Biographies of Invited Speakers
Frances Goldscheider, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Brown University, and College Park Professor, Department of Family Studies, University of Maryland
Dr. Goldscheider has done extensive research in the U.S. and Sweden on household and families with a focus on living arrangements. Specifically, she examines family relationships, particularly those between committed adult couples (e.g. cohabiting, married) and those between parents and adult children. She also studies the growth of absent fathers, stepfathers, and single fathers, as well as the family consequences of child disability. Her book, New Families/No Families: The Transformation of the American Home (with Linda Waite) won the American Sociology Association’s 1993 Otis Duncan Dudley award for their population section.
Abigail Harrison, Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine & Adjunct Assistant Professor of Population Studies, Brown University
Dr. Harrison’s research interests are reproductive health, adolescent and young adult sexuality, partnership dynamics and sexual networking, and HIV prevention. Her current research is based in South Africa where she is working on several projects including
“Gender and Risk for HIV Infection among Young Adults in Rural South Africa,” funded by NICHD and “Adolescent Sexuality in the Context of Reconstruction and Development in South Africa,” funded by the World Health Organization.
William Jankowiak, Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies, University of Nevada – Las Vegas
Dr. Jankowiak’s research interests include the study of human sexuality, family systems and charismatic movements. His current fieldwork projects are based in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China and a Mormon polygamous community in the United States. This research examines the universality of monogamy in terms of emotional intimacy. The author of numerous publications, Dr. Jankowiak is author of Sex, Death and Hierarchy in a Chinese City and is editor of Romantic Passion: The Universal Experience? and the forthcoming Intimacies: Many faces of Love and Sex (all with Columbia University Press).
Daniel Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management & Director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center, Cornell University
Dr. Lichter’s research focuses on welfare incentives on the family, patterns of marriage and cohabitation, assortative mating, and children’s changing living arrangements. Specifically, his work has focused on poverty among children and in rural areas, and his current research focuses on immigration to the United States. Dr. Lichter has published widely, most recently in American Sociological Review, Demography, Rural Sociology and in Journal of Marriage and Family.
Linda-Anne Rebhun, Research Affiliate
Yale Univeristy
Dr. Rebhun’s research interests include globalization, gender, sexuality, love and romance, and emotion and ethnopsychology. She is the author of The Heart is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil, a study of the impact of socio-economic change upon practices of courtship, marriage, cohabitation and infidelity in Northeast Brazil and most recently, “Sexuality, Color and Stigma among Northeastern Brazilian Women” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.Sharon Sassler, Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University
Dr. Sassler’s research examines the factors shaping young adults’ life course transitions into school and work, relationships, and parenthood. Currently, she is pursuing several projects which examine relationship processes, linkages between relationship tempo and union outcomes, and how family formation patterns differ by class and race. Her work has been published in Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Issues, and International Migration Review.