| NEW FACULTY: MICHAEL ROCK
Our series of brief profiles of new tenure-track faculty members continues this week with the Economics department's Michael Rock.Other profiles in the series:
Professor of Economics Michael Rock is self-avowedly passionate about the "dismal science." Appointed Harvey Wexler Professor and chair of the economics department in spring 2004, Rock began his tenure at Bryn Mawr last July. Before he leaves, he says, "I'd like to see virtually every Bryn Mawr undergraduate take a least one economics course, and I plan to work with my colleagues in economics to strengthen our program and increase interest in it."
Born in Lyndora, Pa., Rock spent his undergraduate years at Duquesne University before earning his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Since then he has taught at colleges and universities all over the world, including institutions in Thailand and Vietnam, and has become an authority on the interaction of industrial development and pollution-control policy in Asia.
Rock says that he undertook his first sustained study of Asian economies as an employee of the federal government: "In 1979 I took a year off from teaching and worked as a development economist with the Asia Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development. I worked that year at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C, but traveled in Asia — Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Through this process I discovered that I really enjoyed living, working and traveling in Asia and I have been doing it ever since."
He spent his time in Thailand as a Fulbright professor at a university in Bangkok, but Rock taught a different crowd in Vietnam, as a professor at the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' foreign-service institute. "The Vietnamese government was interested in a seminar that focused on the development successes in East Asia … So I put together a semester-long program that looked at economic development policies in each of these economies. My 'students' were mid-career professionals in government —they were about my age (mid-40s then) and they were university professors and from all kinds of government agencies."
In addition to his international teaching work, Rock has published several books on the subject of East Asian economics. His most recent work, titled Industrial Transformation in the Developing World, uses case studies from East Asia to "focus on what kinds of environmental and industrial policies developing countries can adopt to make industrial development more environmentally sustainable," Rock says. It is due to be published in December by Oxford University Press. He is at work on another book on the political economy of development in Southeast Asia. "The puzzle I'm trying to unravel with this book is why development in these economies has been so good for so long despite the rather corrupt nature of governments and government-business relationships," Rock says. A third research project is an investigation of the impact of globalization on the environmental performance of manufacturers in Southeast Asia.
At Bryn Mawr, Rock plans to maintain his ambitious research projects in Asia. "I love teaching," he says, "and increasing interest in the developing world and international issues is important to me both personally and professionally. This seems a natural for Bryn Mawr and it already looks like it will be very rewarding."
Rock also hopes to pursue his interdisciplinary interests through the College's Center of International Studies, and he is contemplating teaching a course on comparative environmental policy that draws on experiences across both the industrialized and developing worlds.
"Then I have to have time to garden and cocoon with my wife Maggie, fly-fish with my son, and read history and biography," Rock concludes.
— Allison Siegenthaler '07
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