News & Events
With Fulbright, professor to teach, research in Serbia
Professor Thomas H. Koenig, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, will spend the fall semester at the University of Belgrade School of Law, where he will teach, lecture and conduct research on Serbia's progress in bringing its legal regime into conformity with the requirements of the European Union.
Northeastern University has become the newest member of the Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium. This regional collection of anthropology departments promotes inter-school scholarly opportunities, including a lecture series, student conference and public anthropology symposium. For more information visit the Consortium website: http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/anthro/gbac/index.html.
Assistant Professor Heather Hindman has been invited to participate in George Mason's annual Cultural Studies conference which this year is entitled "Hotspots: Key Issues in Contemporary Globalization." She will be addressing issues of gender and employment in a globalizing world. For more information, see http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu/text/hotspots.pdf.
Professor Thomas Koenig, Chair of the Department Sociology and Anthropology was the lead speaker at a Weidener Law School conference in February that explored his theory of "Crimtorts." Crimtorts are punishments for misbehavior that falls on the borderline between criminal law and tort law such as lawsuits against Blackwater for the killing of Iraqi civilians and punishment for companies that endanger U.S. consumers by importing and selling dangerously defective Chinese products. His analysis will be published in an upcoming symposium issue of the Weidener Law Journal.
Associate Professor Wilfred Holton authored a front page article in Footnotes' January 2008 edition on the class and ethnic dynamics underlying the filling of Boston's Back Bay in the nineteenth century. Footnotes is the American Sociological Association's newspaper that is sent to over 10,000 members of that organization.
Associate Professor Kathrina Zippel was awarded a European Union-United States Atlantis Grant Program award from the US Department of Education and the European Commission (with Myra Marx Ferree of the University of Wisconsin) to advance transatlantic applied research on gender equity.
Associate Professor Matthew Hunt recently published four articles in leading social science journals including African-American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality, 1977-2004 in American Sociological Review, the most prestigious Sociological journal.
Associate Professor Matthew O. Hunt, is co-author of "Perceived Racial Discrimination and Risk of Uterine Leiomyomata," published in the November 2007 issue of EPIDEMIOLOGY.
Assistant Professor Heather Hindman, was just appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Popular Culture. Go to http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-3840 for more information.
Associate Professor Kathrin Zippel's book, The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany, published by Cambridge University Press is the co-winner of the Victoria Schuck Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book published the previous year on women and politics. For more information go to http://www.northeastern.edu/nupr/news/0907/ZippelBookAward.html.
Report of the Law and Society Conference Held in Berlin, Germany
President Joseph Aoun recently expressed his desire for the Northeastern University community “to broaden our cross-cultural education and expand our global initiatives.” In precisely this vein, several NU scholars—professors, alums, students—have been engaging in this work, both in their own research and with their students, for quite some time. Mentioned below, all from interdisciplinary fields, they traveled abroad in July to represent Northeastern at this year’s annual International Conference on Law and Society in the 21st Century: Joint Annual Meetings of LSA and the Research Committee on Sociology of Law, held at the prestigious Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Aligned with the academic pursuits of all, the focus of this year’s conference was “Transformations, Resistances, and Futures.”
Located in the former East Berlin and founded in 1810, Humboldt is Berlin’s oldest university and was attended such by famous thinkers as Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Max Planck and W. E. B. Du Bois. It was on this campus on May 10, 1933 that Adolf Hitler ordered the burning of some 20,000 books banned by the Nazi regime.
Laurel Leff, Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, Cambridge University Press, 2006, came with her husband to visit Berlin and attend diverse sessions during the four-day conference. Professor Thomas Koenig, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, presented a paper entitled, “ ‘Hate Torts’ to Fight ‘Hate Crimes’: Punishing the Organizational Roots of Evil.” His paper has been accepted for publication by the journal American Behavioral Scientist. Associate Professor Kathrin Zippel, in an “Author Meets Reader” session, held a discussion of her book, The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union, and Germany, published by Cambridge University Press, 2005. After returning from Berlin, the American Political Science Association made her the 2007 recipient of the Victoria Schuck Award, given annually for the best book published on women and politics. Professor Zippel will be on leave during this academic year 2007/2008 as a Visiting Scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Associate Professor of Political Science, Michael Tolley, who is president of the Research Committee on Comparative Judicial Studies, an affiliate of the International Political Science Association, was asked to organize two panels for the Berlin meeting of the Law and Society Association: “Rights, Remedies, and Justice in National and International Courts” and “Comparative Perspectives on Legal Mobilization.” He served as chair and discussant of the latter. Leonard Buckle and Suzann Thomas Buckle, Associate Professors of Law, Policy and Society, have participated in Law and Society conferences nationally and internationally for the past 25 years and have continued to encourage their students to deliver papers and serve as panelists at the annual L&S meetings. This year the Buckles met with officers and trustees, and along with LPS alum Karen Vautour (2006) accompanied 2 LPS alums, one current LPS doctoral student and one Sociology doctoral student, in support of their presentations. Professor of Law and Society at Ramapo College, Jillian Weiss ( 2005), presented on “Relations between Transgender Non-Discrimination Law and Corporate Policies;” Professor P. Tim Howard (2006) discussed the relationship between cause lawyers and social change in “Framing Florida Tobacco Liability Litigation;” Bridgette Baldwin and her husband, Davarian Baldwin, spoke on “Cultural Pluralism Revisited: The Case for the Criminal Defendant;” and Christina Braidotti presented her research on a social movement within the Jewish Community of Argentina in a paper entitled “What Price Justice? Grassroots Confronts the Institutions.”
Since 2000, Law and Society has incorporated collaborative research networks (CRNs) to facilitate international research collaboration on such topics as African law and society, international human rights, teaching in Law and Society, labor rights, new direction in inequality and legal consciousness, and many more.
This conference was reported to have the largest number of attendees ever. Next year’s conference will be held in Montreal, Quebec, on May 29-June 1 at the Hilton Bonaventure and the Marriott Chateau Champlain with the Canadian Law and Society Association. For more information, consult the Law and Society web site at: http://www.lawandsociety.org.
Matthew O. Hunt, Associate Professor of Sociology, is lead author of "Neighborhood Racial Composition and Perceptions of Racial Discrimination: Evidence from the Black Women's Health Study," published in the September 2007 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly. For more information, see: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asoca/spq/latest.
Assistant professor Silvia Domínguez has just been awarded a NIH Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Program Award to support her research into health issues impacting Boston’s immigrant community.
Silvia's proposal included two primary studies focused on understanding how domestic and neighborhood based violence influence the mental health and economic self-sufficiency of low-income immigrant and minority families. One study stems from her participation as an ethnographer with the Three City Study of Moving to Opportunity where she is looking at “The Role of Mental Health in the MTO Population.” This study looks at women and families who were moved from distressed neighborhoods to less poverty areas and considers the role that mental health has on their outcomes. Silvia is writing a policy brief in conjunction with the Urban Institute which will be released in September just in time for the return of legislators. Silvia will follow the policy brief with an article.
The other study stems from Silvia's participation as an ethnographer with the Welfare, Children and Families-Three City Study. In her dissertation based on that research, Silvia found that domestic violence impacts families for several generations. Silvia and Diane Purvin (Wellesley College) are now working on a review article on poverty and domestic violence. Their goal is to have the urban poverty literature include violence as one of its factors. Silvia received a RSDF grant that has allowed her to hire Amy Lubitow, a sociology graduate student, as a Research Assistant on this project.