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.