marida hollos Phone: (401) 863-7062
Office: Cabinet 210
email: Marida_Hollos@brown.eduTitle: Professor of Anthropology
Departmental affiliation(s): Anthropology
Background info:
Marida Hollos, Professor of Anthropology, came to Brown University in 1974. Hollos received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970, and her M.P.H. from the Harvard University School of Public Health in 1981. Hollos's research has examined issues of fertility, sexual behavior, migration and gender in Africa and other areas of the developing world, most recently in Tanzania and Nigeria.Research interests:
The population of developing countries, especially fertility, infertility, and the status of women. She is especially interested in how motherhood and the concept of children are configured in different regions.Current research:
Marida Hollos’s current research, supported by the National Science Foundation, is concerned with fertility decline in Northern Tanzania. Her current migration interest grew directly out of a community study among the Pare in Ugweno, Kilimanjaro Region, and Tanzania. The NSF project involved interviewing married couples and in the course of this it became clear that approximately half of the husbands were away, either temporarily or for longer periods of time. In an attempt at understanding the community, she has increasingly became interested in following the men to their urban residences and consequently in research on migration.Most recently, her interest has turned to questions of infertility. In the summer of 2004, she completed a project in infertility in Tanzania. The next three years, her work is focused in Nigeria. The purpose of her planned research is to investigate how local meanings of infertility are shaped by the prevalence, social and cultural context of infertility and how they influence community responses, life experiences and infertility treatment-seeking behaviors of the Ijo and Yakurr people of southern Nigeria. This research is conducted in collaboration with Oka Obono, a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at Brown and lecturer at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Selected publications:
2001 Scandal in a Small Town: Understanding Modern Hungary Through the History of One Town. New York: M.E. Sharpe.
2003 Marriage and contraception among the Pare of Northern Tanzania. (with Ulla Larsen) Journal of Biosocial Science. Vol. 36:255-278.
2003 Profiles of Infertility in Southern Nigeria: Women’s Voices from Amakiri. African Journal of Reproductive Health. Vol. 7(2):46-56.
2003 Women’s empowerment and fertility decline among the Pare of Northern Tanzania. (with Ulla Larsen) Social Science and Medicine. Vol. 57:1099-1115.
2004 Which African men promote smaller families and why? Marital relations and fertility in a Pare community in Northern Tanzania. (with Ulla Larsen) Social Science and Medicine. 58:1733-1749.