fireman Foundation to link
workforce development and housing assistance services for homeless families in Massachusetts.
Emily Sigalow finished up her fieldwork and began her dissertation writing this past year. She was awarded a Mellon
Dissertation Year Fellowship to support her writing for the 2013-2014 school year. Emily presented papers at several
conferences this year and has a paper under review with colleague Nicole Fox. Emily also welcomed a new daughter,
Maya, to her family in November.
Good Grad Student News in Summary
Placements
Clare Hammonds, Professor of the Practice in the Labor Center and Department of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts-Amherst
Amanda Gengler, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Wake Forest University
Tom Shields, full-time faculty (non-tenure track), Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Lowell
Dana Zarhin, Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ben-Gurion University
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Significant Grants
Casey Clevenger, Brandeis Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship
Amanda Gengler, Dissertation Improvement Grant, National Science Foundation
Emily Sigalow, Brandeis Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship
Tom Mackie, Health Services Dissertation Award (R-36)
Publications (not including reports or book reviews)
Bandini, J. and E.H. Thompson. 2012. ‘Widowerhood:’ Masculinities and Spousal Loss in the Late 1960s.” Omega: The
Journal of Death and Dying.
Cadge, Wendy, Peggy Levitt, B. Nadya Jaworksy, and Casey Clevenger. Forthcoming. "Religious Dimensions of
Contexts of Reception: Comparing Two New England Cities." International Migration.
Cadge, Wendy and Emily Sigalow. Forthcoming. "Strategies for Negotiating Religious Diversity: The Case of
Overbrook Hospital." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Cadge, Wendy and Clare Hammonds. 2012. “Reconsidering Detached Concern: The Case of Intensive Care Nurses,”
Perspectives on Biology and Medicine. 55(2): 266-282.
Clevenger, Casey and Wendy Cadge. Forthcoming. “Institutional Change in American Religion.” Emerging Trends in
the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Sage Reference.
Conrad, Peter and Caitlin O. Slodden. 2013. “The Medicialization of Mental Illness.” Handbook on the Sociology of Mental
Illness, 2nd Edition. New York: Springer Press.
Cunningham, David, Nicole Fox. Forthcoming. “Civil Rights.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. Ed. Jeff Manza. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Fox, Nicole and Carla De Ycaza. 2013. “Narratives of Mass Violence: The Role of Memory and Memorialization in
Addressing Human Rights Violations in Post-Conflict Rwanda and Uganda.” Societies Without Borders.
Gengler, Amanda M. 2012. “Defying (Dis)Empowerment in a Battered Women’s Shelter: Moral Rhetorics,
Intersectionality, and Processes of Control and Resistance.” Social Problems 59: 501-521.
Hammonds, Clare and Wendy Cadge. Forthcoming. “Strategies of Emotion Management: Not Just On, but Off the
Job,” Nursing Inquiry.
Hammonds, Clare. Forthcoming. “’Children are my Passion’: Motivations in Care Worker Unionization” invited
chapter in Caring on the Clock: Complexities and Contradictions in Paid Care Work. Ed. Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia and
Clare Stacey.
Hammonds, Clare. “Counting Care Work: Measuring and Making the Case for Paid and Unpaid Care Work in One US
State,” with Randy Albelda and Mignon Duffy, Social Problems. May 2013. Volume 60, Number 2.
Lin, IC, MR Bergey, SS Sonnad, JM Serletti, LC Wu. “Management of the Ptotic or Hypertrophic Breast in Immediate
Autologous Breast Reconstruction: A Comparison Between the Wise and Vertical Reduction Patterns for Mastectomy.
Ann Plast Surg. Oct 3.
Mackie T.I., Mulé C.M., Hyde J., and Leslie L.K. (2013). Mental health oversight for children and adolescents in child
welfare custody. In: A. Powell and J. Gray-Peterson (Eds.), Child Welfare: Current Issues, Practices and Challenges, (pp. 136). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Mackie, T.I., Bellonci, C., and Leslie L.K. Forthcoming. Fostering Appropriate Psychotropic Medication Use among
Youth in Foster Care: The Problem, Policy Response, and Resources. CW 360˚: A Comprehensive Look at Prevalent
Child Welfare Issues. Minneapolis, MN.
Smith, Jill. Forthcoming. “Community Colleges” and “Allen Bloom’s ‘The Closing of the American Mind” for the
SAGE Sociology of Education: An A-to-Z Guide.
Zincavage, Rebekah. Forthcoming. "It’s Like a Family: Caring Labor, Exploitation and Race in the Long Term Care
Industry” Caring on the Clock, edited by Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, and Clare Stacey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Zincavage, Rebekah. 2012. “Drugs and Deinstitutionalization” in A. Scull (Ed.) Cultural Sociology of Mental Illness.
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Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
Dissertations in progress
Meredith Bergey. “The Rise of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD) Coaching: The Social Meanings and Policy
Implications of a New Paradigm for Managing ADHD.” (Conrad)
Casey Clevenger. “’Women with Hearts as Wide as the World:’ Gender, Race, and Inequality in Women’s Transitional
Religious Organizations.” (Cadge)
Brian Fair. “Forms of Community in the Urban Neighborhood of South Boston.” (Cadge)
Nicole Fox. “Moving Beyond Violence: The Role of Memory and Nationalism in Post-Genocide Rwanda.”
(Cunningham)
Amanda Gengler. “Cultural Health Capital and the Reproduction of Inequality Among Families of Seriously Ill
Children.” (Conrad) [Defended August 2013]
Jennifer Girouard. “Socio-Spatial Exclusion and Inclusion: A Study of the Legal, Political and Social Aspects of
Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B Fair Share Housing Law.” (Sirianni)
Clare Hammonds. “(Re)Valuing Care: Union Organizing in Paid Care Work.” (Hansen)
Tom Mackie. “Extending Psychotropic Medication Oversight for Children in Foster Care: A Sociological and
Econometric Examination of Organizational Determinants and Their Impact on Service Use and Safety.” (Conrad)
Vanessa Lopes Munoz. “Managing Children’s Food Allergies: Families, Doctors, and Schools.” (Conrad)
Tom Piñeros Shields. “Undocumented and Unafraid: Actor Constitution of the Undocumented Student Immigration
Movement, 2008-2010.” (Cunningham) [Defended September 2013]
Emily Sigalow. “Jews on Zafus: A Study of Jewish-Buddhist Lived Hybridity.” (Cadge)
Caitlin Slodden. “Living With Colorectal Cancer: An Experience of Illness Study.” (Conrad)
Jill Smith. “The Role of Independent Educational Consultants in the College Application Process.” (Cadge) [Defended
October 2013]
Dana Zahrin. “The Social Experience of Obstructive Sleep Apnea: Pathways to and Away from Medicalization.”
(Conrad) [Defended August 2013]
Rebekah Zincavage. "My Siblings' Keeper: Mental Illness, Family Dynamics and Responsibility Among Adult Siblings."
(Conrad)
Access more information on the recent accomplishments of our graduate students and faculty,
as well as a digital copy of this newsletter at our website:
www.brandeis.edu/departments/sociology/.
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Welcoming New Grad Students
New PhD Students
Sociology PhD Program
Thomas Bertorelli comes from Great Neck, NY. He received his BS in Neuroscience and BA in Music from Muhlenberg
College in 2010, and his MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2012. He is interested in science &
technology studies and medical sociology.
Rachel Madsen comes from High Point, NC. She received her BA in Sociology from University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill in 2007, and her MA in Sociology from University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2012. She is interested in environmental sociology, political sociology, and social movements.
Nicholas Monroe comes from Watertown, MA. He received his BA in History from Oberlin College in 2009, and his
MA in Art of Teaching from Dominican University on 2010. He is interested in inequality and education.
Joint Sociology-Heller PhD Program
Sarah Taghvai-Soroui comes from Vienna, VA. She is joining us after a year in Heller’s PhD program. She received her
BS in Social Justice & Social Policy from Virginia Commonwealth in 2006, and her MS in Peace & Conflict from George
Mason University in 2010. She is interested in globalization and social welfare.
New MA Students
Sociology MA Program
Talia Abrahams comes from Waltham, MA. She received her BA in Psychology from Boston University. She is interested in higher education and disability studies.
Semra Malik comes from Austin, TX. She received her BA in Sociology from Rice University in 2011. She is interested
in immigration, gender, and work.
Ame Wren comes from Jamaica Plain, MA. She received her BS in Philosophy and Religion from Northeastern in 2005,
and her MA in Gender and Cultural Studies from Simmons College in 2011. She is interested in religion and
globalization.
Joint Sociology-Women’s & Gender Studies MA Program
Stephanie Bonvissuto comes from Jamaica Plain, MA. She received her BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology from
University of Massachusetts, Boston in 2013. She is interested in gender, religion, and sexuality.
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Bits from Undergraduates
Undergraduate Senior Theses 2013
Yosep Bae
Analyzing the Two Different Nationalisms in the Two Koreas
Supervised by Gordie Fellman
Rebecca Miller
Understanding Brandeis Students’ Activism and Mobilization in Regards to Reproductive Rights
Supervised by David Cunningham
Tianyi Zhang
The Three Major Roles of Chinese Television: Striking a Balance between the Party-State,
the Audience, and the Advertising
Supervised by Laura Miller
Yosep Bae
Sociology Prizes for Undergraduates
The Selma and Joseph Finstein Award, which is given to a sophomore or junior who demonstrates academic
achievement, was awarded to Phil Gallagher ’14.
The Irving Kenneth Zola Prize for Excellence in Sociology, for an outstanding senior in Sociology, was awarded to
Eliana Light ’13.
The Dewey-Boyte Prize for the Scholarship and Practice of Democracy, which honors a student who has combined
excellent scholarship with active civil engagement and effective democratic leadership, was awarded to Aaron Bray ’13.
The Elise Boulding Sociology and Social Activism Award, for the student who best exemplifies the thoughtful
application of Sociological analysis to his or her own activist endeavors, was awarded to Caitlin Abber ’13.
The ASA’s Elise Boulding Student Paper Award, presented to one undergraduate student who contributes thoughtful
analysis to the study of peace, was awarded to Andrea Verdeja ’14 for her paper “The Merging of Times: Refugee
Identity within the West Bank.”
BRANDEIS SOCIOLOGY ALUMS:
Send notices about your latest achievements and happenings to Peter Conrad
(conrad@brandeis.edu) and Judith Hanley (hanley@brandeis.edu).
Send it today so you don’t forget. We’ll include it in next year’s newsletter!
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Raustin Hernandez ‘14
The privilege afforded a foreigner, particularly a white, male foreigner who speaks a bit of Arabic allowed me
experiences outside those of the usual travelers’ in Palestine, Morocco, and Egypt. Early on, I discovered that I had to
do very little work to make local friends; young men were simply dying to show me their lives, their culture, and particularly their societies’ seedy underbellies. Many of my fellow foreign acquaintances during that year abroad were
female, however, and theirs were very different experiences. My analysis is that of a constant stream of blatantly exercised male social dominance of patriarchal and misogynistic social norms as opposed to the slightly more nuanced forms they take in the US. It is very important, in
my mind, to experience a new place, its people, and its culture as it is and not to
constantly compare it with others. However, it is good to challenge conceptions and
not fall in to the trap of total cultural relativism.
It seemed that, in the three places in which I lived last year, I merely had to
step out on the street and someone would approach me to strike up a conversation. It almost never turned to an attempt to bed me or wed me, as it often did with
foreign women. Rather, as a male, I was taken under wing as a cultural apprentice of
sorts. This was a two way street, though, because when the young men had a foreigner around they were allotted certain social freedoms to break boundaries and
norms. Travelling in Upper Egypt (South of Cairo) my Egyptian friends would often
ask me to pretend not to understand Arabic and they would proceed to ask the historical sites’ security for special
favors as faux-guides. Tourism is such an important industry in many places, but in a struggling economy even more
so. The guards would, of course, allow us through because we Egyptians are all just trying to make a living here. On
the other hand, oftentimes simply speaking in Arabic got me falafel on the house because I “wasn’t like” the other
ajanib, or foreigners and tourists.
A year abroad is not a terribly long time, but in terms of examining one’s own mannerisms, thought processes,
and informal formalities it is ages. I could not for the life of me stop winking at people every time I spoke to them after living with Palestinians. In
Morocco, the custom is to hold one’s hand to the heart while greeting and
departing, among countless other forms of non-verbal communication. After Egypt I found my eye contact to be even more focused and
intense. Consequently, the way I interact with women now is much different. I was a feminist before my travel and studies last year, but now I really
embody that in my actions and the words I choose to use. I am even more
critical in social interaction and constantly cognizant of my own and
others’ body languages. It is most definitely the small things in life that are
constantly shifting. The larger social framework of one’s mind doesn’t
necessarily change all that much in such a brief period of time, but certainly how that framework is enacted and discussed.
Elizabeth Stoker ’13 Receives a Marshall Scholarship
Brandeis Sociology alumna Elizabeth Stoker (2013) received a Marshall Scholarship
to study theology and Christian ethics at Oxford University. The Marshall
Scholarship is highly prestigious – almost 1,000 students apply annually and no
more than 40 of them are awarded. Previous Brandeis recipients include social and
cultural historian Eileen Yeo (1963), journalist and three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner
Thomas Friedman (1975), and Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Professor
Martin Stone (1985). Liz is the first Brandeis Marshall Awarded in over 20 years!
Other recipients include US Representative Derek Kilmer (1996), Baltimore Sun
columnist Lionel Foster (2002), and Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns
(1978). We are proud that Elizabeth is among these elite American scholars as a
recipient of the scholarship and look forward to learning what her future holds!
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2012 – 2013 Colloquia Series
Thursday, October 11th
Professor Amy Schalet, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
“Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex”
Thursday, October 25th
Professor Catherine Turco, MIT Sloan School of Management
“So You Think You Can Dance? Lessons on Distorted Public Valuation from the US Private Equity Bubble”
Thursday, November 29th
Professor Steve Epstein, John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University
“Sexual Health as Buzzword: Competing Stakes and Proliferating Agendas”
Thursday, February 28th
Professor Japonica Brown-Saracino, Boston University
“Pride of Place: Queer Female Identities and Communities in Four Small U.S. Cities”
Thursday March 14
Professor Doug Harper (PhD Brandeis University ’76), Duquesne University
“Seeing Society: The Long and Winding Road”
BRANDEIS SOCIOLOGY ALUMS:
If you’ve recently published a book, we would love to display it in the department.
Please send a copy to us!
Please let us know of changes to your Email and Snail mail addresses.
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