FACULTY

Terry Boychuk, Associate Professor and Chair
BA Carleton College 1986, MA Princeton University 1990, PhD Princeton University 1994

Terry Boychuk took his undergraduate studies in Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton College and received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty at Macalester College in 1996, Professor Boychuk directed the Health Policy Certificate Program at the Center for Health Policy Research Education at Duke University. Professor Boychuk has taught a wide range of courses that reflect his research interests in the historical development of social policies: Affirmative Action Policy, American Social Policy, Comparative Health Systems, Medical Sociology, Nonprofit Organizations, Politics of Health Policy, and Sociology of Philanthropy. He commonly leads sections of Introduction to Sociology each year and has taught the department’s quantitative methodology class, Science and Social Inquiry. He has recently led the Senior Seminar in Sociology, the capstone experience for department majors. Professor Boychuk also teaches Comparative-Historical Sociology, one of the three methods course offered in sociology. His doctoral and postdoctoral research on the comparative history of American and Canadian health policy was published as The Making and Meaning of Hospital Policy in the United States and Canada, appearing in 1999 under the imprint of the University of Michigan Press. More recently Professor Boychuk has devoted his attention to a study of the historical origins of the legal frameworks that define the nature and scope of the charitable nonprofit sector in the UK, US, and the British Commonwealth.

Mahnaz Kousha, Professor
BA Iran-Tehran 1978, MS University of Kentucky 1985, PhD University of Kentucky 1990

Professor Kousha took her undergraduate studies at the College of Fine Arts in Tehran and received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Kentucky. She joined the Macalester sociology department in 1991. Professor Kousha teaches the department’s methods of field research course, Interpretive Sociology, as well as a range of classes on race, ethnicity, and gender. These courses include Family Bonds, Images of Asians and Asian Americans, Images of Women in the Middle East, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Professor Kousha’s latest publication, Voices from Iran: the Changing Lives of Iranian Women (2002), focused on women's lives in Iran within the family as well as the larger society. The book explored intimate family relationships between mothers and daughters or fathers and daughters; this exploration took into account the much broader socio-cultural changes that were happening in the country during the last three to four decades. Professor Kousha’s current work is an attempt to explore issues regarding men and their relationship with their parents. This study will provide a close look at male gender socialization in Iranian families and will situate the findings within the much larger body of literature to provide a comparative context. Professor Kousha is co-founder of the Center for Critical Studies of the Middle East, a member of the Board of Directors and co-founder of the journal, Critique: Critical Studies of the Middle East, and co-organizer of the Annual Conference: Life and Politics in the Middle East.

Erik Larson, Assistant Professor
BA Hamline University 1992, MA University of Minnesota 1997, PhD University of Minnesota 2004

Erik Larson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Macalester College. His fields of interest include sociology of law, political sociology, economic sociology, and comparative-historical sociology. He received his B.A. from Hamline University and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His courses at Macalester include Law and Society, Criminal Behavior / Social Control, Political Sociology, Economic Sociology, Indigenous Peoples’ Movements in Global Context, and Science and Social Inquiry (the department’s quantitatively-oriented research methods course). His research focuses on the emergence and transformation of legal, economic, and political institutions in relation to the global and national developments. For this research, he has traveled to Fiji, Ghana, Iceland, Switzerland, and Japan. Recent and current research projects include analysis of the political contention concerning economic affirmative action policies targeted on the basis of indigenous status; examination of the establishment and operation of new young stock exchanges; investigation of the nexus between the global indigenous rights movement and national and regional indigenous rights movements; and study of the preparation, presentation, and interpretation of evidence for international treaty reporting and monitoring bodies. In addition, Professor Larson has collaborated with Macalester students to study the Ainu rights movement in Japan in relation to the global indigenous rights movement and to examine factors associated with school-wide performance on standardized tests in Minnesota.

Khaldoun Samman, Assistant Professor
BA George Washington University 1988, MA SUNY Binghamton 1996, PhD SUNY Binghamton 2001

Khaldoun Samman took his undergraduate studies at George Washington University in Washington D.C. and received his PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He joined the Macalester sociology department in 2002. Professor Samman teaches the department’s Social Theory course, Islam and the West, Secularism and Its Discontents, as well as a range of classes on social problems and social inequalities. Professor Samman’s latest publication, Cities of God and Nationalism: Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome as Contested World Cities (2007), tackles the controversial thesis that modernity, far from bringing in an age of tolerance, creates the social bases of exclusion. The central thesis of the book is that our real problem is the rigid conceptions of national spaces and peoples that have recently been forced upon these sacred spaces. The book uses three major sacred cities to explore how modernity, through the apparatus of nationalism and the nation-state, redefined our constructs of self and other in fundamental ways, having major implications for the way Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem are conceived by the inhabitants of the world who identify with them. Professor Samman’s current work will explore the nationalist discourses of Kemalists, Zionists, Arab nationalists and contemporary Islamists. Samman argues that all of these movements are a response to the incorporation of the region into the matrix of modernity, with Zionism and Kemalism, in their secular orientation, ascribing to the dictates of modernizing and Occidentalizing nationalist identities while the latter, especially the Islamist, prefer an alternative orientation, what Samman identifies as an Orientalizing modernity. This latter project is especially important because it symbolizes the slow evaporation and eventual deligitimization of the racialized discourses of the Enlightenment and the modernist/nationalist projects which, through their developmentalist and modernizing projects, reproduced the racial schemes of their colonial masters. Recently, professor Samman collaborated with a number of his students and published together their sociologically informed biographries in the journal Human Architecture: The Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge (2005, Volume 3). He hopes to do something similar for his Spring 2007 course, Islam and the West.

Deborah Smith, Visiting Professor
PhD Candidate UMN