American Academics Research Articles

Israeli scientists in an American looking glass: Habitus, self-awareness and identity formation

This article examines the impact of intercultural encounters on the identities of Israeli scientists interacting with their American counterparts. The cross-cultural experience in American academia compels Israeli scholars to identify the codes that structure this environment. Using these codes as a mirror, they reflect on their previous habits of thinking, speaking, and acting. Based on 144 interviews with Israeli scholars immersed in American academia, the study demonstrates how respondents become aware of their cultural habitus. What they once took for granted becomes evident when they engage with the American academic setting. The analysis reveals that by looking into this academic mirror, respondents gain insights into three cultural codes that shape their Israeli habitus. First, they recognize that, unlike their American colleagues who conform to hierarchical structures, they advocate for a non-compliant "hutzpah" attitude toward authority. Second, through their encounters with the pleasantries of American discourse, they become aware of their own tendency toward direct, even aggressive, speech. Third, as they observe American tendencies toward proceduralism and rule following, Israeli scientists begin to appreciate the value of their own non-conformism. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of their behavior, Israeli scholars view their foundational habitus as fostering critical thinking, originality, and creativity. Rather than merely integrating into American mores, they increasingly recognize their primordial cultural assets as integral to their intellectual strengths.

Cultural Politics and Academic Crises in American Campus Fiction – Francine Prose’s Blue Angel and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons

Abstract The article starts from the implications of a phrase in the first chapter of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, a book that addresses issues of contemporary morality in the closed environment of the American academia: “Everyone knows.” Written in the aftermath of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, Roth’s novel and the two books this article discusses reveal dual, often deliberately ambiguous depictions of gender and power dynamics in the ecosystem of the American college campus, a space that widens the gap between social structures, which grow more and more granular. The examined novels share concerns about cultural politics, offering a complementary perspective: while Francine Prose’s novel follows the tradition of the campus novel and retells the story from a mature academic’s point of view, Tom Wolfe’s book shifts to a young student’s side of the story. The article aims to demonstrate it is not a mere coincidence that these representative novels about social and moral crises faced on the campus were actually written in a time when campus fiction was also going through an aesthetic crisis. The crises on the campus and the crisis in campus fiction indicate a turning point, where creative solutions can be identified, despite their potential controversy.

The Level of Happiness and Its Relationship with Personal and Occupational Well-Being in Women Leaders at a Mexican University: An Exploratory Study

This exploratory study aims to identify the state of well-being of a select group of women leaders in a Mexican university by analyzing the relationship between their perception of happiness and their satisfaction with their life and work. Through the application of a psychometric battery, this work examined how these leaders manage their well-being within an environment that is simultaneously empowering and demanding. Methodologically, a descriptive statistical analysis was performed, including a correlation analysis of all items. As a result, the research identified positive correlations between the variables age and positive perceptions of work and life, which are strongly associated with high personal and professional satisfaction. In addition, people who find their work rewarding and feel that their life is close to their ideal tend to be more satisfied in general. Although this study intended to be exploratory, it also sought to contribute a deeper understanding of the well-being status of women in university leadership positions in Mexico. In doing so, it filled an important gap in the literature on gender, leadership, and well-being in Latin American academia by highlighting the complexity of managing and supporting women in leadership positions.

Tens of Thousands of American Academics on the Editorial Boards of Journals Run by Predatory Publishers

Between August 2022 and March 2023, the names and affiliations of 2183 American academics were found on the editorial boards of journals owned by nineteen predatory publishers. A survey email went out to 905 of them, and 195 replies were received. Twenty-six replies were uninformative. Sixty-five respondents confirmed that they served knowingly and willingly, ninety-one reported that their names were being used without their knowledge, and thirteen said that their names were being used despite requests to have them removed. Based on these results, a minimum estimate of the number of academics serving on the editorial boards of corrupt publishers runs into the tens of thousands, while the maximum exceeds ninety thousand. The former estimate uses very stringent criteria to define a predatory publisher, excluding all moderate, minor, and doubtful cases. This situation should be intolerable. The academic community is urged to take legal action.

Women in Latin American Academia

This article discusses the gender inequality female researchers and university professors face in the social sciences in four Latin American countries: Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The objective is to understand the forms of discrimination these women face in their work environment and analyze how these forms operate and impact their labor marginalization. It also seeks to characterize the difficulties faced by female academics in reconciling their reproductive and care responsibilities with professional practice. The second section sets out the theoretical framework and defines the concept of gender inequality. The third analyzes the gender gap in international academia, contrasting the most recent data from the Global North and South on the obstacles faced by women in professional academic settings. The fourth reviews case studies in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina and offers a characterization of this problem in these countries. The final section presents four analytical-interpretative conclusions.

Racialized Identity, Then and Now: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the Rise of Donald Trump, and the Role of Academia

Abstract: This paper explores the formation of racialized and gendered identities in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. To this end, the intervention aims at analysing how these identities are constructed along the colour line and also reconnoitred in the novel by putting W. E. B. Du Boas’ seminal term “double consciousness” into operation. The study also zeroes in on the sea change taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and beyond to demonstrate how various racial constructions are still at work in assorted forms and practices and reinforced under the guise of Donald Trump’s slogan of “make America great again”. It, further, tries to show how we can address these issues by drawing on the course Critical Race and Ethnic Studies taught in the American academia that can eventually, to certain extents, help us to identify several critical tools and paradigms to deal with the politics of the “personal and spiritual” with a view to envisioning a future in relation to emancipation and equity.

An Interview with Professor Jonathan Locke Hart

Professor Jonathan Locke Hart answers our questions about Comparative Literature in Canada, Canadian indigenous literary traditions, Shakespeare, and the dominance of American academia, and the English language. He refers to a wide range of texts and scholars, his personal experience as a poet and scholar, and comments on the potential future of our shared disciplines.

How southern is Southern criminology in Latin America?

Criminological research published in Latin America has received limited attention in global debates. Inspired by the Southern criminology project, in this article I aim to fill this gap by describing the main features of articles published in Latin America and exploring to what extent these publications reflect the core elements posited by Southern criminologists. To this end, I propose a novel operationalization of Southern criminology coding topics and theoretical frameworks using a dataset I compiled with articles published in 2020 in Latin America (N = 230). The results show that most of the articles are non-empirical and almost half of them are Southern articles. Also, the findings suggest that when articles adopt a Southern theoretical framework, almost all of them are non-empirical. I conclude by discussing the results within the larger context of Latin American academia, arguing for the need to expand empirical approaches to achieve the goals of Southern criminology.

Američki realisti i rat u Bosni 1992-1995.

While there is a significant body of literature on U.S. policy towards Bosnia in the early 1990s, the role and policy recommendations of American realists have been largely overlooked. Realism is a school of thought in international relations which holds that states are the key actors motivated by interests which seek to maximize their power and security in an anarchic world. Adherents of this worldview emphasize the pursuit of national interests and the importance of power and force in achieving it. Realists are generally opposed to military interventions where a vital national interest is not at stake. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by analysing both realist policymakers and academics and how they responded to the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. Several top officials of the George H. W. Bush Administration including the President, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft were realists and this worldview shaped the US response to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. Focused on a host of other foreign policy issues at the time, the Bush Administration was adamant not to get involved militarily in Bosnia. James Baker’s statement „We don't have a dog in that fight“ came to define the Bush Administration's Bosnia policy. Its realist outlook combined with the presidential campaign priorities in 1992 to ensure that the Western response to the war in Bosnia was handed over to the Europeans. With realist policymakers in power from the outbreak of the war in spring 1992 through early 1993, many Bosnians hoping for a Western military intervention at the time would later come to realise how far-fetched those hopes were. In addition to realist policymakers, several prominent realists in the American academia also weighed in on how the US should respond to the war in this part of Southeast Europe in the early 1990s. Academic realists published their opinions and recommended policy options in leading media outlets throughout the three-and-a-half year war. Though their worldview was not shared by the first Bill Clinton Administration, academic realists continued offering policy recommendations on Bosnia. Academic realists like Robert Pape and Michael Desch opposed the use of air power in Bosnia arguing that it would be ineffective. John Mearsheimer together with Pape called for partition of Bosnia and establishment of homogeneous states in the Balkans and arming of Bosnian Muslims. Kissinger was opposed to a military commitment to Bosnia but did not lay out specific policy recommendations. In sum, both policymakers and academics argued that there was no vital US national interest at stake in Bosnia warranting deployment of ground troops. Even after the Dayton peace talks concluded in late 1995, American realists continued weighing in on Bosnia and offering generally bleak assessments. While the majority of those recommended policy options were not implemented, realists’ views on Bosnia in the 1990s still deserve scholarly attention. Studying American realists provides an overview of how both practitioners and intellectual adherents of a key theory in international relations perceived the war and its outcome. This analysis will also provide a more nuanced understanding of the variety of American responses to the war in Bosnia.

The Golden Parachute Mechanism of Listed Businesses' Bad Faith Takeover Defense

As the wave of mergers and acquisitions spreads in China, incidents of hostile takeovers in the capital market are becoming more frequent. More Chinese companies are revising their articles of association and adding anti-hostile takeover clauses, including the Golden Parachute clause, to protect their interests. Most research on Golden Parachute has focused on the U.S. market, but China's capitalist market environment and corporate governance structure differ greatly from the U.S., and there are blank spaces in the value judgment of the Golden Parachute in American studies. When introducing it in China, legislative bodies and corporate rules should not copy blindly; rather, they should extract its essence while discarding the dross. This article summarizes current research literature on the Golden Parachute clause by Chinese and American academia, uses empirical research to analyze how the clause was applied in the Musk-Twitter acquisition case, and presents personal insights on how Chinese companies can write the Golden Parachute clause into their articles of association and localize it based on actual mergers and acquisitions scenarios. Efforts must be made at the institutional, legal, and ethical levels to address the challenges faced by the Golden Parachute clause in practice, thereby opening up greater possibilities for their application in China.

Disrupting and Re-imagining European Studies: towards a More Diverse and Inclusive Discipline

In 2019, UACES and the European Studies Association of Sub-Saharan Africa (ESA-SSA) launched a project funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus Plus Jean Monnet Projects. The aim of the programme was to encourage and promote diversity within European Studies - broadly defined. The project, ‘Diversity, Inclusion and Multidisciplinarity in European Studies’ (DIMES) sought to explore ways to increase diversity within the field of European Studies, in particular with regards to the ethnicity, disciplinary focus, geographical location of its participants and eventually knowledge production within European Studies itself. The outlined aims of the project were threefold: 1) to improve the representation of BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour) academics within UACES and European studies more generally; 2) to move away from the emphasis on Western European and North American academics towards greater inclusion for scholars from under-represented, even marginalised geographies; 3) to broaden the disciplinary focus of contemporary European Studies to include adjacent/related disciplines such as anthropology, human geography, cultural studies and sociology.

Decolonizing Displacement Research: Betweener Autoethnography as a Method of Resistance

Over the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of displaced scholars from the Middle East and Africa who have come under sustained pressures and threats from their governments; only a few of them have been able to relocate to European and North American academia through scholarships and grants.1 Even these temporary solutions for displaced scholars rarely result in sustainable institutional solidarity in the form of permanent teaching or professorial positions. The lack of institutional support, coupled with discriminatory and racialized immigration policies, pushes these few fortunate scholars to either accept exploitative conditions perpetuated by the neoliberal economy or leave academia altogether to support their families. These challenges, along with draconian economic sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on citizens of countries such as Syria, Sudan, Iran, and Cuba are only a snapshot of what displaced scholars endure on a daily basis while trying to do research, care for their families, and compete with scholars with privileged citizenship status for shrinking opportunities in the academic job market.

Subliminal voices: barriers to healthcare and proposed interventions by international students and their families at a large research university in the Midwest

Despite the vast numbers of international students in the U.S. as well as their contribution to the economy, their voices are rarely heard within the discursive spaces of the American academe. This study takes a step toward filling that gap and seeks to open up a platform where married, international graduate students at a large Midwestern university could communicate, in particular, the barriers they faced while accessing healthcare facilities for their families. Using a culture-centered approach to health communication, through focus groups and in-depth interviews, this study provides a discursive space where 22 international students and spouses articulate vivid narratives of the problems they encountered while negotiating the American healthcare system, revealing a basic issue of unaffordability of students' spousal health insurance, accompanied by a dire need for better communication between international students and the university, with there being a need for the latter to better explain to international students a healthcare system that is new to them, as well as communicating with them, with better clarity, the available healthcare options for them and their spouses. The participants also proposed interventions to redress the problems, including the need for better dissemination of information regarding healthcare.

Fantasy and Dissimulation in the Memoirs of Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926)

ABSTRACT The Yiddish-language memoirs of the journalist Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926), published in New York in 1919–1920, present a version of his life that deviates considerably from the version one might glean from other contemporary testimony, such as newspaper articles and institutional records. This paper examines how Zelikovits constructed a counterfactual narrative in which he seeks to present his readership with his life as it should have been. As well as Zelikovits’s sense of injustice at how he had been treated by European and American academia, and by the British and French establishments, another reason for his deviation from the truth is that he was guilty of a number of serious offences: academic fraud, false accusation of murder, and likely sexual assault. I conclude by exploring what is at stake for a biographer, from an ethical and scholarly standpoint, in exposing Zelikovits’s misdeeds and untruths.

The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on Teaching Islam in American Universities

The significance of the Muslim Brotherhood in American academia lies in the academic articulation of the brothers’ discourse as the expression of modern Islam in general. As such, the discourse of a specific political group is taken as the appropriate example of modern mainstream Islam. This treatment of the brothers’ discourse has resulted in an assumption that Islam, or at least modern Islam, is essentially political. It is not surprising, therefore, that one can easily find courses that teach “Islam and Politics,” or “Islam and Democracy,” which have no parallel in courses taught on other religions. What creates this distortion is not the mere political nature of the Brothers as an organization. It is the redefinition of Islam as has been presented by the brothers’ discourse since its foundation. There, Islam is presented as a differentiated structure that mirrors the differentiated structure of the secular state. Islam is presented as a comprehensive modern system that includes a number of complementary systems: political, economic, social, educational, health, etc. that work in harmony, guided by the rational principle of maṣlaḥah, public interest. The discourse of the Brothers defined the object of studies for American academia and set its research agenda. Not only has this presentation of Islam over politicized it, but it marginalized a plethora of significant traditional structures and concepts, as well as several modern responses that are not included in the brothers’ discourse. The overpoliticization of Islam and presenting it as nece­ssarily Islamism has become not just a problem of media misrep­resentation, but a crisis in the quality of knowledge about Islam that is produced and nurtured in academia. Moreover, this situation developed two unfortunate scholarships on modern Islam in Western academia that further distorted and blocked our knowledge on Islam: one is minor and Islamophobic, the other is major and Islamophilic. The Islamophobic approach sees Islam as inherently opposed to the modern structures of civil society, democracy, cultural diversity, and free market. The Islamophilic approach portrays Islamism—seen as the normative form of modern Islam, which is embraced by Muslim societies, as legitimate and popular native protest movement against non-democratic regimes. An exploration of John Esposito, whose scholarship has set the tone on Islam in academia for decades, and whose books have been widely adopted in courses taught in American universities will prove my argument.

Faulty Power in the Faculty Tower: James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale as a Parody of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

ABSTRACT The current article takes established theoretical postulates about parody as a point of departure for examining how James Hynes’s postmodern novel, The Lecturer’s Tale (2001), contributes fresh fictional angles to the field of campus literature by building on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to chart its own protagonist’s transition from victim to victor and to sound a cautionary note about ill-advised and addictive pursuit of power. I maintain that Nelson Humboldt, a visiting adjunct lecturer at the elite University of Midwestern at Hamilton Groves, Minnesota, renders the role of Shakespeare’s ambitious eponymous tragic hero, whose usurpation of the crown wreaks havoc on the Kingdom of Scotland. This accounts for Hynes’s satirical portrayal of academia as a battleground where several argumentative and erudite professors, craving praise and prize and armed with words and swords, tend to wage battles of wits and wills and to get entangled in a web of intrigue. Finally, the paper underlines that the novel’s comic vein veils serious concerns about the defects and difficulties afflicting contemporary American academia.

Escaping Nazi Germany: Jewish refugee dentists and their post-emigration careers in the United States of America

This study is the first to examine the collective of dental lecturers and scientists who emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States of America. We pay special attention to the socio-demographic characteristics, emigration journeys, and further professional development of these individuals in the country of immigration. The paper is based on primary sources from various German, Austrian, and United States archives and a systematic evaluation of the secondary literature on the persons concerned. We identified a total of eighteen male emigrants. The majority of these dentists left the “Greater” German Reich between 1938 and 1941. Thirteen of the eighteen lecturers were able to find a position in American academia, mainly as full professors. Two-thirds of them settled in New York and Illinois. The study concludes that most of the emigrated dentists studied here succeeded in continuing or even expanding their academic careers in the USA, although they usually had to retake their final dental examinations. No other destination country for immigration offered similarly favorable conditions. Not a single dentist decided to remigrate after 1945.

Visual sociology between tradition and new frontiers of research

ABSTRACT Visual studies, although consolidated in European and North American academia, are still developing. The research fields associated with them are also affected by multidisciplinary approaches ranging from the fields of ethno-anthropology, art, communication, sociology, semiology, forming a semantic and epistemological mosaic in continuous evolution. The essay presented here proposes, on the one hand, a reflection on visual culture and, on the other, an introduction to some of the most interesting lines of research in visual studies. In this way we want to deepen the epistemological/methodological value of visual sociology, and at the same time give witness to the achievements and innovative proposals that make this field of study one of the most interesting in social research.

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

동양, 탈아와 정체, 아시아연대와 타율 - 식민주의 역사학에 대한 단상

The modern historiography of Japan, developed since the late 19th century, revealed the progress of the Japanese people in response to the demands of Japanese society, which developed modernization and imperialism at the same time after contact with the West. However, it is said that the Japanese thought of Japan in Asia after contact with the West, rejected the Chinese-centered worldview in the past, relativeized China and other Asian countries, and created the Tōyō as a new space centered on Japan. In Tōyō, Japan was the only one in Asia to succeed in Westernization out of Asia and lead the solidarity of Asia. Japanese historians’ study of Korean history was to explain the historical inevitability of the task of “Out of Asia” and “Asian Solidarity” that the Japanese imposed on themselves to achieve modernization and imperialism.BRIn order to explain the “Out of Asia” that only Japan was able to do, the others such like Korea and China, which were historically stagnant and failed, were essential. The view of Japanese historians to Korea’s past, which we have summarized as “the stagnation theory”, was aimed at reflecting Westernization, which was only possible by Japan. And in order to historically show that Japan was bound to be the leader of the Asian Solidarity, it had to reveal that the past of Japan, the island nation at the eastern end of Asia, was accompanied by the historical development of the Asian continent. At this time, the Korean history of the peninsula close to Japan takes on more important meaning to them. From their point of view, Korea is a place where the historical changes of the continent are condensed, with the absolute inuence of continental forces such as Manchuria, Mongolia, and China, and Japanese history can be linked to the historical changes of the continent as Japan has established relations with Korea since the beginning of history. What we have summarized as the “Heteronomy eory” of Korean history is to connect Japanese history to the historical development of the continent, and in this regard, the so-called “Heteronomy eory” opens the way for Japanese history to be newly organized around Japan. If so, the more prominent the character of Japan’s modern historiography is, the more stagnant and heteronomous the history of other Asian countries, including Korean history, is revealed.BRMeanwhile, the view of colonialist historiography had its influence even after the war. This didn’t stop in Japanese academia after 1945, but it seems likely to affect American academia. e U.S. policy stance in the northeast Asia, which sought U.S. national interest and hegemony by blocking the spread of socialism centered on Japan, resembled the idea of Japanese historians who wanted to paint the Tōyō centered on Japan, talking Korea’s lack of feudalism and insisting on the impossibility of internal modernization.