Caroline B. Brettell
Dedman Family
Distinguished
Professor of Anthropology
Heroy Hall, Room 451
cbrettel@smu.edu
Caroline Brettell joined the faculty of
Southern Methodist University in 1988. In 2003 she was named Dedman Family
Distinguished Professor. She served as Director of Women's Studies from 1989-1994
and as Chair of Anthropology from 1994-2004 and as Dean ad Interim of
Dedman College, 2006-2008. She was born and raised in Montreal
and received her B.A. in Latin American Studies from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D.
in Anthropology from Brown University . In 2000-2001 she served as President of the Social
Science History Association and between 1996 and 1998 she was President of the Society for
the Anthropology of Europe (SAE). She served as President of the SMU Faculty Senate and
as a member of the SMU Board of Trustees in 2001-2002. She served as a member of the
selection committee for the International Dissertation Research Program for the Social Science
Research Council (2003-2005) and for their International Migration Program (2000-2002). She has also served as a member of SNEM-3 Scientific Review Panel, National Institute of
Health (1999-2003). Among her research interests are: migration and immigration, the
cross-cultural study of gender, the intersections of anthropology and history, and European
ethnography, particularly Portugal . Other interests include ethnicity, historical demography
and family history, kinship, and the anthropological study of religion.
Brettell has several ongoing research projects on
immigration. One, funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on the DFW metroplex as
a new city of immigration and how immigrants are incorporated into the economic, social, and
political structures of a sunbelt city. Another, recently funded by the Russell Sage
Foundation, will be exploring aspects of citizenship practice and civic engagement among
Asian Indian and Vietnamese immigrants in the DFW area. A third addresses the experience of a
group of post-colonial migrants, Goans who left Portuguese India after the
"liberation" (or "invasion" from Portugal's perspective) of Goa
in 1961 and settled in Lisbon.
Exploring the Relationships Among Anthropology, History, Gender, and Migration
Dr. Caroline Brettell's work has focused on the
comparative and interdisciplinary study of population movement across time and space. She
was a pioneer in exploring the role of women in the migration process in her monographs
Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait (1986) and We Have Already Cried Many Tears
(1982/1995), and in a co-edited volume International Migration: The Female Experience
(1986) In Men Who Migrate, a work that combines anthropology with historical
demography she looked the impact of emigration on marriage and fertility patterns in northern
Portugal over two and a half centuries. Her book Anthropology and Migration, a
collection of essays, explores a host of questions pertinent to the study of migration from an
anthropological and historical perspective.
Dr. Brettell is also extremely interested in both theory and
methodology and has often published essays on these topics as they emerge from her research.
The essay "Anthropology, Gender and Narrative", for example, looks back on the
development of feminist anthropology and also addresses the role of life history in
anthropological writing - a method Brettell has used herself in We Have Already
Cried Many Tears and in her book about her own mother, Writing Against the
Wind (1999). The essay "Gendered Lives' wrestles with how historical
records are "transformed" into social scientific data; and the essay “The
Individual/Agent and Culture/Structure (Brettell's 2001 Presidential Address to the
Social Science History Association) traces the dialogue between and among these concepts in
the social sciences during the 20th century. Another edited book, When They Read What
We Write, a response to some of the debates in reflexive anthropology, explores the
reactions of anthropological informants to how they are portrayed in anthropological writing.
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