Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, a book series that publishes cutting-edge family research, is seeking submissions for three upcoming volumes. Facing Death: Familial Responses to Illness and Death will take a multidisciplinary approach to how families around the world respond to illness and death. The submissions deadline is July 31, 2021. Please direct all questions to editors Christina L. Scott [email protected], Heidi M. Williams [email protected], and Siri Wilder [email protected]. Police, Courts, and Incarceration: The Justice System and the Family will delve into how various components of the justice system affect families and family relationships. The submission deadline is August 31, 2021. Please direct all questions to editors Sheila Royo Maxwell [email protected] and Sampson Lee Blair [email protected]. Flexible Work and the Family will focus on how flexible work influences families and its impact upon the work-family interface. The submission deadline is August 31, 2021. Please direct all questions to editors Anja-Kristin Abendroth [email protected] and Laura Lükemann [email protected].
The American Journal of Cultural Sociology’s new book review essays editor Celso Villegas [email protected] is accepting book review essays that put two or more texts in conversation with one another and that focus on the meaning-centered, cultural aspects of contemporary sociology. Villegas is interested in reviews that open up conversations between the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology and W. E. B. Du Bois, critical race theory, queer theory, empire and decoloniality, and critical sociology more broadly.
The American Institute of Indian Studies invites applications to its 2021 fellowship competition. Junior fellowships are awarded to PhD candidates to conduct research for their dissertations in India for up to 11 months. Senior fellowships are awarded to scholars who hold a PhD degree for up to nine months of research in India. The application deadline is November 15, 2021. Download applications from the website. Inquiries should be directed to (773) 702-8638 or [email protected].
Peter F. McManus Charitable Trust. The trust offers research grants to nonprofit organizations for research into the causes of alcoholism or substance abuse. Basic, clinical, and social science proposals will be considered. The trust will consider proposals that request up to $75,000. Please send brief summary proposal (2–3 pages), proposed budget, copy of institution’s (501)(c)(3) letter, and investigator’s bio-sketch. Grants may not be used for tuition, and no more than 10 percent of the amount granted may be used for indirect costs. Please send application materials to Katharine G. Lidz, 31 Independence Place, Wayne, PA, 19087. Applications must be postmarked or placed with courier service on or before Friday, September 10, 2021. Emailed applications will not be accepted. If you have any questions, please contact the trust by telephone (610) 647-4974 or email at [email protected].
EffEE PhD Workshop on Causal Analyses of School Reforms. The WZB Berlin Social Science Center and the ifo Center for the Economics of Education will jointly host this workshop September 30–October 1, 2021. This EffEE PhD workshop is aimed at PhD students from the field of educational research who are investigating the effects of reforms in the school system using causal analysis. A total of 12 PhD students will have the opportunity to discuss their results and conceptual considerations with experts in the context of paper presentations. Depending on the pandemic situation, the workshop will take place either at the WZB in Berlin or in a digital format. For more information, click here.
Steven E. Barkan, University of Maine, and Michael Rocque, Bates College, have received the 2020 Outstanding Contribution Award from the division of biopsychosocial criminology of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), to be presented at the 2021 ASC conference in Chicago for their article “Socioeconomic Status and Racism as Fundamental Causes of Street Criminality,” Critical Criminology 26(2):211–231.
The editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has selected the paper “Physician–Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns,” by Brad N. Greenwood, George Mason University, Rachel R. Hardeman, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Laura Huang, Harvard University, and Aaron Sojourner, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, as the winner of the 2020 Cozzarelli Prize in the Behavioral and Social Sciences category. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences. The paper “Cross-Level Sociodemographic Homogeneity Alters Individual Risk for Completed Suicide,” by Bernice A. Pescosolido, Indiana University, Byungkyu Lee, Indiana University, and Karen Kafadar, University of Virginia, was a finalist in this category.
Stephen J. Morewitz, San Jose State University, was executive producer of the Holocaust and human rights documentary, Nobody Wants Us, which was nominated for an Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences: National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter.
Andréa Becker, The Graduate Center, CUNY, was selected by The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Institute for Citizens and Scholars as one of its Dissertation Fellows in Women’s Studies for 2021. Her dissertation is titled “‘I Just Wanted It Gone’: Examining ‘Wanted’ Hysterectomies through Two Gendered Case Studies.”
Professor Mauro F. Guillén, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed the next director of Cambridge Judge Business School beginning on September 1, 2021.
Shirley A. Jackson, Portland State University, was elected vice president-elect of the Pacific Sociological Association for 2021–2022, andpresident-elect of the Society for the Study of Social Problems for 2021–2022.
Marta Tienda, Princeton University, has been named one of Phi Beta Kappa's 2021–2022 visiting scholars. These scholars travel to more than 100 colleges and universities each year, immersing themselves in the academic life of each institution.
Celso Villegas, Kenyon College, has been appointed the Book Review Essays Editor for the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Geneviève Zubrzycki, University of Michigan, is the only sociologist among 184 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists awarded a 2021 fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her work focuses on nationalism, religion, and memory.
Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia, was quoted in the April 15, 2021, article in The New York Times, “C.T.E. Tests May Not Fully Explain N.F.L Player’s Shooting Spree.”
Chloe E. Bird, Pardee RAND Graduate School, co-authored the commentary “Mothers Need a Continuous System of Care Even After Babies are Born” on Newsweek.com on May 10, 20201.
Karen A. Cerulo, Rutgers, was a guest on the BBC4 radio show Thinking Aloud, on May 5, 2021, where she was interviewed about her 2018 study “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making and Meaning Attribution.”
Hae Yeon Choo and Robert Diaz, University of Toronto-Mississauga, authored the op-ed “Addressing Anti-Asian Racism in the University” in the April 2, 2021, edition of Inside Higher Ed.
Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University, was interviewed for the article “White Evangelical Resistance is Obstacle In Vaccination Effort,” appearing on the front page of the April 5, 2021, print edition of The New York Times, as well as for the article “Republicans and Democrats Switch Sides on Religion vs. Science” in The Washington Post on May 25, 2021.
Charles A. Gallagher, La Salle University, was quoted in the article “‘The Relationship Has Always Been Tense.’ Philadelphia's Police Department Has a Troubling History with the City's Black Community,” in the October 30, 2020, issue of TIME Magazine and was interviewed for several news segments, including: “Digital Blackface: What the Online Phenomenon Means,” on March 16, 2021, and “Our Race Reality: Action for Allies,” on March 20, 2021, on Fox 29 Philadelphia; “Philadelphia Police Increase Presence in Parts of City Again Following Storming of U.S. Capitol,” on January 7, 2021, on CBS 3 Philadelphia; and “Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust, Museum of American Revolution Host ‘It Begins With Us’ Webinar,” on February 20, 2021, on WBNG 12 Binghamton.
Shirley A. Jackson, Portland State University, was interviewed for the piece “Antifa Didn't Storm the Capitol. Just Ask the Rioters” for the March 2, 2021, episode of NPR’s Morning Edition. She also appeared in the May 16, 2021, episode of CNN's United Shades of America titled “The Power of Protest,” where she discussed the protests in Portland, OR, during summer 2020.
Jennifer Lee, Columbia University, wrote an article “When the Past Becomes Present: A Legacy of Anti-Asian Hate” that appeared in the April 22, 2021, Social Science Research Council Insights blog. With Tiffany J. Huang, Columbia University, Lee wrote the editorial “Reckoning with Asian America,” that appeared in the April 2, 2021, issue of Science, which the editor-in-chief highlighted in the Editor’s Blog.
Martyn Pickersgill, University of Edinburgh, authored a March 25, 2021, article for the UK broadsheet The Herald, titled “Why We Must Do More to Make Mental Health Our Priority,” and was quoted in a April 30, 2021, La Tercera article, “‘Nueva Normalidad’: La Experiencia de Israel y Reino Unido, los Líderes en Vacunación.”
Michael S. Pollard, Pardee RAND Graduate School, was interviewed about his recent study of public trust in the CDC by KNX News Radio on April 5, 2021; by CNN for the May 21, 2021, article “As It Fights a Pandemic, CDC Wages a Second Battle To Win Back Trust”; and by United Press International for the April 5, 2021, article “Public Trust in CDC Drops across All Demographics during Pandemic.”
Abigail C. Saguy, University of California-Los Angeles, Kjerstin Gruys, University of Nevada-Reno, and Kate Mason, Wheaton College, were quoted in the USA Today May 25, 2021, article “Those Infamous Edited Yearbook Photos and Society’s Obsession with Girls’ Bodies: ‘You Can’t Win.’”
Jennifer Patrice Sims, University of Alabama-Huntsville, was interviewed on the March 9, 2021, episode of BBC World News for a live segment on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. She was also quoted in the March 9, 2021, article in The Washington Post, “Meghan and Harry’s Interview Confirmed That Royal Status Is No Shield from the Paper Bag Test.”
Jackie Smith, University of Pittsburgh, was quoted in a May 5, 2021, article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review from her statement at a special City Council public hearing on the crisis of Black Pittsburghers leaving the city.
Stacy Torres, University of California-San Francisco, authored the op-ed “Violence and Hate Against Asian Americans is a Health and Safety Crisis for Everyone,” appearing in the March 17, 2021, edition of USA Today.
Jake Wilson, California State University-Long Beach, and Ellen Reese, University of California-Riverside, were interviewed by the German labor magazine Luxemburg Gesellschaftanalyse und Linke Praxis, March 2021.
Paul S. Adams and Geoffrey L. Wood, University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, Eds., The Impact of Natural Disasters on Systemic Political and Social Inequities in the U.S. (Lexington Books, 2020).
Sam Cohn, Texas A&M University, All Societies Die: How to Keep Hope Alive (Cornell University Press, 2021).
Celeste Vaughan Curington, North Carolina State University, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Ken-Hou Lin, University of Texas at Austin, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (University of California Press, 2021).
Steven J. Gold, Michigan State University, Ed., Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration (Purdue University Press, 2020).
Brian Gran, Case Western Reserve University, The Sociology of Children’s Rights (Wiley, 2021).
Amalia Leguizamón, Tulane University, Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina (Duke University Press, 2020).
Bart Nooteboom, Process Philosophy: A Synthesis (Anthem Press, 2021).
Joachim J. Savelsberg, University of Minnesota, Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles (University of California Press, 2021).
Jason Schnittker, University of Pennsylvania, Unnerved: Anxiety, Social Change, and the Transformation of Modern Mental Health (Columbia University Press, 2021).
Hermann Strasser, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Der Kommunikator als Architekt der Gesellschaft: Blicke, Worte, Gesten (Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing, 2020).
A. Javier Treviño, Wheaton College, Ed., Investigating Social Problems, 3rd edition (SAGE, 2021).
Ari Ezra Waldman, Northeastern University, Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Enrique de la Garza Toledo passed away on February 24, 2021 at the age of 74. He held a PhD in sociology from the Colegio de Mexico and was a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, a researcher emeritus of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, and a member of the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias. He is credited (as a sole or joint author) with more than 40 books, 100 academic articles, as well as numerous chapters and academic and nonacademic presentations on the topics of industrial relations, labor processes, workers’ organization and unions, transnational companies, and social methodology and theory.
Bob Herman, Pomona College Emeritus Professor of Sociology and expert on urban issues who wrote a definitive Downtown Los Angeles walking guide, died of complications following a recent fall. He was 92. Herman taught sociology at Pomona College for four decades. He loved teaching, served for many years as the chairperson of the sociology department, and was well known among fellow faculty for his warm collegiality. Herman was passionate about mentoring students, and he was honored with the Wig Award for excellence in teaching in 1991.
1935–2021
Donald Armour Clelland was the son of Rev. John P. Clelland Sr., who was part of the resistance movement that formed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He is survived by his wife, sociologist Wilma A. Dunaway, his sons Fred and Daniel Clelland, his granddaughters Emily and Mary Catherine Clelland, his sister Jean DeKryger, and his brother John P. Clelland Jr. He is preceded in death by his father, his mother Winifred Armour Clelland, his sister Ann Vanderploeg, and his dear friend Immanuel Wallerstein.
Clelland earned his BA from Calvin College (1958) and his MA (1960) and PhD (1970) from Michigan State University. His academic career spanned more than 30 years at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He touched the lives of more than 6,000 undergraduates and chaired 28 graduate committees. Fourteen of his PhD students became department chairs at American and non-Western universities. Several of his former doctoral students described Clelland to be the shaping force in their careers. Former students remembered Clelland as that faculty member they could depend on to challenge inequitable administrative policies that disproportionately impacted minority, female, older-return, and international students. It was appropriate that Clelland died on Earth Day, as he introduced ecological threats to the planet into his teaching and research in the late 1960s.
Clelland’s death represents the loss of a great mind whose work was unique and groundbreaking. Over the decades, he offered theoretical revisions in several areas, but he was proudest of the work he did in international political economy. In 2015, he co-authored a controversial article that challenged the tendency of American scholars to impose on the rest of the world their theories about race. However, his theoretical work about dark value in global commodity chains attracted the greatest attention during his retirement years. He argued that global commodity chains transmit goods to the rich countries that are “cheap” because of their hidden unpaid and underpaid labor, natural resources, and externalized costs. At age 80, two of his groundbreaking articles were awarded prizes by ASA’s Section on Marxist Sociology and Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS). Clelland’s intellectual website can be accessed here.
Clelland supported 10 ASA Sections, but he was most active in the Marxist and PEWS Sections. Clelland was shocked by the racist and sexist inequalities and the narrow theoretical dogmas within sociological associations in the 1960s and 1970s. He organized and coordinated within the Southern Sociological Society the country’s only “Radical Caucus” to create an institutional space for colleagues whose concerns about theoretical exclusions and race, gender, and class inequalities were silenced within traditional committees. Between 1976 and 1995, the Caucus consistently carried petitions for change to professional annual meetings. In 1994, the Caucus undertook a nationwide survey to identify Black and White sociologists whose roles in the civil rights movement had been ignored by the profession. In 1995, the Caucus organized a gathering to celebrate those scholar-activists and present a lifetime achievement award to Professor Charles G. Gomillion (1900–1995), a son and grandson of slaves who effected a 1960 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racist gerrymandering of voting districts and who battled to break racial barriers in the American Sociological Association and Southern Sociological Association.
Clelland’s family thanks the many former students and colleagues who have emailed memories about his contributions to their lives and invites you to post memories and review his tribute wall at https://www.clickfh.com/obituaries/obituary-listings. Memorial donations may be sent to Global Labor Justice, 1634 I Street, NW, Suite 1000, Washington, DC, 20006, or online.
Wilma A. Dunaway, Virginia Tech, Donald’s wife
1936–2021
N.J. Demerath III (Jay) of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst passed away February 5, 2021, in Leeds, MA. His immediate cause of death was COVID-19-related complications.
Demerath graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, receiving his BA in 1958. He earned his MA (1962) and PhD (1964) from the University of California-Berkeley, where he studied with Charles Glock. Demerath joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1962–1972, progressing from instructor to full professor, then moving to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as professor and department chair in sociology. When he retired from UMass in 2008, Demerath held the title Emile Durkheim Distinguished Professor.
Demerath’s sociology of religion was at the heart of his scholarly reputation, and he published in sociological theory, collective behavior, and the institutional dynamics of the academy. His first book, Social Class in American Protestantism (Rand McNally, 1965), was a study in how religion becomes expressed in various class cultures. Demerath authored or co-authored three books specifically on religion and politics: Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City (Princeton University Press, 1992) on the connections between religion and politics in Springfield, MA; Crossing the Gods: World Religions and Worldly Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2001)which wasan international comparative study; and Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion (Indiana University Press, 2005), a study of public religious expression in Indianapolis.
An article from the Springfield study and the book Crossing the Gods won scholarly awards. He also published on non-religion, American culture wars, and organizational theory. Another book of note was Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982, with Gerald Marwell and Michael Aiken.
Demerath offered considerable organizational service to the discipline of sociology. He was executive officer of the American Sociological Association (1970–72) and was president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (1997–99), the Eastern Sociological Society (2001), the Association for the Sociology of Religion (2005). He chaired the ASA Section on the Sociology of Religion (2011). He was willingly drafted into organizing conference sessions, being a discussant or a critic in an ‘author-meets-critics’ session or serving on committees. He was an active consultant to the Lilly Endowment, Inc. on several projects on religion in American life, and secured Ford Foundation funding in the late 1990s so that international scholars could travel to conferences in the U.S. Along with his scholarship, this gave a powerful push to the sociology of religion’s efforts to become more global. Demerath was active in the International Society for the Sociology of Religion and the International Sociological Association. He had two different Fulbright fellowships in India and did a turn as visiting faculty at the London School of Economics, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard University.
In so many ways, Demerath was the consummate professional. He was committed to rigorous scholarship and to the promotion of sociology. He believed fervently in the craft of good writing and was a tireless editor of others’ prose, as well as his own. He was generous with attention and mentoring advice for younger scholars and colleagues. He began every presentation with an opening joke or humorous anecdote that hooked the audience. I can’t remember him ever being at a loss for something to say, usually expressed with his characteristic wordplay, puns, or literary allusions.
Demerath loved travel, music, and New England sports teams, and was an excellent cook. Two of his sons followed him into the academy and the third is a professional musician and teacher. He had an international network of friends and colleagues. He was truly adored by his grandchildren.
For all these contributions—professional and personal—Demerath will be missed.
Rhys H. Williams, Loyola University-Chicago
1970–2021
Sinikka Elliott, dear colleague, friend, mentor, and teacher, was found deceased May 15, 2021, after going missing on, BC (Canada).
Elliott had an international reputation as a scholar of the family, inequality, and health. Elliott was an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She came to UBC in 2017 from NC State University, which she joined in 2008 after completing her doctorate in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.
In her work, Elliott sought to understand how social inequality is reproduced, resisted, and transformed by examining the specific social contexts in which the families she studied were embedded and how they responded creatively to the difficult situations they often faced. In 2012, she published her first book, Not My Kid: What Parents Believe About the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers (NYU Press, 2012). Elliott sought to understand how American parents addressed their own teenagers’ sexuality when teen sexuality is deemed a major social problem. She found that, while parents saw teen sexuality as risky, they didn’t believe their own child engaged in such behaviour, drawing upon gender, racial, class, and sexual inequalities to draw a boundary between their own child and the stereotypical “risky” teen. Elliott argued that parents’ beliefs about teen sexuality were shaped by a social discourse that represents parents as morally responsible for teaching children about and protecting them from the negative consequences of sex. Off-loading of the social problem of teen sexuality from educational or health-care systems onto parents made parental attitudes about sex ripe for the reproduction of inequality.
Elliott’s next book, Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2019), co-authored with Sarah Bowen and Joslyn Brenton, was based on a major study of childhood obesity and food insecurity among low-income American families. Pressure Cooker explores the stories of nine families to illustrate broader patterns among low-income families, documenting how family food practices are shaped by access to transportation, income insecurity, precarious employment, unpredictable work hours, and lack of access to affordable childcare. The authors argued that both policy and popular discourses that represent home cooking as the solution to childhood obesity fail to recognize the powerful structural constraints that poor families face in feeding their children. As with her other work, in this book Elliott and collaborators sought to promote policies for a more just society that offers better family supports.
In addition to these major works, Elliott published articles on the parenting experiences and strategies of low-income Black mothers in the U.S.; how low-income mothers navigate medical and governmental surveillance of their children’s body size; and the importance of orientations toward time in conducting ethnographic fieldwork. In all her work, Elliott adopted a profoundly collaborative approach. She regularly partnered not only with students and scholars from other disciplines, but also with community partners, such as a recent partnership with the New Westminster school district in British Columbia on the development of a school lunch program. Elliott regarded her research participants as research partners. She informed them of research findings and consulted with participants during the analysis process, allowing them to register their own reactions to her scholarly interpretations of their lives. This sense of responsibility toward the people she studied deeply informed Elliott’s scholarship and her concerns with social inequality.
Throughout her career as a sociologist, Elliott left her mark as an exceptional teacher and mentor. She was devoted to her students, nurturing them into budding scholars with compassion and generosity. As a colleague, Elliott was steadfast in her commitment to a supportive, equitable, and diverse academia. We are heartbroken to have lost her.
Amy Hanser, University of British Columbia
1934–2021; ASA President, 1994
William (Bill) Gamson had a knack for opening sentences. A favorite, “Beware of economists bearing gifts,” was emblematic, grabbing attention and setting up the paper—a critical examination of the growing influence of utilitarian perspectives in assessing the politics of social protest. Pithy and provocative, the line opened an argument against the so-called “free rider problem,” buttressed by historical accounts and contemporary examples, and ending with a formal mathematical proof. It was characteristically free of jargon and gratuitous citation, and clearly aimed at making sense of a theoretical problem in order to engage in more effective action.
Of course, there’s considerable variation in Gamson’s styles and subjects—math, for example, appears episodically—but a concern with clarity and practical consequences stretches across a massive volume of writing, which includes eight books and well over 100 articles published between 1961 and 2014. Gamson could write.
Gamson engaged critical topics in the study of collective action, always concerned about the influence and outcomes of social movements that opposed war and promoted progressive policies. He started with coalitions, considered how individuals and groups made judgments about justice and choose to get involved in politics, the political and policy outcomes of social movements, how activists worked in and with mass media, and how media framed both activists and their causes. An astonishing share of his work animates that of other scholars decades later. Along the way, he wrote about whatever else engaged him, writing about his identity as a Jewish professor teaching at a Catholic school late in his career.
Gamson’s teaching, like his politics, was fundamentally democratic. In the classroom, he committed to learning groups and games (SimSoc!), where small learning groups worked through problems to engage difficult and interesting material. He even brought the learning groups to the presidential address of the American Sociological Association in 1994, where 1,500 sociologists spread out across scores of tables to talk about genocide and nuclear war. Outside the classroom, he was one of the architects of the first “teach-in” about the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan in 1965. Over decades, he met weekly with the members of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP), which he co-founded with Charlotte Ryan. With good humor, coffee, and baked goods, MRAP was a home for an admixture of activists and academics and launched a thousand dissertations.
Gamson was an innovator, prospecting methods and creating games. As an assistant professor, he created fantasy baseball, allowing academics to imagine alternative careers in sports, and created classroom games that similarly stoked students’ imagination. A creative and eclectic scholar, he deployed formal modeling, simulations, historical analysis, frame analysis, focus groups, and interviews—depending upon the question of the moment.
Gamson won many awards and honors. A partial list includes: AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research (1962); the ASA Sorokin Award, for a distinguished scholarly publication (1969) for the book Power and Discontent (Richard D. Irwin, 1968); Guggenheim Fellowship (1978); Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1978); ASA Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award (1987); ASA President (1994); Distinguished Career Award, ASA Section on Peace and War (1997); Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002); the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements’ Distinguished Book Award (2004, with Myra Marx Ferree, Jürgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht) for Shaping Abortion Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2002); John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior (2011); and W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (2012).
Gamson was born in Philadelphia on January 27, 1934. He earned a BA from Antioch College (political science) and a PhD from the University of Michigan (social psychology), where he taught from 1962 until 1982. In 1982, he moved to Boston College, teaching there until 2010 and remaining engaged after his retirement until his death on March 23, 2021. He is survived by his wife, sociologist Zelda Gamson; a son, sociologist Joshua Gamson; a daughter, Jenny Gamson; and five grandchildren. His half-century of work continues to animate scholarship, and if you throw a rock at ASA’s annual meeting, you will hit someone who remembers Gamson’s extraordinary kindness.
David S. Meyer, University of California-Irvine
1939–2021
Retired sociology professor Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, a pioneering researcher in rape counseling and trauma—whose interests also extended to other compelling social issues, such as the challenges faced by two-career families and controversies surrounding intensive care for newborns—died on February 6, 2021. She was 81.
As the sociology department’s first tenured female faculty member at Boston College, Holmstrom taught at the college for four decades and served as department chair for six years. In 1972, Holmstrom, along with Boston College’s Connell School of Nursing faculty member Ann Wolbert Burgess, founded a rape victim counseling program at Boston City Hospital—among the first to be based in a hospital—that, in addition to offering therapeutic services, provided the two with insights into the plight of women who endured sexual violence. They spoke with victims at the hospital, did follow-up work, and took some cases to court. Holmstrom and Burgess also trained nurses at the hospital to continue the counseling, remaining as supervisory consultants for the program.
Burgess, who praised Holmstrom as “a visionary scholar, a trailblazer for interdisciplinary collaboration before it was popular in academia,” recalled that the two had met through interdisciplinary teaching on health care. Dr. Holmstrom was aware of the gathering revelations about the trauma of rape through feminist literature and women’s consciousness-raising groups, Burgess recalled, but it was not yet a widespread research topic.
In 1974, Holmstrom and Burgess published the study “Rape: Victims of Crisis,” which drew upon their experiences and observations through the Boston City Hospital program. These findings formed part of the basis for Holmstrom and Burgess’s book The Victim of Rape: Institutional Reactions (John Wiley & Sons, 1978), the first empirical study to detail the encounters of rape victims with three major institutions: police, hospital, and court. The co-authors tracked 115 victims, 113 of them female, and detailed their emergency room experiences, interactions with police, and odyssey through the legal process. “Lynda was a born teacher and taught me methods of participant-observation fieldwork and how to record raw data in the fantastically detailed and meticulous way good field notes require,” said Burgess.
Prior to embarking on her groundbreaking research with Burgess, Holmstrom had scrutinized what was at the time another less-explored aspect of contemporary American society: how married couples tried to balance professional ambitions and family relationships while both trying to pursue high-level careers. She interviewed 20 such couples—wives and husbands separately—and a comparison group of seven couples where wives had given up careers.
In her book The Two-Career Family (Schenkman Pub. Co, 1972), Holmstrom explained that the interdependencies of family and occupational structure lay in the woman performing domestic duties and so allowing her husband to devote himself single-mindedly to his career. This was especially true for child-rearing—16 of the 20 couples interviewed had children—because the couples tended to lack easy access to adult relatives, household help, or childcare centers. Women would modify their career plans, usually putting them in jeopardy in doing so by being unable to keep current with professional developments while caring for children. Holmstrom proposed flexible work schedules, among other ideas, to help couples deal with such situations.
In the 1980s, Holmstrom and sociology colleague Jeanne Guillemin tackled an emerging dilemma in medical science. Advances in intensive care technology had increased the survival rate for premature babies, subsequently creating a host of quality-of-life issues. Some of these babies would face a future of health challenges, severe intellectual disabilities, or early death. The two sociologists undertook the first in-depth study of the approximately 300,000 babies in the 500–600 neonatal intensive care units in the U.S. In their book Mixed Blessings: Intensive Care for Newborns (Oxford University Press, 1986), Holmstrom and Guillemin addressed such questions as who should be the guardian for these babies’ interests, what constitutes “good” treatment, and how parents of premature babies should approach such an emotionally fraught scenario.
Fellow Boston College sociology professor Sharlene Hesse-Biber said, “Lynda was ahead of her time: Her research projects were at the cutting edge of her field and were often interdisciplinary. She was an outstanding colleague and friend. When I was an assistant professor, Lynda always found time to mentor and encourage me along my academic journey. She fostered a deep sense of community within our department, had a wonderful sense of humor and a great smile. She was always deeply interested in what scholarly activities her colleagues were working on. Even in her retirement years, she remained deeply connected to our department.”
The sociology department recognized the contributions of Holmstrom, who retired as a full-time faculty member in 2009, by naming an award after her. The Lynda Lytle Holmstrom Award recognizes the best class paper on the topic of gender with sociological implications submitted to an undergraduate course in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences each calendar year.
A native of Seattle, Holmstrom earned a BA from Stanford University, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD from Brandeis University. Prior to joining Boston College, she worked as a research assistant at Stanford University and at a research institute in Virginia. Holmstrom is survived by her husband, Ross, and children, Bret and Cary. Condolences may be sent to: Ross Holmstrom, 66 Sacramento St., Cambridge, MA, 02138.
Maureen Renehan, Boston College
1928–2021; ASA President, 1987
Melvin L. Kohn, emeritus professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and academy professor at the Academy at Johns Hopkins, died in his home on March 19, 2021.
Kohn joined JHU sociology in 1985, and in 1987 was elected American Sociological Association president. He joined Hopkins after almost 35 years of distinguished service at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), during the last 25 of which he led the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies. At NIMH, Kohn’s path-breaking research on the relationship between social class and schizophrenia garnered many awards, including elected memberships or fellowships in the American Psychopathological Association, the Sociological Research Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Kohn was a pioneer in establishing the field of study of social structure and personality that combined class analysis and social psychology, with a particular focus on job conditions and their implications for personality development. In his classic text, Class and Conformity: A Study of Values (University of Chicago Press, 1969), Kohn marshaled survey data from Italy and the U.S. to show how job conditions affect not only parental values and personality but also parents’ socialization practices vis-à-vis their children. In 1985, the book was designated a “citation classic” by the editors of the Social Sciences Citation Index. Today, it remains a standard reference in the literature on social structure and personality.
JHU was Kohn’s first academic appointment, and it remained his only such appointment. At JHU, he became a true comparativist and expanded his research framework to explore the relationship between class and personality in Poland, Japan, and Ukraine. After the collapse of Soviet communism, Kohn seized the opportunity to study how the class-personality relation changed in the context of radical social transformation from state socialism to market capitalism in 1990s Poland and Ukraine. In the 2000s, he launched a five-city study in China to study social psychological change amidst rapid urban transformation.
Kohn’s comparative works earned him some of the highest academic recognition in several countries where he conducted his research. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Polish Sociological Association and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, as well as being granted an honorary doctorate in Ukraine’s National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2008, the Polish Academy of Sciences hosted a symposium on his work entitled “Social Structure and Personality under Conditions of Stability and Change: Research of Melvin L. Kohn and his Collaborators,” with participants from around the world. In 2012, ASA organized a special session, “Class, Stratification, and Personality Under Conditions of Apparent Social Stability and of Radical Social Change (1956–2006),” at its Annual Conference to honor Kohn’s lifetime achievements.
From his PhD in sociology at Cornell University in 1952 to his retirement at JHU in 2012, Kohn was a never-tiring social scientist full of novel ideas to break new grounds. After his retirement, he continued to write and published his last book, The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality (Anthem Press, 2019). The book is a theoretical reflection and intellectual memoir of his lifetime of research. Looking back at his corpus of works is humbling. Kohn sets an example and a high standard of what social scientific investigation, theory building, and global comparison should be like. We will all miss his passion for research, his teaching and mentorship, his companionship, and his laughter.
Ho-fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University
1946–2021
Kenneth E. Melichar, longtime sociology professor at Piedmont University, Demorest, GA, passed away on March 25, 2021. With his wife of 49 years, Barb, Melichar moved to Traverse City, MI, in 2012 to be closer to their daughter, Leah, and died there of complications from Parkinson’s disease. Melichar will be remembered as a gentle man and committed teacher for whom the breadth of the sociological imagination perfectly suited his ever-evolving interests.
Born in Lewistown, MT, in 1946, Melichar served in the U.S. Marine Corps before completing a BA degree at the University of Montana in 1972. In 1975, he pursued an MA degree in sociology at the University of Wyoming, where he focused on alienation as a theoretical concept. Melichar received a second MA in sociology at New York University in 1982 and completed his PhD at NYU in 1985. His dissertation was a study of Montana’s 1987 Clean Air Act. In 1991, Melichar earned an EdS in Education with a focus on adult education at the University of Georgia, and in 2009 he received a third MA degree, this time in religion with a focus on Native American studies, also at the University of Georgia.
These degrees chart the many interests, growing rather than shifting, of Melichar’s curious mind. His early interest in Marxist humanism and critical theory informed all his subsequent studies, including educational reform, cultural tourism, depictions of Native Americans, film studies, and individual scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and James Welch.
Melichar chaired the sociology department at Piedmont University for 15 years and then chaired the department of social sciences from 1998 to 2011. His commitment to Piedmont University extended to directing international research for nearly a decade and serving as associate vice president for academic affairs from 2005 until retirement. Melichar lived in Washington, DC, while finishing his courses and dissertation at NYU, taking the train regularly between the two cities and teaching at Northern Virginia Community College. He was an adjunct in general studies at North Georgia Technical College after retiring. Melichar also taught as visiting professor for DeVry University Online from 2003 to 2012. The list of nearly 30 courses he offered during his career ranged from cultural anthropology to political sociology, social theory to criminology, and social psychology to ethnic and racial minorities.
In 1991, Melichar participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” and in 2000 he attended a second NEH Summer Institute, “Traversing Borders.” He also wrote The Filmic Indian and Cultural Tourism (LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2011) and wrote several book reviews and papers for scholarly journals, including Sociological Perspectives. Melichar edited Adult Basic Education from 1993 to 2004.
Friends and colleagues will remember Melichar as an honest and unassuming man whose thirst for knowledge and commitment to sociology made him a congenial and stimulating companion. He typified what boxer Joe Louis said about himself: “I did the best I could with what I had.”
Garth Massey, Portland, OR
1949–2021
It is with great sadness that the sociology department at Virginia Tech announces the death of colleague and friend, John W. Ryan. A native of Rochester, NY, Ryan grew up loving baseball and rock ‘n’ roll. He graduated from West Virginia University with a BA in sociology in 1971 and an MA in sociology in 1977. He earned his PhD in sociology in 1982 from Vanderbilt University.
Ryan formed his first band when he was 14. He won songwriting contests, performed in folk duos and a successful rock band, and was a colleague of singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. Ryan continued his musical career, performing as a guitar-playing singer-songwriter in the many music halls and bars of Nashville, TN. Slowly, however, his music career gave way to a sociology of music career, and Ryan’s sociological creativity emerged in publications on the music industry and the arts.
Ryan began his academic career in 1982 at Clemson University. Working in the production of culture perspective, Ryan published the seminal work The Production of Culture in the Music Industry: The ASCAP‑BMI Controversy (University Press of America, 1985), as well as several other influential works analyzing the production of country music, television, news, and art.
While Ryan continued his work in the production of culture throughout his career, he began working in the area of violence prevention after receiving a grant for an evaluation study of two neighborhood anti-violence organizations. The project and evaluation continued for 10 years, and Ryan’s work contributed to improved community-police relations, increases in public services to the community, closing of abandoned houses, and a substantial reduction in crime in both neighborhoods.
In 2001, Ryan moved to Virginia Tech, where his scholarship expanded to include studies on terrorism, online extremism, and community reactions to crime and tragedies. His work in communal reactions to tragedies resulted in international recognition and awards. Ryan and James Hawdon’s model of how communities respond to tragedies has been applied to numerous tragedies, including mass shootings, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and technological disasters.
While Ryan’s research was influential, his greatest strength was as an administrator, a role in which he truly excelled. He served as director of graduate studies at Clemson University, 1993–1995, and he chaired the department of sociology at Clemson, 1996–2001. Ryan became chair of Virginia Tech’s sociology department in 2001, continuing in this position for 18 years. During this time, Ryan guided the department’s growth from approximately 250 majors to nearly 800 majors, and from 14 faculty members to 40. He oversaw the creation and development of two centers—the Race and Social Policy Research Center and the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention—and the inclusion of three interdisciplinary programs into the department: Africana studies, American Indian studies, and women’s and gender studies. Ryan’s administrative skills transformed the department, and we who were privileged enough to work under his leadership are truly thankful for his patient, calm, compassionate, empathetic, and inspiring approach. Ryan was formally recognized by the International Association of Administrative Professionals as the Executive of the Year in 2004, by Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences for his excellence in administration in 2014, and by Virginia Tech with the University Exemplary Department Award in 2019.
Ryan passed away on February 23, 2021, and will always be remembered for his calm demeanor, dry wit, razor-sharp insights, and sound advice. He was a passionate sociologist, and he positively affected the lives of many.
James Hawdon and Michael Hughes, Virginia Tech
1938–2020
Andrew C. Twaddle, 82, died of complications from COVID-19 at University Hospital in Columbia, MO.
Twaddle received his BA from Bucknell University in 1961, his MA from the University of Connecticut in 1963, and his PhD in sociology from Brown University in 1968. During his undergraduate student years at Bucknell, as the Vietnam War was heating up, Twaddle worked and lived one summer at the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg. When he received a letter from his local draft board asking for information in order to classify his draft status, Twaddle listed the penitentiary as his current address. Consequently, Twaddle received a 4F classification, absolving him from military service.
After earning his PhD, Twaddle joined the faculty of College of the Holy Cross (sociology), Harvard University School of Medicine (preventive medicine), Massachusetts General Hospital (medicine), University of Pennsylvania (sociology and community medicine), Northeastern University (sociology), and the University of Western Ontario (sociology). In 1971, he settled at the University of Missouri, where he spent the remainder of his career.
Twaddle thought that health, sickness, medical-care institutions, and medical professions were windows on society, helping to grab the attention and develop the sociological imaginations of students from all academic disciplines. Talcott Parsons, one of Twaddle’s colleagues at Harvard, put it well in the Foreword to A Sociology of Health (Allyn & Bacon, 1987), a book I coauthored with Twaddle. “I have long had the conviction that the study of health and illness and of the professional and other organizations devoted to health care is one of the most important fields in which sociologists and other social scientists, such as economists and psychologists, should work,” Parsons wrote.
The University of Missouri provided Twaddle with a pioneering medical sociology program that secured joint appointments for medical sociology faculty in the College of Arts and Science, Department of Sociology, and in the School of Medicine, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Social and Behavioral Science Unit (SBS). He also received a medical sociology training grant from the National Institutes of Health, Bureau of Health Sciences Research, that offered fellowships to 40 graduate students between 1973 and 2000.
Twaddle established an informal seminar program held in faculty homes as part of the training grant graduate curriculum. Medical sociology faculty, graduate students, and other interested graduate students and faculty across the campus were welcome to hear Paul Lazarsfeld, founder of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University; H. Jack Geiger, who initiated the neighborhood health center for the poor in the U.S.; Peter Kong-ming New, former president of the Society for Applied Anthropology who studied the barefoot doctors of China; Ramon Jaurigue, chair of the citizen board of directors for the Tucson Neighborhood Health Center; Judith Swazey, trailblazer with Renée Fox on medical ethics; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who conceptualized stages of death and dying; and Martin Martel, Twaddle’s PhD advisor at Brown University who studied changing race relations and whose research on aging influenced Medicare coverage.
Twaddle leaves behind his wife of 57 years, Sarah Anne Wolcott-Twaddle, daughters Lisa Ruth Wolcott (Domenic Durante) of Gainesville, FL, and Kristin Mara Wolcott Farese (James Farese) of Kentfield, CA, five grandchildren, a sister, niece, nephews, and sisters-in-law. Twaddle was predeceased by his parents, Paul and Ruth, and his brothers-in-law, George H. Mason and Peter D. Baird.
Richard M. Hessler, Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri
