1934–2022
Gordie Fellman, a beloved teacher and colleague, died on October 19, 2022, at the age of 88. A professor emeritus of sociology at Brandeis University, Fellman retired in May 2022 after having taught at the university level for 60 years, 55 of those years at Brandeis.
Fellman grew up in Nebraska and attended Antioch College for his undergraduate degree. Antioch opened his eyes to the excitement of learning, activism, and passionate political debate. He earned his PhD in sociology from Harvard University and in 1964 joined the fledgling Sociology Department at Brandeis. Over the years, he inspired generations of students to think critically, be self-reflective, and engage in social action. As a former student commented at Fellman’s June 2022 retirement gathering, Fellman conveyed warmth, passion, and concern for students as people. He invited students to join him in an inquiring and a critical approach to learning and to take an active and creative role in their own education. Countless students have spoken of the profound personal growth they experienced in his classes and the ways he inspired them to make the world a better place.
Fellman taught numerous courses in sociology and beyond that revolved around several central questions: What are the sources, in history and in the self’s development and inner workings, of unnecessary human suffering? How can it be thoughtfully, carefully, mindfully reduced? His Sociology of Empowerment class stood out as a transformative experience for hundreds of students over the past 25 years. Fellman received the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1999. And in 2007, he won the Student Union Best Teaching Award.
Fellman was chair of the Brandeis University Sociology Department from 1974–1976, and again from 1984–1987. As well as being a faculty member of the Sociology Department, he was a cofounder and, from 1990 on, served as chair of the interdisciplinary Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies Program-PAX (originally called Peace Studies Program, and later, Peace and Conflict Studies Program).
Fellman’s first book, coauthored with Barbara Brandt, The Deceived Majority: Politics and Protest in Middle America (Transaction Books 1973), is based on his experience—together with a group of his neighbors from Cambridge, MA—of successfully fighting the “inner belt” highway that was going to destroy Cambridge’s working-class neighborhoods. His second book was Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival (SUNY Press 1998). In this book, Fellman developed a central idea of his thinking, offering a paradigm of mutuality based on cooperation, caring, nurturing, and loving. This, he suggested, should supplant the dominant Western paradigm of adversarialism based on conflicts of interest and war. Fellman saw the shifting emphasis from adversarialism to mutuality as essential for the survival of our species and of the environment.
Fellman received the 2011 Robin Williams Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship, Teaching, and Service from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Peace and War and Social Conflict. Most recently, Fellman received the 2021 Peace Educator-Scholar Award for excellence in scholarship and dedication to peace education from the Peace and Justice Studies Association. For the Brandeis University 2022 commencement, Fellman was honored to serve as the grand marshal.
He leaves behind his wife, Pamela Blau, and their two children, Ezra and Talia. Fellman married for the first time when he was 65 and fulfilled his lifelong desire to become a parent when he became a father to Ezra in 2001 and to Talia in 2003. Being a father brought Fellman tremendous joy! He will be missed greatly.
Contributed by family and colleagues
1948-2022
Alan Gordon Hill, 77, professor emeritus of sociology at Delta College, died on October 2, 2022, after a year of declining health. Hill was a resident of Taylors, SC, and a native of nearby Greenville, where he graduated from high school in 1963 and earned a BA cum laude from Furman University in 1967. He received an MA in 1969 and an MPhil in1973, both from Columbia University. While at Columbia, Hill coauthored several articles with physicians from Mount Sinai Medical Center, who depended on his statistical skills to analyze their data.
Hill first taught sociology at Furman University, where he was a frequent commentator on social and political issues for Greenville’s local television station, WYFF. He then taught for 25 years at Delta College, from which he retired in 2012. Although his career focused largely on teaching, he also engaged in research and service to Delta and to the profession of sociology. His publications focused on the impact of computers on society and the sociology of religion.
Hill’s early and primary commitment to teaching stood out and is captured in a letter of recommendation from one of his professors at Columbia, Robert K. Merton: “I single out Alan Hill as one of our better prospects … It was refreshing to discover his deep interest in teaching. Just about everything he has done as a graduate student has been designed to give him the kind of wide-ranging knowledge that he can put to use as a teacher. Judging from his performance in seminars, he has a gift for exposition. He not only says what he has to say clearly but manages to interest his audience in the ideas he puts forward. I support his candidacy for a college teaching post without reservation.”
As an outstanding performer in the classroom, Hill received the 1989 Outstanding Teaching Award from the Michigan Sociological Association and the 2000 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on computers and society (now known as the Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology’s Public Sociology Award). Perhaps more than anyone, he advocated for and successfully brought the widespread use of computers for both teaching and research to Delta College.
Just as Hill’s teaching was often recognized, so too was his service to his college, his profession, the larger academic community, and the public. In 1995, he received the “Recognition Award for Governance” from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which noted that Hill “represents the courage and integrity of academic freedom at its best.” He was a constant advocate for the establishment of a faculty union, was a board member and president of Delta’s AAUP chapter and served on several of its committees. In May 2012, Hill was lauded for “twenty-five years of outstanding service to our students and the Delta College Community.”
Without a doubt, Hill’s constant and unswerving support for the Michigan Sociological Association (MSA) was among his best acts of service. In 1998, the MSA awarded him the Marvin Olsen Award for Distinguished Service to Sociology in Michigan and/or the MSA. In 2012, the MSA awarded Hill a special commendation “for a career of distinguished service to Michigan sociology,” and an issue of the Michigan Sociological Review was dedicated to him. In addition to long-term membership on the MSA Executive Board, he was president in 1991‒92, and served as executive officer for 12 years, the longest serving and best performing occupant of that position. The MSA remains deeply in his debt, and his absence will be felt for years to come.
Hill was predeceased by his wife of 34 years, Toyo Murono Hill. He is survived by his son, Arthur Ginzo Hill of Taylors, SC; his life-long friend Louisa “Dee” Savage of Greenville, SC; and his numerous friends at the Michigan Sociological Association.
Donations in his memory can be sent to Dr. R. Kirk Mauldin, Lake Superior University, Sault Ste. Marie, MI 49783. Please make checks payable to Michigan Sociological Association and note that they are for the Alan Hill Fund.
Larry T. Reynolds, Central Michigan University; Joseph Verschaeve, Grand Valley State University
1957‒2022
Robin Leidner, a member of the sociology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988, died at home on September 23, 2022, of complications from breast cancer. She was 65. An ethnographer, a feminist scholar, and a student of work and workplace interactions, she was the author of the influential and elegantly written Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (University of California Press 1993) and a beloved mentor.
Her graduate students spoke of her with admiration and affection, almost always mentioning her exceptional kindness and her attentive care. “Funny, caring, and serious, all at the same time,” Keith Brown, now professor and chair of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Joseph’s University, wrote. She was also a dedicated undergraduate chair and a resourceful teacher in courses on work and gender, famed for the care she gave to grading and to the quality of her students’ prose.
Fast Food, Fast Talk is based on her doctoral research into the routinization of workplace emotions of both McDonald’s counter workers and the insurance agents of a large midwestern insurance company. Observing training sessions at both the insurance company and McDonald’s Hamburger University, then accompanying insurance agents on their rounds and working behind the counter at a McDonald’s franchise, Leidner discovered considerable variation in the responses of workers to the efforts of management to control their emotions.
Some McDonald’s workers squirmed over issues of inauthenticity and frequently resisted, but Leidner found it was more usual for them to adapt. Insurance agents, on the other hand, generally accepted the company’s direction and felt it helped them do their work. These findings produced a strain of unease about the societal consequences of unresisted emotional routinization, causing Leidner to ask in her conclusion whether these disruptions of the ground rules that have long governed interaction will change “the character of relations among people in and out of the marketplace.” The possibility worried her. Fast Food, Fast Talk ends with an expression of anxiety about the precarious moral fate of the self on its journey through life. “We may wonder,” she wrote, “whether civility, trust, and personal trust and integrity can be written into scripts.”
Jerry Jacobs, her longtime colleague at Penn, reflected that “I often refer to Robin’s ideas about the triangular relationship between owners, workers, and customers in the context of what she called ‘interactive service work.’ Her insights seem more relevant than ever as machines are introduced in places where human interaction prevailed until recently.” Fast Food, Fast Talk has often been praised as pathbreaking, and in 1994 it received the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work. It has been cited more than 2,500 times.
Robin Leidner grew up on Long Island, graduated from Harvard University with a BA in sociology in 1980, and resumed work as an actor and playwright with the Rhode Island Feminist Theater before starting graduate work at Northwestern University, finishing in 1988 and accepting a job at Penn. She was a dedicated playgoer and an enthusiast of foreign travel. Leidner had an irrepressible creative spirit: she was the author of satirical songs and of witty and beautifully designed Groundhog’s Day cards, which many friends here and abroad will now miss. She is survived by her mother, Marilyn (Maggie) Leidner; her brother, Michael Leidner; her sister-in-law, Beth Leidner; her nephew, Destin Leidner; and her partner of many years, the sociologist Sam Kaplan.
Samuel W. Kaplan, retired
1946–2022
A founding figure in gay studies, sociologist Ken Plummer’s writings on the subject were appreciated across the world, as were his contributions on a wide variety of other scholarly topics. As part of a prodigious output, he created (in 1996) the journal Sexualities, a title reflecting the plural nature of human affection and capacities. It continues bringing together sociological contributions with complementary efforts in anthropology, literature, gender, geography, history, and legal studies.
Starting with his graduate work at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Plummer joined with the likes of Paul Rock and Stan Cohen to enlarge the so-called deviancy paradigm. In completing his first book, Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Account (Routledge 1975), he came to advocate sexuality as linked into larger social and cultural structures, beyond the practices of any given grouping. Laying the groundwork, avant la lettre, for what was to become the arena of “queer,” he took up a wide range of macro topics as they grew out of micro concerns. He called for a benevolent “cosmopolitanism,” relying on “hope and the humanist imagination” to enhance inclusions. Sexuality, as with other human experience, was not topic, but teacher.
No naïf to the task, Plummer was aware of collisions. He knew the dilemmas of letting-it-be versus standing for justice. He did not pretend to solve the great problems of humankind, only to play a part in their clarification. His concepts—such as “intimate citizenship” and “critical humanism”—grappled with predicaments by taking them to a higher (and more informed) level.
Plummer wrote with engaging directness; his print publications came to about 200 in number and have been translated into many languages. He authored volumes on symbolic interaction and qualitative methods, as well as the general content of sociology. His introductory text, Sociology: A Global Introduction, ran through five editions (John Macionis, coauthor); he edited the four-volume set on American sociology, The Chicago School, Critical Assessments (Routledge 1997). He also leaves behind an extraordinary personal website of discussions, clarifications, tips, and provocations. Oh yes, along the way, he had a liver transplant (in 2007)—a two-and-a-half-year ordeal about which he also wrote at length (his “illness narrative”). Recovering, he wrote still more books, taught himself to play the piano, adjusted his puddings, and enjoyed long country ambles.
Ken Plummer walked the walk. Having pioneered in legitimating same sex-unions in the UK (not without some bravery), he had his own 40-year civil partnership with his “bestest friend,” Everard Longland. Everard bestowed the kind of meticulous care that alone could have kept Plummer going. At the same time, Plummer remained deeply tied to traditional family kin: his brother, Geoffrey; sister-in-law, Stephanie; and nephew, Jon, a physician who helped supervise his medical care.
Like the musicals he admired—especially Sondheim’s, which he said had “deep affinity” with sociology—Plummer was humanely discerning. However much at times he may have been disappointed in events of the world, or the frailties of his own body, hope and persistence pulled him through. His optimism, like his mindful realism, was fundamental and boundless.
Harvey Molotch, New York University and University of California-Santa Barbara; Peter Nardi, Pitzer College
