Bridging the Great Divide

Robert S. McElvaine's Eve's Seed and the Quest to Bring Together Biology, Anthropology, Religion, and History

A Conference on the Evolution of the Relationship between the Humanities and Sciences

Saturday, March 2, 2002

9 am - 5 pm

Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex Recital Hall

Millsaps College

Jackson, Mississippi

With presentations by...

Deborah Blum, University of Wisconsin Deborah Blum is an award-winning science writer and has been a Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997. Her series of articles on the ethical issues and dilemmas of primate research, “The Monkey Wars,” won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, the 1992 science writing award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the 1992 Clarion Award from Women in Communications. In 1997, she published Sex on the Brain, which was a named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and has since been translated into Japanese, Korean and German.

Carl Degler, Stanford University Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1972, and a past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, Carl Degler is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University. In a forty year career, he has written on race (Neither Black Nor White, which won the Pulitzer Prize), women’s studies (At Odds), Southern history (The Other South), the New Deal, and many other subjects. His most recent book, The Search for Human Nature, is a sweeping history of the impact of Darwinism (and biological research) on our understanding of human behavior.

Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University Tracy Fessenden is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Religion, specializing in American studies and in cultural and critical theory. She holds dual appointments in the Department of Religious Studies and the Women’s Studies program at Arizona State University. She has written extensively on gender, race, and sexuality, and their position in American culture and religion. In 2001, she edited a volume called The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature, and her forthcoming book is entitled Culture and Redemption: Secularizing Desires in American Literature.

Betty Friedan Betty Friedan, a 1942 graduate of Smith College, was a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and was its first president, serving in this capacity through 1970. Her pioneering research into the lives of homemakers and mothers formed the basis for her first book, The Feminine Mystique, which by 1966, when NOW was formed, had sold over 3 million copies. To this day, she continues to push for political reform in the area of women’s rights, and is a world-renowned teacher, speaker, and writer. She currently directs research at the Institute for Women and Work in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, where she and colleagues are investigating feminism and its relation to the American home and workplace.

Michael Galaty, Millsaps College Michael Galaty is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Millsaps College. He is co-director of the Mallakastra Regional Archaeological Project, which is funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant and has operated since 1998 in central Albania. Since 1999, he has directed archaeological research on the property of the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship, in Loudoun, Virginia. His first book, Nestor’s Wine Cups, was published in 1999, and he is co-editor of the volume Rethinking Mycenaean Palaces.

David Gilmore, SUNY-Stony Brook A Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, David Gilmore is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Europe. He has written extensively on peasant cultures, and several books, including Carnival and Culture and Aggression and Community, present results of ethnographic research in Spain. He has also published on issues of gender and manhood, including two books, 1991’s Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity and the recent Misogyny: The Male Malady.

Alison Jolly, University of Sussex Dr. Alison Jolly is a researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom, and is a former president of the International Primatological Society. Her research interests include primate social and sexual behavior, as well as the general importance of biological evolution to studies of human nature. Her book Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution, published in 1999, won the 1999 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Award of the Association of American Publishers, in the Sociology and Anthropology Category.

Robert McElvaine, Millsaps College Robert McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters. He is an historian who specializes in the Great Depression, women’s history, and American political, cultural, and social history. His course on the 1960’s is a favorite amongst Millsaps students, known for its innovative learning exercises. He has published several books on a variety of topics: among them, The Great Depression, Mario Cuomo, and, of course, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History. Eve’s Seed was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2001 by The Los Angeles Times

Carol Meyers, Duke University Carol Meyers is a Professor of Religion at Duke University. She specializes in biblical studies and archaeology, and is a prominent scholar in the study of women in the biblical world. She has authored or co-authored eight books and has edited or co-edited five others. Her book Discovering Eve is a landmark study of women in ancient Israel; and her recent reference book, Women in Scripture, is the most comprehensive study ever made of women in Jewish and Christian scriptures. Dr. Meyers co-directs Duke’s summer in Israel program, and she is an affiliated faculty member of Duke’s Women’s Studies Program.

T. Douglas Price, University of Wisconsin-Madison Doug Price is the Weinstein Professor of European Archaeology and Director of the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a specialist in the prehistory of northern Europe-especially the Danish Mesolithic-and has pioneered new approaches to archaeological chemistry, particularly bone chemistry. He is also an authority on the transition to agriculture, and his volumes Transitions to Agriculture in Prehistory, Last Hunters - First Farmers, and Europe’s First Farmers are required reading in Neolithic archaeology.

Karen Strier, University of Wisconsin-Madison Karen Strier is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specializes in physical anthropology and primatology. For years, she has studied the rarest and largest South American primate, the muriqui or woolly spider monkey (Brachyteles arachnoides). The social lives of these fully arboreal monkeys have been described in her book Faces in the Forest. She is also an ardent proponent of conservation, aiming to save the Atlantic rain forest of eastern Brazil, the primary territory of the highly endangered muriqui.

Lionel Tiger, Rutgers University As a pioneer of biological approaches to human behavior in the 1960s, Lionel Tiger holds the Charles Darwin Chair of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He applies Darwinian theory to diverse aspects of human behavior, including political structures, sex roles, aggression, social uses of food, and industrial society. He has written many books on these topics, including The Imperial Animal, The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System, and Optimism: The Biology of Hope. He is also a member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at Rutgers.

Arthur Waldron, University of Pennsylvania Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist in the study of Chinese history, particularly from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Communist period, and is an expert on diplomatic history, often called to testify and advise in Washington D.C. He has a special interest in the history and causes of war, having published From War to Nationalism: China's Turning Point, 1924-1925 in 1995. In addition, he has produced several books on Asian culture and history, two of them written and published in Chinese.

Rita Wright, New York University A Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Rita Wright specializes in the archaeology of the Near East and South Asia. She is Assistant Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project and Director of the Beas Valley Regional Survey, both of which operate in Pakistan. She has pioneered the study of gender and women in prehistory, having published several books and articles on the subject, including Digging Women and Gender and Archaeology. She has also written extensively on the archaeology of complex societies, urbanism, and craft specialization.

Marlene Zuk, University of California-Riverside Marlene Zuk is Professor of Biology at the University of California-Riverside and an expert in behavioral ecology. Her research centers on sexual selection and the effects of parasites on mate choice. Currently, she is examining the effects of conflicting selection pressures on song structure in a Pacific field cricket subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitoid fly. She has also written extensively on the intersection of feminism and the study of biological evolution. Her forthcoming book is entitled Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex From Animals.