Joan Huber
Joan Huber served as the 79th President of the American Sociological Association. Her Presidential Address, entitled “Macro-Micro Links in Gender Stratification,” was delivered at the Association’s 1989 Annual Meeting in San Francisco,and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR February 1990, Vol 55 No 1, pp 1-9).
Upon her retirement in 1993, Huber donated her professional papers to the Archives at Pennsylvania State University. A finding aid for Huber’s papers is available online at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/FindingAids/huber.html. The Penn State Archives provided the following biographical sketch of Huber:
Joan Huber was born on October 17, 1925 in Bluffton, Ohio to Hallie Althaus and Lawrence Huber. Her father was an entomologist with the Agricultural Experiment Station in Wooster, Ohio, where they lived. Huber was influenced by her father’s education (Ph.D.), as well as the presence of a liberal arts college in the area. After graduating from high school in Wooster, she attended The Pennsylvania State University and earned her B.A. degree in German in 1945–completing the degree program in less than two years. Following graduation, Huber remained in Pennsylvania and married her first husband, Tony Rytina (with whom she had two children, Nancy and Steve). Between 1945 and 1947 Huber served as an instructor in the German Department at Penn State, and in 1947 she left the university to become a full-time housewife and volunteer. Huber enrolled in graduate school at Western Michigan University to pursue a master’s degree in sociology (1963) and subsequently earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1967.
Huber secured her first academic appointment as a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught from 1967 to 1971. In 1971, Huber married her second husband, William Form (Professor of Labor Studies), and both accepted positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Huber taught numerous courses at Illinois, including: Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Poverty, Social Stratification, and Introduction to Women’s Studies in the Social Sciences. She consequently served as director of the Women’s Studies Program (1978-1980), and Head of the Department of Sociology (1979-1983). In 1984 Huber and Form left the University of Illinois and secured new faculty positions at Ohio State University. In 1984 Huber left Illinois to become dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ohio State (1984-1992), Coordinating Dean of the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences (1986-1992), and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and University Provost (1992-1993). Form became a professor of Sociology.
Huber held executive positions in several professional sociological organizations. She served as president of Sociologists for Women in Society (1972-1974), the Midwest Sociological Society (1979-1980), and the American Sociological Association (1988-1989). Huber has also received recognition and awards for excellence in teaching and scholarship; she was the recipient of the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association in 1985. Huber served on numerous editorial review boards, research committees, and counseled many academic institutions on the development of their respective sociology departments. She published numerous scholarly books and articles, covering such subjects as social stratification and issues relating to race, class, and gender. Huber retired in 1993.
