David Kertzer Phone: (401) 863-3251
Office: Giddings House
email: David_Kertzer@brown.eduTitle: Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science; Professor of Anthropology; and Professor of Italian Studies
Departmental affiliation: Anthropology
Background info: Brandeis University 1969-1974 Ph.D. (anthropology)
Research interests:
Politics and culture; European social history; anthropological demography; political economy and family systems; age structuring; anthropology of religion; European historical demography; nineteenth-century Italian social history and contemporary Italian society and politics; history of Vatican relations with the Jews and with the Italian state.Current Research:
Kertzer is currently the principal investigator of the research project "Explaining Very Low Fertility," funded by grants totalling over $1 million from NIH and NSF for the period 2004-2008. In collaboration with Michael White of the PSTC, and with Marzio Barbagli (University of Bologna, Italy) and former PSTC postdoc Laura Bernardi (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany), Kertzer is crafting a new methodological synthesis of anthropological and statistical survey methods in seeking better understanding of the forces that produce very low fertility. Four postdoctoral anthropologists are doing 15 months of fieldwork in Naples, Cagliari, Padoa, and Bologna, while major new national-level Italian surveys are being analyzed, with an emphasis on longitudinal methods.Selected publications:
Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis (edited with Tom Fricke). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Census and Identity: The Politics of Ethnicity, Race, and Language in National Censuses (edited with Dominique Arel). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
The History of the European Family (edited with Marzio Barbagli), Vol. 1: Family Life in Early Modern Times (2001); vol. 2: Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century (2002); Vol. 3: The History of Family Life in the Twentieth Century (2003). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Additional web pages:
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