Participant Profiles

Culture, Contention and Conflict

October 11 and 12, 2002, Princeton University

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and hosted by the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies

Wayne Baker is Professor of Organizational Behavior, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Society & Economy at the University of Michigan. He is also Faculty Associate at the Institute for Social Research. He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1995, after teaching for eight years on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He held a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University. Dr. Baker conducts research on social capital and networks, culture, economic sociology, and organization theory. His latest work is a book manuscript, North Star Falling: The American Crisis of Values which based on extensive analyses of data from multiple waves of the World Values Surveys. This book examines America’s values in global context. His earlier work on social change and culture includes the lead article in the American Sociological Review’s special millennial issue, co-authored with Ronald Inglehart (“Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values” (2000, 65:19-51.) Professor Baker's current projects include directing the 2003 Detroit Area Study.

Larry M. Bartels is a Professor of Politics and the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the founding director of Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, which supports empirical research of normative significance on democratic processes and institutions. Bartels received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Yale University in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He taught at the University of Rochester for eight years before moving to Princeton in 1991. Bartels has published articles on electoral politics, public opinion, the mass media, and political methodology in The American Political Science Review, The American Journal of Political Science, and other leading scholarly journals, and in a variety of edited volumes. His current research projects focus on voting behavior, electoral politics, democratic theory, defense policy, and economic news. Bartel’s first book, Presidential Primaries and Dynamics of Public Choice (Princeton University Press, 1988) received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the year’s best book on government, politics, or international affairs.

Amy Binder is a Post-doctoral Fellow of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation (2002-2004). In this capacity she will study the Stapleton Development, a newly designed urban community of residents, commercial interests, and schools on the site of the old Stapleton International Airport in Denver. She will examine the Development as an “institutionalized social movement,” and will pay particular attention to the interactions of foundation leaders, developers, and middle class and working class residents around issues of mixed income housing, schools, and community creation. Since beginning graduate school in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University in 1990, Binder has studied some combination of race, culture, and politics as they interact in different institutions—from the media to schools. She recently published Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2002), which compares seven cases of marginal challenge to school systems across the country. Her work also has appeared in the American Sociological Review (a comparison of media responses to heavy metal and rap music), the Sociology of Education (an article on employers’ beliefs about non-college bound high school students) and Religion and Education (a study of elite and grassroots creationist strategies for changing the way science is taught in the United States), among others.

Bethany Bryson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia where she studies cultural conflict and difference. She has written on the use of musical taste to express social dislikes, and (with Paul DiMaggio and John Evans) on the myth of opinion polarization in the U. S. Bethany has just finished a book on the Canon Wars that analyzes the way English professors in four universities managed the meaning of multiculturalism during the late 1990s. This work advances our understanding of cultural change, challenges the rhetoric of blood in the hallways, and explains why multiculturalism has become so widely accepted and yet so rarely influential. Her fledgling new project will bring a sociology of culture approach to traditional questions of political party identification opinion formation.

Arcadio Diaz-Quinones is the Emory L. Ford Chair of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures. He received his Ph.D. at the Universidad Central de Madrid and taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (1970-1982) before joining the Princeton University faculty in 1983. He also served as director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton for six years.
Professor Díaz-Quiñones teaches Spanish-American literature, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th centuries intellectual and cultural history, including fiction, essay and poetry.

Paul DiMaggio is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Research Director for Princeton’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, a research program of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School directed by Stanley N. Katz. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 1979 and taught at Yale until moving to Princeton in 1992. His primary research interests are in the fields of sociology of arts and culture and in organizational and economic sociology. His publications include Managers of the Arts (1986), Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (with Francie Ostrower, 1992), and The 21st Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective (ed., 2001). His current research focuses on two areas: cultural conflict in the contemporary U.S.; and social and cultural implications of new information technologies. A past chair of the Princeton Sociology Department, he has held fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has also served as a member of the governing Council of the American Sociological Association, the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Institution, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Board of Directors of the National Assembly of State Art Agencies.

Nancy DiTomaso is Professor of Organization Management at Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick. Her research specialties include the management of diversity and change, the management of knowledge-based organizations, and the management of scientists and engineers. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and she previously taught at New York University and Northwestern University. She also has a Certificate in Business Administration from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and attended Proyecto Linguistico in Quetzeltenango, Guatemala. She has co authored and co edited four books and many articles and has had articles published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Sex Roles, Leadership Quarterly, California Management Review, and the Journal of Engineering-Technology Management. She is currently collecting data for a forthcoming book entitled The American Non-dilemma about how people think about issues of inequality in the labor force. In addition, she has been analyzing survey data on the career experiences of 3200 scientists and engineers from 25 major companies. Her work on the transformation of organizations into "organizations of the future” has addressed the changes in the structure of organizations, work and careers, and the management skills needed for the coming decades.

John H. Evans is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate. (2002, University of Chicago Press) and co-editor (with Robert Wuthnow) of The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism (2002, University of California Press). He has also published a number of articles on opinion polarization in the U.S. over abortion, homosexuality and related issues. His research focuses on the sociology of religion, culture, knowledge, science and, in particular, bioethics.

Myra Marx Ferree is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The paper presented in this meeting reflects work done in the collaborative project comparing in the relationships between political parties, social movements and the media in the United States and Germany (with William Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards and Dieter Rucht, Shaping Abortion Discourse, Cambridge University Press, 2002). She is a long-time student of feminist politics in both Germany and the US. Some recent articles include “Talking about women and wombs: discourse about abortion and reproductive rights in the GDR during and after the ‘Wende’” (with Eva Maleck-Lewy), in Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life After Socialism (Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds, Princeton, 2000) and “Gender, class and the interaction among social movements: a strike of West Berlin daycare workers” (with Silke Roth, Gender & Society, 1998).

Marcel Fournier is professor of Sociology at the Université de Montréal, Montra, Canada. He is a member of the Canadian Royal Society, and in 2001-2003, Killam Fellowship, Visiting Professor (Sociology Department) and Pathy Chair, Princeton University, N.J. He is Editor of the international French journal, Sociologie et Sociétés and co-editor of Durkheimian Studies (Oxford). He is author of serveral books, including Marcel Mauss (Paris, Fayard, 1994); Cultivating Differences (with Michèle Lamont, University of Chicago Press, 1992); Quebec Society (with D. White, Prentice Hall, 1996); Marcel Mauss, Écrits politiques (Paris, Fayard, l996); Émile Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss (with Philippe Besnard, Paris, PUF, 1998); and Durkheim, Mauss & Cie (Fayard, Paris, forthcoming).

Gerald Graff is Associate Dean of Curriculum and Instruction and Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford in 1963. He chaired the English Department at Northwestern University for 6 years and served as director of the Northwestern University Press. From 1991 to 2000, he was Professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago. Graff was a Guggenheim Fellow and a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is author of numerous books and articles, including Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987, U. Chicago Press); Literature Against Itself (1979, U. Chicago Press); and Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992, W.W. Norton). He is currently working a book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale University Press) which explores the problem of academic-intellectual discourse and how it can be addressed in classrooms and academic writing.

Marjorie Heins is director or the Free Expression Policy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship. She was a First Amendment litigator at the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991-98, where she directed the ACLU's Arts Censorship Project. She is the author of Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (Hill & Wang, 2001) and Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars (New Press, 1993; 2nd edition 1998). She graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978, clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, taught at Boston College Law School, directed the Civil Rights Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office in 1990, and spent seven unforgettable years as a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Susan Herbst is Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Northwestern University. She is author of several books and articles including Reading Public Opinion (Chicago, 1998). Her current work explores how cultural artifacts, particularly fine art and film, can be used to map the changing nature of public opinion in the United States. The first article from this project was recently published in Political Communication (Summer 2001).

Jennifer Hochschild joined the Government Department in January 2001, with a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies. She had been the William Stewart Tod Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Professor Hochschild studies the intersection of American politics and political philosophy -- particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration --and educational policy. She also works on issues in public opinion and political culture. She is the author of Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton University Press, 1995); The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (Yale University Press, 1984); What's Fair: American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Harvard University Press, 1981) and a co-author of Equalities (Harvard University Press, 1981). She is a co-editor of Social Policies for Children (Brookings Institution Press, 1995). Her forthcoming books are tentatively entitled The American Dream and the Public Schools (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Madison's Constitution and Identity Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). Professor Hochschild is the founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former vice-president of the American Political Science Association, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Michael Kammen is the Newtown C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1965. He graduated from The George Washington University in 1958 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964. From 1977 until 1980 he served as Director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, and in 1980-81, he was the first holder of the chair in American history established by the French government at the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. In 1989 he was appointed Regents’ Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. His books include A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986), which received both the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize; Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture (1986); A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (1978); Colonial New York: A History (1975); People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972); awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History; Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (1970); and A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (1968). In 1975-76 he served as host and moderator for “The States of the Union,” a series of fifty one-hour programs broadcast by National Public Radio.

Stanley N. Katz is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the leading organization in humanistic scholarship and education in the United States. Mr. Katz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1955 with a major in English History and Literature. He received his M.A. from Harvard in American History in 1959 and his Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard in 1961. He has recently co-edited a book on the behavior of non-governmental peace and conflict resolution organizations in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and South Africa. Other recent research has focused upon private philanthropy and its effect on public policy in the United States. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Mr. Katz is a leading expert on American legal and constitutional history.

Thomas Levin is Associate Professor in the German Department at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at Princeton in 1990 after completing graduate study in art history at Yale University and after a year as a fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. His teaching and scholarship range from the history of aesthetic theory and Frankfurt School cultural theory to the history and theory of media (Weimar cinema, rhetoric of new media, archaeologies of vision). His recent work on questions of aesthetics, technology, and sound have grown out of his research on metronomes, gramophones, and the prehistory of acoustic inscription, as well as his responsibilities as associate editor of The Musical Quarterly. Levin is currently working on a study of the origins of synthetic sound in the late 1920's, a new project on surveillance, and a book on the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. He has recently curated an exhibit on surveillance art, "Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice,” at Princeton University’s Art Museum and has co-edited a book on the same topic, Rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002, MIT Press).

Lawrence T. McGill is director of research and planning for the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA), the country’s first electronic archive of research data on the arts and culture. CPANDA is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and jointly administered by Princeton University’s Firestone Library and the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. McGill was formerly director of research for The Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to promoting public understanding of First Amendment freedoms. With The Freedom Forum, he conducted the annual State of the First Amendment survey, research studies on improving newsroom diversity, and numerous polls on public attitudes toward the news media. Previously, he was director of research for The Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Center at Columbia University, where he also administered the Media Studies Center’s residential fellows program. Before that, he was manager of news audience research at NBC, where he conducted research that led to the development of Dateline NBC and numerous audience studies for other NBC news programs, including NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. McGill has taught at the Medill School of Journalism and in the department of sociology at Northwestern University. He also served on the research faculty of Northwestern’s Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. McGill has published articles and reports in the fields of media studies, education and sociology. A member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, he earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Northwestern University and holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Oklahoma.

Tali Mendelberg is associate professor of Politics at Princeton University. Her interest include political communication, race, public opinion, political psychology, and experimental methods. She is the author of The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001), winner of the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for "the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs". She has also published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Communication. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. In 2002 she received the Erik H. Erikson Early Career Award for Excellence and Creativity in the Field of Political Psychology.

Susan Olzak is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, where she does research on social protest and ethnic and racial conflict and social movements. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1978, and has been on the faculty at Yale, University of Georgia, and Cornell University before coming to Stanford in 1991. In 2000-1 she was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, where she worked on a forthcoming book analyzing comparative data on racial and ethnic conflict in over 100 countries (The Global Dynamics of Ethnic Mobilization). Her current research projects include a NSF-funded project (with Doug McAdam, John McCarthy and Sarah Soule) analyzing all forms of social protest in the United States, 1960-1995, event-history analysis of the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified over the 1972-1982 period (with Sarah Soule), analysis of the impact of legislation and policies regarding race and immigration on the rate of racial conflict in the United States, 1869-1924 (with Suzanne Shanahan), and collaborative research (with Ruud Koopmans) on the impact of political speeches and editorials on the rate of anti-foreigner violence in contemporary Germany.

Nell Irvin Painter is currently the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. from the university of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Formerly a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she is the author of five books and has edited two Penguin Classic editions. Her most recent book appeared in April 2002: Southern History Across the Color Line. You can visit her website at www.nellpainter.com.

Paul Starr is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the C. Wright Mills Award, the James Hamilton Prize of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and the Bancroft Prize in American History. He is also coeditor of The American Prospect – a liberal magazine about American politics and society, public policy, and ideas – which he founded in 1990 with columnist Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich. Through The American Prospect, he helped to organize the Electronic Policy Network and to create its “virtual” publication, Idea Central. Professor Starr has written extensively on American society and public policy, particularly health care. His book The Logic of Health-Care Reform (1992, reissued in a revised and expanded edition in 1994) laid out the case for a system of universal health insurance and managed competition. During 1993 Professor Starr worked at the White House on President Clinton’s health plan. He is currently working on a book on the politics of information and the information age.

Brian Steensland is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2002 and his fields of interest are politics, culture, and religion in late 20th century America. His dissertation examined the rise and fall of guaranteed income policies as a strategy to reform the U.S. welfare system in the 1960s and 1970s. His paper (with co-authors) on classifying religious groups in America won the 2001 "Best Article" award from the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion section. Brian was involved in the Center's project on public conflict over the arts in Philadelphia from 1965-1997, and he is currently working with Paul DiMaggio on a project examining media depictions of moral and cultural contention in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s.

András Szántó is deputy director of the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) at Columbia University. Based at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, in association with its School of the Arts, and supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the NAJP is the premier academic fellowship program and research center in the United States dedicated to the improvement of arts and cultural journalism in the news media. Szántó earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia with a dissertation analyzing transformations in New York's visual art world and art market. He was formerly research manager of the Media Studies Center in New York, a leading media research think-tank. He has taught courses on the sociology of culture and other subjects at Columbia University and Barnard College. Szántó has co-authored two books and numerous academic articles and research reports about arts, culture, and the news media, both in the US and in his native Hungary. From 1994 to 1996 he was Senior Advisor on New Media development the to the Hungarian Minister of Culture and Education; in 2001 he helped to establish the Transatlantic Forum for Cultural Research at UNESCO in Paris. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Prospect, Interiors, Architecture, Variety, MSNBC and other domestic and foreign publications.

Steven J. Tepper is deputy director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Sociology. He has written about sociology of art, cultural policy and democracy and public space and is currently completing a book on cultural conflict in 75 American cities. Additionally, he is collaborating on a project for the Pew Charitable Trusts that explores the role of meetings and convenings as instruments of policy making, especially in the field of art and culture. Tepper received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University, a masters degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to Princeton, Tepper served for five years as the executive director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Bicentennial Observance. He is author of The Chronicles of the Bicentennial Observance (UNC, 1998). In addition, he has served as a consultant to numerous cultural institutions including the National Humanities Center, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Canadian Confederation Center for the Arts, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and various foundations.

Joel Wachs, long-time member of the Los Angeles City Council, its past President, and recent candidate for Mayor, joined The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as its president in October 2001. Following a career as a tax attorney, Wachs was first elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1971 and won re-election to that office seven times by record margins – most recently in 1999. During his tenure on the City Council, Joel Wachs was widely recognized as Los Angeles’ strongest advocate for the arts, and authored most of the city’s significant legislation designed to support artists and art organizations, including the establishment of the landmark Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts. Wachs also served as acting chairman of the National League of Cities Task Force on the Arts, which drafted the nation’s first comprehensive municipal policy statement on the role of the arts in our cities. He has served a variety of arts organizations, most notably the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts where he was vice chairman of the Board of Trustees.