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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY > People >Judith Schachter

Judith Schachter (Modell)

Professor
Ph.D.: University of Minnesota, 1978
Department Member Since: 1984

Biography

JUDITH [Modell] SCHACHTER is a Professor of Anthropology and History at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2001, she was appointed Director of the Center for the Arts in Society, an interdisciplinary Center joining the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Fine Arts. Her publications include Ruth Benedict (1983); Kinship with Strangers (1994), A Town without Steel: Envisioning Homestead, (with Charlee Brodsky, 1998); A Sealed and Secret Kinship (2002); Constructing Moral Communities: Pacific Islander Strategies for Settling in New Place (Editor, Special Issue, Pacific Studies, March-June 2002). Schachter has published a number of methodological and theoretical articles on life histories, visual anthropology, and kinship, with a focus on adoption. Her work has concentrated on analyses of families in crisis, including economic collapse, disruptions of kinship patterns, and loss of political and cultural autonomy. In recent articles, she has explored the interconnections between individual lives and historical processes. Schachter does extensive research in Hawai'i, and her next book will be a cultural-historical portrait of an Hawaiian family that will also tell the story of Hawaii during the past century. Upon completion of that book, she will begin an inquiry into the origins and impact of sovereignty movements, with Hawaii as her prime case.

selected Publications

(Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of time. Co-edited with Stephen Brockmann. Publisher is the Center for the Arts in Society, distributed by Penn State Press.
Constructing Moral Communities: Pacific Islander Strategies for Settling in New Places. Editor, Special Issue, Pacific Studies, March-June 2002.
A Sealed and Secret Kinship: The Culture of Policies and Practices in American Adoption, New York: Berghahn Books, March 2002.
A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead (with Charlee Brodsky), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, October 1998.
Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Articles and Essays
“International Adoption: Lessons from Hawaii” IN International Adoption. New York: Berghahn Press, forthcoming.
“Adoption in Cross Cultural Perspective” IN The Chicago Companion to the Child.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.
“Writing Lives: Ruth Benedict’s Journey from Biographical Studies to Anthropology" IN PacificStudies, forthcoming.
“Ruth Fulton Benedict” IN Dictionnaire des Sciences Humaines.  Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006
“Matching in American Adoption Practice,” “Foster Care,” “Hanai: Hawaiian Customary Adoption” IN The Encyclopedia of Adoption. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006.
“Ruth Benedict’s Concept of Patterns Revisited” IN Reading Benedict/Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Visions. D. Janiewski and L. Banner (eds.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Courses Taught

Claiming the Pacific: Pacific Islander Struggles for Survival
Colonization and De-colonization in Pacific
Circulation of Children in a Global Context
Rights to Representation: Indigenous People and their Media
Hawaii: America’s Pacific Island State
Visual Anthropology
Cultural Understanding/Misunderstanding: Translating Language, Culture, and Histories in Japanese, Vietnamese, and U.S. Relations

Contact Info

Department of History
Baker Hall 242-D
P: 412.268.3239
F: 412.268.1019
jm1e@andrew.cmu.edu

Publications