1945-2024
Peter F. Conrad died in his home in Lincoln, MA, on March 3, 2024. He was 78 years old and had been living with Parkinson’s Disease for several years. Conrad received his PhD in sociology from Boston University in 1976 and joined the Brandeis University Department of Sociology in 1979. He was Brandeis University’s Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences and professor emeritus of the Department of Sociology.
Conrad wrote or edited 16 books and monographs, with his dissertation being the basis of his first book, Identifying Hyperactive Children: The Medicalization of Deviant Behavior (DC Health 1976). In The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Johns Hopkins University Press 2007), Conrad synthesized the medicalization research he had worked on for three decades. His books with Joseph Schneider—Having Epilepsy: The Experience and Control of Illness (Temple University Press 1983) and Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (Temple University Press 1992)—are essential texts, and his reader, Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives (St. Martin’s Press 1981), coedited with Rochelle Kern, is now in its tenth edition. Conrad also coedited with Chloe Bird and Allen Fremont the Handbook of Medical Sociology, 5th Edition (Prentice Hall 2000), transforming it into an up-to-date, creative, intellectual contribution.
As a leading scholar in the experience of illness, Conrad’s work on hyperkinesis and epilepsy are widely cited as core articles in that field. His approximately 120 articles have appeared in prominent journals in medical sociology and related fields, including the Journal of Health and Social Behavior; Social Science & Medicine; Social Problems; Hastings Center Report; Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; and the American Journal of Sociology. Conrad also served as coeditor of Qualitative Sociology (1982-87), and sat on the editorial boards of several journals, including Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Sociological Quarterly, Sociology of Health and Illness, the American Sociologist and Health.
Conrad was one of the discipline’s fundamental theorists and researchers of medicalization and illness experience, and he spent several years studying corporate health promotion as an extension of medicalization. Conrad also took up the issue of increased prescribing of psychotropic drugs to children and was one of the pioneers in sociological analysis of genetic issues, creating a body of work that spurred medical sociologists to take up varied research on genetics. More recently, Conrad started a project on the experience and management of Parkinson’s Disease, an interest that arose from his own diagnosis in 2014.
In service to the profession, Conrad excelled. He co-organized an amazing working conference in 1999, “Medical Sociology Toward the Millenium: Continuity and Change in Health and Medicine,” which brought together approximately 150 sociologists—primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom, but also from other countries—and led to a series of other such conferences. He also served as chair of the American Sociological Association’s Medical Sociology Section (1988-1989) and was the recipient of the American Sociological Association Section on Medical Sociology’s 2004 Leo G. Reeder Award.
Conrad was a devoted teacher and a great mentor to his students and to many faculty members. He built the interdisciplinary program Health: Science, Society, and Policy and was so satisfied as he led it to become the largest major at Brandeis University. He retired from teaching in 2017.
In all these areas, Conrad conducted himself with deep attention, a friendly smile, warm encouragement, and both intellectual and personal respect for others. He leaves behind his wife, Ylisabyth Bradshaw; daughter, Rya Conrad-Bradshaw; son, Jared Conrad-Bradshaw; and grandchildren, Rafi, Sela, and Avi.
Phil Brown, Northeastern University
1946-2024
The Jane Addams Research Center in Saint Joseph, Michigan, announces with sorrow the unexpected death at age 77 of its internationally celebrated founder and executive director, Mary Jo Deegan. Born in Chicago in 1946, she became an authority on the Hull-House settlement and the Chicago school of sociology. Deegan was a prolific chronicler of Edith Abbott, Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Annie Marion MacLean, Harriet Martineau, George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, Elsie Clews Parsons, Anna Garlin Spencer, Ellen Gates Starr, Jessie Taft, Amos Griswold Warner, Fannie Barrier Williams, and myriad others.
Deegan received the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on the History of Sociology and Social Thought Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 as well as the Section’s Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award in 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2009. She also received the ASA Section on Peace, War and Social Conflict’s Robin Williams Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship, Teaching, and Service in 2008. The Mary Jo Deegan Project, based in Spain, continues her work among Spanish-speaking sociologists.
Initially trained in chemistry and mathematics (Western Michigan University, 1969), Deegan turned, after a physically disabling accident, to medical sociology, disability studies, qualitative methods, phenomenology, social theory, symbolic interaction, archival investigation, and disciplinary history. She earned her MA in sociology at Western Michigan University (1971) and her PhD at the University of Chicago (1975). Her mentors included Odin Anderson, Mircea Eliade, Erving Goffman, Irving Louis Horowitz, Morris Janowitz, Victor Lidz, Cora Bagley Marrett, Talcott Parsons, Victor Turner, Morton Wagonfeld, and Gibson Winter. After teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for 40 years, Deegan became professor emerita of sociology in 2015.
Best known for her groundbreaking study of sociologist Jane Addams, Deegan also explicated the intersecting constellations of men and women associated with Hull-House and probed the institutional relationships between Hull-House, the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, the University of Chicago, the American Sociological Association, and other organizations. She was impressed by the theories of George Herbert Mead and produced three volumes exploring Mead’s ideas regarding social psychology, education, and war. Likewise, her three coedited volumes of works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman placed Gilman’s ideas squarely within the realm of sociological discourse. Deegan also attended to African American thinkers, of which her volume on Fannie Barrier Williams is an instructive example.
Deegan engaged the world of popular culture with personal and professional joie de vivre. Her avocations included reading science fiction and mystery novels, collecting and selling costume jewelry, and dancing to live reggae bands. She was devoted to her four pet dogs, all lovingly named after sociologists. Living in Nebraska from 1975 to 2015, she escaped to her beloved Lake Michigan cottage almost every summer, allowing her to conduct archival research at the University of Chicago, enjoy Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, and repeatedly visit the Art Institute of Chicago. She was an active traveler, with sustained visits to Germany, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, and shorter visits to Austria, Belgium, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, Poland, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, Scotland, and Switzerland. Deegan officially became an Irish citizen in 2003.
An unflinching and egalitarian feminist, Deegan’s stinging analyses of the core codes of inequality (sex and class) and repression (bureaucracy and time) that structure American ritual dramas and quotidian social interactions made her anathema to chauvinists, racists, capitalists, university administrators, and Big Red sports fans alike. Deegan’s books are found in libraries worldwide, and many shorter writings are available via the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons website. Her file cabinets currently brim with yet to be completed projects awaiting posthumous attention. Deegan is survived by two older sisters and her sociologist-geographer life-partner, Michael R. Hill. She died peacefully and unexpectedly of natural causes in early 2024 while gazing at the woods just outside her Lake Michigan cottage.
Michael R. Hill, Jane Addams Research Center
1958-2024
Kathleen Lowney passed away on January 8, 2024, after a short illness at the age of 65. Lowney obtained her PhD in religion and society from Drew University in 1986 and taught at Valdosta State University (VSU) from 1987 until her retirement in 2018. Retirement did not mean that she stopped working. She continued by contributing to her blog Pedagogical Thoughts, created in 2016 and in which she described herself as “A veteran professor, learning about teaching one day at a time.” Known as Kathe to her friends, she also created a professional editing business, helping PhD students craft their dissertations, among other editing tasks.
During her time at VSU, Lowney wrote four books and 41 journal and book chapter articles. Of her research, she said, “I am a sociologist of religion by training, but whose research has taken me into the worlds of professional wrestling, kudzu as a social problem, adolescent Satanism, religion on talk shows, and so on. But always, I come back to thinking and writing about the scholarship of teaching and learning.”
Lowney’s contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning included serving as the editor of the American Sociology Association (ASA) journal, Teaching Sociology, from 2010 to 2014. She was the driving force behind instituting a Teaching and Learning Center at VSU that helped faculty improve their teaching. About the establishment of this center Lowney said: “Teaching students is great, and I love it, but helping others to find their teaching style so that they can go and impact other students is, in a way, even more near and dear to my heart.” In addition, Lowney and I coauthored the book, In the Trenches: Teaching and Learning Sociology (W.W. Norton & Company 2014), one of the first books written specifically to help sociologists teach.
Lowney’s outstanding achievement in the art and science of teaching is reflected in her many awards. In 2011 she received both the Valdosta State University (VSU) College of Arts and Sciences’ Excellence in Teaching Award and VSU’s university-wide Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2012, she received the Felton Jenkins Jr. Hall of Fame Faculty Award for excellence in teaching in the University System of Georgia. In 2014, she received the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award from ASA, its highest pedagogical award. In 2015, she received the ASA Teaching and Learning Section’s Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology. In 2016, she received the Georgia Sociological Association’s Sociologist of the Year Award, and in 2019, she received the ASA Teaching and Learning Section’s Scholarly Contributions to Teaching and Learning Award.
Lowney had a profound impact on many of us. Adam Albrite, one of her former students said, “Her passion for teaching and commitment to excellence were as contagious as the common cold.” I was one of Lowney’s friends, first drawn to her because of her kindness. Later I became one of her coauthors, drawn by her expertise and the sheer joy of being in her presence. Her infectious laugh and warm, caring support were inspirational. She is sorely missed by her husband VSU Emeritus Professor Frank Flaherty; sisters Mary Faure, Debra Hofbauer, and Pat Jennings; and her family, friends, colleagues, and former students.
Maxine P. Atkinson, North Carolina State University
1940-2024
Hugh P. Whitt, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), passed away on February 4, 2024. His theoretical and empirical work in criminology and sociology influenced generations of scholars. He was also a warm and welcoming person who devoted much of his time to mentoring, teaching, and bettering his community.
Whitt earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and his master’s and doctorate in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After earning his doctorate, Whitt spent time as an assistant professor at UNL, Fisk University, and Vanderbilt University. He then returned to UNL, where he received tenure and eventually promotion to full professor. At UNL, he taught courses covering an array of sociological topics—crime and delinquency, theory, methods, statistics, race, urbanicity, religion, sports, social movements, and others.
Whitt’s early research focused on religion, including work on religion and migration and religion and political tolerance. (My first introduction to his work was his 1977 article with Hart Nelson on moral traditionalism and tolerance of atheists.) While continuing to do work on religion, much of his research in the latter half of the 1970s and in the 1980s focused on mental health. Whitt then transitioned to doing work on crime and delinquency, though here too, religion continued to play a role. He wrote several influential articles on crime and violence in 1990s, and he coauthored the award-winning book The Currents of Lethal Violence: An Integrated Model of Suicide and Homicide (SUNY Press 1994) with N. Prabha Unnithan, Lin Huff-Corzine, and Jay Corzine.
Throughout his career, Whitt’s work incorporated cutting-edge methodologies while also maintaining a strong connection to classical and contemporary sociological theories. Exemplifying this approach, he capped off his career with an article in the American Journal of Sociology on suicide and crime in nineteenth-century France. Whitt used spatial regression analyses (self-taught, I believe) that connected historical records on crime and violence to regional attributes and neighboring regional influences. He tied this to theories of regional violence and Durkheim’s work on suicide in the article “The Civilizing Process and Its Discontents: Suicide and Crimes against Persons in France, 1825–1830” (American Journal of Sociology July 2010). It is one of the most quintessentially sociological articles I have ever read, clearly connecting community attributes and regional cultures to the behavior of individuals.
Whitt received the Bobbs-Merrill Award in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1967 and the Distinguished Book Award from the Mid-South Sociological Association in 1995. Probably more important to him were the numerous mentoring and teaching awards he received throughout his career. For instance, Whitt received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and, along with other members of the sociology department, he was presented with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s University-wide Award for Outstanding Departmental Teaching in 1996. Whitt was also acknowledged for his teaching contributions by the UNL Parents Association and the UNL Teaching Council on three separate occasions.
In addition to his research, Whitt published fiction, predominantly novels about Sherlock Holmes. He was also a huge baseball fan. As one might expect of someone with his statistical bent, he was strongly focused on sabermetrics, or the use of statistics to assess and compare players and teams. Most importantly, Whitt was one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. He took a genuine interest in every student, colleague, and member of the staff. He was always happy to talk—about research, teaching, fiction, baseball, or whatever was on your mind. What I will most remember about Whitt is that he was more generous with his time than any other academic I have known, and for that I will always be grateful.
Philip Schwadel, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
