December 10, 2003

Meet Dean Leavitt, campus ethnographer

Anthropologist Steve Leavitt, more accustomed to doing field work in far-off places like Papua New Guinea or Fiji, this fall finds himself taking notes in what he calls "my ethnographic playground" here on campus.

Leavitt, the acting dean of students, also finds himself in a new position -- working without his wife, Karen Brison, who also teaches in the anthropology department.

"We've shared every job until now," Leavitt says. "Now, I'm dean of students and she's not and I don't know what to do," he jokes, adding that Karen, with her experience as a researcher in political anthropology, seems to be able to recall "every single interaction she has ever had with a student."

The couple joined the College 10 years ago, and for the last three have served as co-directors of the Union Scholars Program. They have led three term abroad programs in Fiji in which students used the internet to share their ethnographic fieldwork with their on-campus peers. For their first two years with the College, they lived in the guest house on Lenox Road (now Thurston House) and had the opportunity to be among the first to greet new faculty colleagues and campus visitors.

Before joining Union, the couple taught together at Washington University in St. Louis.

"I want to use this year as a time for all of us to assess the good and not-so-good about student life here outside of academics," Leavitt said in a letter introducing himself to students. "This includes housing, social life, psychological and social services, and, yes, parking."

His goal, Leavitt says, is to seek out and gather information for a report to his successor.

Leavitt says he fell in love with the liberal arts college experience when he was an undergraduate at Swarthmore. There, he majored in religion, served as a resident advisor, got up early to sell copies of The New York Times, and worked as a tour guide who also set up overnight stays for prospective students.

He went on to earn his Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego, where he met his wife. He has written on religious movements, family relations, sexuality, adolescence, and responses to bereavement. He and his wife did their doctoral field research independently in 1984-1986, in two adjacent societies of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Leavitt's dissertation looked at how a contemporary religious revival movement was informed both by local colonial history and by continued emotional conflicts in family relationships.

Leavitt and Brison live in Schenectady with their son, Jeffrey, now in third grade.

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