The following is an article from Sociology Speaks 2004-5.
Over the last academic year national searches were conducted to make tenure-track faculty hires in the areas of Sociology of African American Society and Advanced Quantitative Methods. After screening a large number of candidates and conducting on-campus interviews, it is with great pleasure that I report that we were able to successfully recruit our top candidates for each position and with the support of the Boston College administration make two hires in the area of Sociology of African American Sociology. A brief description of new faculty members Zine Magubane, C. Shawn McGuffey and Natasha Sarkisian is provided below.
Zine Magubane
Zine Magubane will join the faculty of Boston College as an Associate Professor of Sociology. She completed her B.A. in Political Economy at Princeton University in 1991 and her Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard University in 1997. From 1997 to 2005 Zine was employed as first an Assistant then Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Professor Magubane also taught at University of Cape Town in South Africa during 1996-1997 and served as a Research Associate with the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, South Africa from 1998-2000.
While at University of Illinois Zine established herself as a prolific writer and influential scholar. Her areas of specialization include social theory, sociology of post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, globalization, race and popular culture, gender and sexuality, and sociology of African societies. Professor Magubane is the author of Bringing the Empire Home: Imagining Race, Gender and Class in Britain and Colonial South Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and the editor of two other books Postmodernity, Postcoloniality, and African Studies (African World Press, 2004) and, with Reitu Mabokela, Race, Gender and the Status of Black South African Women in the Academy (Routledge, 2005). In addition, Zine has authored numerous refereed journal articles and published chapters on a wide range of topics.Her work to date revolves around a series of insightful critical analyses of the social dynamics of ideology and, in particular, racialized ideology as a global historical and material force. Throughout her work Zine pays particular attention to historically specific connections between cultural, political, and economic realms of power, and to the complex ways in which racialized, gendered, and classbased ideologies reciprocally shape each other. In pursuing the question of how ideology works, her research also deals extensively with two major geographical areas of the world - the United States and Southern Africa. Substantive topics explored by Magubane include the relationship between racialized and gendered stereotypes and the global historical construction of social class, the political reality effects of popular culture images of gendered black bodies and sexuality, the fate of African societies in the context of capitalist globalization, and the limits of scientific discourses about race when science fails to engage critically with questions of institutional racism. These themes converge in Professor Magubane's book Bringing the Empire Home. This work makes use of a wide range of historical materials to explore the cultural construction and political uses of discursive images of black Africans in nineteenth century England during the peak years of the British Empire. Here Zine shows how cultural stereotypes of blacks mirror related images of women and working class people in contributing to the naturalization of cruel social hierarchies as well as the subhuman treatment of South African blacks. The book also includes a highly revealing analysis of how blacks in South Africa interpreted the culture, religion and economy of conquering whites. Bringing the Empire Home concludes with a path-breaking sociological discussion of the material economic force of discursive stereotypes and images.
In addition to bringing her exciting scholarly talents to Boston College, Zine Magubane will also join our faculty with an established record of teaching excellence. In describing her own teaching, Magubane observes, The philosophy that informs my teaching is that students learn best when in an atmosphere that is simultaneously intellectually challenging, culturally diverse, and supportive of divergent views. My foremost aim is to facilitate discussion and debate such that students retain a firm grasp of the readings and lecturers while at the same time learning to critique and challenge them My aim is to encourage students to use their critical faculties and to develop the ability to formulate their own opinions on the assigned texts and materials. By all accounts, Zine's teaching has routinely succeeded in meeting these aims. While teaching at University of Illinois, Professor Magubane was included on four separate occasions on a campus-wide list of Teachers Voted Excellent by their Students. In fall of 2005 Zine will teach the graduate-level seminar Introduction to Postcoloniality, and in spring semester 2006 will teach Race and Popular Culture.
Shawn McGuffey
Shawn McGuffey will join the faculty of Boston College as an Assistant Professor of Sociology after completing his Ph.D. in Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor McGuffey's main areas of research and teaching include social psychology, sociology of race, class and gender, sociology of childhood and the family, and qualitative methods. Many of these concerns are evident in Shawn's published work to date, particularly in Playing in the Gender Transgression Zone, a 1999 article in Gender and Society with B. Lindsay Rich, and Engendering Trauma: Gender, Race and Mother Blame, also accepted for publication in Gender and Society. The Engendering Trauma article is based on data from Shawn's 2005 dissertation on the impact of child sexual abuse for family and gender relations. Parental Responses to Extrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse of Boys, an earlier paper by Shawn also based on his dissertation research, was awarded the distinction of Outstanding Graduate Student Paper of 2002 by the Department of Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Playing in the Gender Transgression Zone resulted from research Shawn McGuffey conducted while still an undergraduate major in Sociology and Anthropology at Transylvania University. Grounded in the methods of participant observation and Shawn's experiences as a counselor at a summer camp for middle-school children, Playing in the Gender Transgression Zone explores the performance of hegemonic masculinity on the part of high status boys and the implications that this form of hierarchical social interaction has for both young men and young women.
The interactive complexity of gender, race and class is also a focal point in Shawn McGuffey's dissertation, Engendering Trauma: Gender, Race, and Family After Child Sexual Abuse. This work examines the impact of child sexual abuse on families participating in group therapy following the extrafamilial sexual abuse of young boys. To explore this issue McGuffey gained access to a group therapy program, which enabled him to observe parents interacting with therapists and each other and to conduct multiple interviews with both staff members and parents. Based on these unique sources of data, Shawn makes important inferences about how interactions between gender, sexuality, and race contribute to how parents cope with the abuse of their sons. Of particular concern are the ways that coming to terms with sexual abuse can stir parental homophobia and/or racial anxiety and lead to increased investment in traditional gender roles. Mothers of abused children were often forced to bear the burden of blame, and families traumatized by child sexual abuse tend to reaffirm traditional cultural norms privileging masculinity and masculine expressions of power.Engendering Trauma is a compelling study of the social impact of trauma on the family, as well as the nucleus of what is likely to be a series of influential journal articles and an important book. The first article drawn from Shawn's dissertation examines the social dynamics of mother blame. This was recently accepted for publication in Gender and Society. He also plans to extend his dissertation research in several ways - reinterviewing as many of the parents in his study as possible and compiling materials on how survivors make sense of their sexual abuse.
In addition to bringing his strengths as a scholar, Shawn McGuffey will also come to Boston College as an experienced universitylevel teacher and the recipient of a Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Massachusetts in 2000. While a graduate student at University of Massachusetts, Shawn taught courses in the areas of family; race, class and gender; social inequality; social problems; and most recently a seminar on writing sociology. In his first year at Boston College he will teach a course on race, class and gender, as well as an introduction to African American society.
Natasha Sarkisian
Natasha (Natalia) Sarkisian, a native of Russia, completed her undergraduate studies at the State Academy of Management in Moscow and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. With a sophisticated expertise in a wide range of advanced quantitative methods, Natasha will join our tenure- track faculty with a well-deserved reputation as an outstanding teacher of statistics. The department has already become acquainted with Natasha as she was selected for a one-year position as a Visiting Instructor in Sociology for academic year 2004-05. During this period she taught two graduate-level seminars in advanced statistics and undergraduate courses in Sociology of the Family. Following a national search in the area of advanced quantitative methods Natasha was selected for a tenure- track position as an Assistant Professor of Sociology.
In addition to her familiarity with a wide range of advanced statistical methods, Natasha Sarkisian is also already an accomplished scholar in areas pertaining to sociology of family, race, class and gender, and social inequalities. A 2001- 02 recipient of the prestigious Rose Fellowship of the American Sociological Association and recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for 2003-04, Natasha is also the recipient of several other important awards and honors. These include Best Academic Paper of 2000 and Best Professional Paper of 2002 at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Best Graduate Student Paper Award for 2001 of the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; Best Graduate Student Paper Award for 2001 of the Family Section of the American Sociological Association; Best Graduate Student Paper for 2003 of the Carework Network; the Christina Maria Riegos Distinguished Student Paper Award for 2003 of the Latino/a Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; and Honorable Mention for the Rose Coser Laub Award for Best Dissertation Proposal of 2003 of the Eastern Sociological Association.In her dissertation Natasha Sarkisian brings her expertise in quantitative methods to bear upon an important and long debated empirical topic - whether black and Latino families are more or less integrated in comparison to white families of the same social class. Entitled Kin Support in Black and White: Structure, Culture, and Extended Family Ties, her thesis makes use of the National Survey of Families and Households in exploring questions at the sociological intersections of race, class and gender. Her findings are particularly relevant in countering two kinds of sets of existing research on the status of Black families - those that romanticize the super-organizational character of extended black family networks and those that paint a picture of the black family as disorganized or pathological. By contrast, Natasha discovered high levels of similarity in support provided by both black and white men to families, while noting key differences in the kinds of support provided by women.
Natasha Sarkisian's dissertation represents the nucleus of what is likely to result in an influential book on kinship support structures. In addition, key elements of her research have already been accepted for publication as refereed journal articles. With her graduate mentor and collaborator Naomi Gerstel, she's authored three journal articles and is planning grant applications aimed at extending and deepening their previous research on gender, race, class and kinship support networks. She's also written two methodological articles on mathematical modeling and is presently at work on an article examining methodological issues she encountered in the course of her dissertation research.
Like fellow Ph.D. student Shawn McGuffey, while at University of Massachusetts Natasha Sarkisian also gained considerable experience as a university-level instructor. At Boston College Natasha will offer a variety of graduate seminars in advanced quantitative methods and also courses on sociology of family and the intersections of race, class, and gender.