newsletter spring 2002

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Tara McPherson (School of Cinema-Television and Gender Studies) recently delivered “All Shook Up: Race, Class, Sexuality and Elvis” at the Meadows Museum of Art in conjunction with an opening of previously unseen Elvis photographs. Her work on the Race in Digital Space conferences was featured in two articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education this fall, and she was the featured guest in an online chat on issues of the race, technology and the digital divide hosted by the Chronicle in November. She continues work on the next RDS conference, to be held at USC in Fall 2002. In May, Tara will be a member of the plenary panel on the future of media studies at the annual Society for Cinema Studies Conference.

Lynn Carol Miller (Communications) published “Men's and Women's Mating Preferences: Distinct Evolutionary Mechanisms?” in Current Directions (with A.D. Putcha- Bhagavatula, & W. C. Pedersen) and “Evolved Sex Differences in the Number of Partners Desired? The Long and the Short of It” in Psychological Science (with W. C. Pedersen, A.D. Putcha & Y. Yang) These two publications, due out this spring, directly challenge the findings of Buss and his colleagues regarding evolved sex differences in sex distinct mating preferences. “Virtual Personalities: A Neural Network Model of Personality” (with S.J. Read) in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

Mike Messner (Sociology and Gender Studies) published Paradoxes of Youth and Sport with Margaret Gatz and Sandra Ball Rokeach. He has recently been promoted to Full Professor.

Nelly Stromquist (Rossier School of Education) is a visiting professor this semester in the Programs in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.

Gloria Orenstein (Comparative Literature and Gender Studies) presented “Ecofeminist Artists Reweaving the Connections Between Aesthetics and the Environment” at the Literature, Eco-Criticism and the Environment conference in Albuquerque. “I'm off to
San Diego to have a portrait made of me on my birthday—International Women's Day—March 8. This is for an artist friend’s Older Women Series.” Orenstein is on sabbatical, and has been invited to lecture and spend several weeks at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, “But as anyone can understand, my actual trip will depend upon the political climate in Israel in the month of April. I would very much like to accept this invitation during my sabbatical. Lots of prayers for peace are urgently needed.”

Dana Polan’s (School of Cinema-Television) book on Jane Campion just came out from the British Film Institute.

D. Michael Quinn (CFR Affiliated Scholar) published “Prelude to the National ‘Defense of Marriage’ Campaign: Civil Discrimination Against Feared or Despised Minorities,” in Dialogue (volume 33) and “Response to Goshute Nuclear Waste Policies” in Teaching Ethics. Quinn, with Yolanda Retter, shared his intimate knowledge of the ONE Institute & Archives for the CFR series “Work in Progress.” His new book, Elder Statesmen: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark, is forthcoming from Signature Books.
Ruth Wallach (Art and Architecture Library) published “Does Cultural Heritage Information Want to be Free? A Discourse on Access” in Art Documentation. She has written entries for the Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature and for The Dictionary of
Literary Biography which are forthcoming.

Walter Williams (Anthropology and Gender Studies) sends his news: he spoke at Beijing University on “Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Homosexuality,” and at Shanghai Medical University on “The Medical Anthropology of Homosexuality.” He writes, “These speeches mark the first time a foreign scholar has spoken on Gay Studies at an officially sponsored lecture in China.” His four-hour talk at Beijing University, attended by nearly two hundred people at China’s most prestigious university, was recorded and translated into Chinese and posted on several web sites in China. In both Beijing and Shanghai, Williams led seminars for China’s leading gay activists on effective strategies for reducing anti-gay prejudice in China, based on the theoretical models in Williams’s book Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia. A paper that Williams wrote on techniques of erotic interaction that do not lead to HIV transmission (based on his research in Indonesia and Polynesia) was translated into Chinese and distributed to attendees at China’s first government-sponsored national conference on AIDS Prevention. “This conference represents a historic shift, in which the government of China is taking a proactive stance to address China’s AIDS problems,” he says. While in Beijing, Williams had a three-hour private audience with Dr. Li Yinhe, a member of China’s National People’s Congress and a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; she is recognized as Congress’s main expert on sexual issues. They discussed China’s laws on sexual behavior, and how they might be modified to help reduce HIV transmission. Williams also met with Professor Cui Zien of the Beijing Film Academy, who directed and produced China’s first documentary film about gay people in China that was broadcast on Chinese government-sponsored public television.

Adam Winkler (Law School) published his article “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution’” in the New York University Law Review. In addition to sharing this research with the Center for Feminist Research community, he presented “Behavioral Economics, Corporate Compliance, and Caremark” at the American Association of Law Schools’ Annual Conference in January. Last semester he presented “Corporation Contribution Bans and the Separation of Ownership and Control” at the American Society for Legal History Annual Conference. He will present “Against Giantism: Reconceptualizing the Regulation of Corporate Politics” at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Annual Conference in July.

Elinor Accampo (History) wrote the chapter on “Class and Gender", in Malcolm Crook’s volume Revolutionary France: 1788-1880, volume seven of A Short Oxford History of France from Oxford University Press. She delivered “The Fertility Transition and the Gendered Nature of Contraception in France: Nelly Roussel and Neo-Malthusianism, 1900-1920” at the 26th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago. Accampo acted as commentator for “Imagining New Feminist and Gendered Identities from Pre-Revolutionary France to the Third Republic” at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History in Indianapolis.

Carolyn Cartier (Geography) saw the publication of her book Globalizing South China by Blackwell.

Judith Jackson Fossett (English and American Studies and Ethnicity) reviewed Natalie Zemon Davis’s Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision in www.common-place.org (online journal of Early American history and culture). She convened the panel “Topsy-Turvy: Uncle Tom's Cabin at 150 to be held at the Huntington Research Library, Oct. 4-5, 2002. Fossett appeared as an expert witness in Suntrust Bank (Trustee for Margaret Mitchell Estate) vs. Houghton Mifflin concerning the publication of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone last April. She will teach AMST 285 Black Popular Culture: Fall 2002. She has received the Keck Foundation and Mayers Fellowship for Summer 2002 at the Huntington Research Library.

Dorrine Kondo (Anthropology and American and Ethnic Studies) published “(De)colonizing the Academy?” in Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. She organized the panel “Women of Color (Re)Visioning Race,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Kondo has been granted a Zumberge award, with Velina Hasu Houston, for the staging of two plays: Houston’s Calling Aphrodite and Kondo's Seamless. Each will comment on the other’s work, both in post-play discussion and ultimately in a book. Kondo is also taking part in UC Irvine, Humanities Research Institute’s Resident Research Group on Transnational Asian/ Asian American Performance this spring.
Philippa Levine (History) was Program Chair of the January 2002 American Historical Association conference. She has a Rockefeller grant at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, March-April 2002. Finally, Levine was elected President of the USC Academic Senate, and will take up the position as of July 2002.

Nancy Lutkehaus (Anthropology and Gender Studies) has been busy this past year with events related to events celebrating anthropologist Margaret Mead’s centennial year. She was the keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester titled “Change the World.” She spoke about “Margaret Mead: Anthropology and the Public Sphere.” She returned to her alma mater, Barnard College, to participate in a conference sponsored by Barnard’s Center for Research on Women, “Margaret Mead’s Legacy: Continuing Controversies.” In September, she was the keynote speaker at a program organized by the Anthropology Division of the New York Academy of Science in honor of Margaret Mead where she spoke on “MM and New York City.” In November, she organized and chaired a session at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC on “Margaret Mead as a Public Intellectual.” She was also the discussant for another session on Mead titled “The Legacy of Margaret Mead: Founding a Theory of Contemporary Culture”. In December she participated in a special two hour long program prepared for the Diane Rehm Show, a National Public Radio syndicated program, that focused on Margaret Mead and published a short piece in Natural History magazine, “Margaret Mead: An American Icon” that reminisced about her experience working for Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History. In February, she presented a paper about Margaret Mead as a celebrity intellectual titled “Margaret Mead: Anthropology’s Liminal Figure” at a colloquium sponsored by the USC Annenberg School of Communication’s Norman Lear Center for its working group on “Celebrity Politics and Culture.” And on March 22, 2002, she participated in a special symposium organized by the Library of Congress on the use of the Margaret Mead Archives housed at the Library of Congress. All of this activity surrounding Margaret Mead is related to the book Nancy is writing about Margaret Mead and anthropology titled Margaret Mead and the Media: The Rise and Fall of a Cultural Icon.

Doe Mayer (School of Cinema-Television) was honored by the California chapter of the National Organization for Women for her work in advancing women’s education in the state. Mayer was recognized for teaching women how to use the media for social change.