Bryn Mawr College

Faculty and Staff

Professors:

David Karen
Office: Dalton Hall, Room 200C, Phone: 610- 526 5395
dkaren@brynmawr.edu

Teaching and Research Interests: sociology of education, social inequality, social movements, sociology of sports and research methods

 

Mary J. Osirim, Chair
Office: Dalton Hall, Room 200H, Phone: 610-526-5393
mosirim@brynmawr.edu

Teaching and Research Interests: gender and development, economic sociology, immigration, race and ethnic relations, sociology of gender and the family

 

Judith R. Porter, Katharine McBride Professor
Office: Dalton Hall Room 200D, Phone: 610-526-5657
jporter@brynmawr.edu

Teaching and Research Interests: sociology of AIDS, injection drug use, sociology of poverty

 

Ayumi Takanaka
Office: Dalton Hall Room 200B, Phone: 610-526-5059
atakenak@brynmawr.edu

Teaching and Research Interests: international migration, race and ethnic relations, Asian American communities, Asians in the Americas, urban sociology and ethnographic research methods.

 

Robert E. Washington
Office: Dalton Hall Room 200G, Phone: 610-526-5392
rwashing@brynmawr.edu

Teaching and Research Interests: sociology of culture, social theory, sociology of sports, race and ethnic relations, African American communities, social deviance, modernization and development in East Africa

 

Nathan Wright - On Leave 2008-09
Office: Dalton 200E, Phone: 610-526-5394
nwright@brynmawr.edu

Teaching and Research Interests: sociology of religion, public opinion, sociology of culture and research methods

 

NEW FACULTY MEMBER

RUTH SIMPSON

 Office:  Dalton 200F, Phone: 610-526-5677

Ruth Simpson's research focuses on various intersections of medicine, the environment, science, culture, and the development of the concept of "modernity."  Recently she has explored the parallels between  late nineteenth-century social theory and the debate over the origins of epidemic disease during the same period, in which more communal understandings of epidemics as environmentally-caused gave way to the more individualistic explanation of germ theory.  As a post-doctoral fellow at Brown University, she studied the processes through which communities discover and take action on toxic contamination and the methodological and ethical issues of using community-based participatory research to study local environmental action.  Simpson has written on environmental justice, problems of risk perception, phobias, and historical narrative, and has published and contributed to articles in Sociological Forum, The Handbook of Medical Sociology and the forthcoming Contested Illnesses (Brown, Morello-Frosch, Zavestoski, eds.).  She is beginning a project that explores resistance to the use of public transportation, as well as a separate project that explores the attribution, in popular science, of large consequences (i.e., epidemics, nuclear explosions) to tiny causes (i.e., germs, atoms).                               

         

Administrative Assistants:

Barbara Burns
Office: Dalton Hall, Room 114, Phone: 610-526-5331
bburns@brynmawr.edu

Karen Supizio
Office: Dalton Hall, Room 114, Phone: 610-526-5030
ksulpizi@brynmawr.edu