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Mary Alice Haddad joined the faculty in the
Government Department and East Asian Studies Program as an assistant
professor in June 2004.
Haddad, a native of Washington, D.C., completed her undergraduate work at
Amherst College and earned a Ph.D at the University of Washington in
Seattle. Her dissertation, "Creating Citizens: Volunteers and Civil Society,
Japan in Comparative Perspective,” was about civil society in Japan. Her
primary area of research is comparative civil society, with a focus on
Japan.
“I am especially
interested in traditional organizations like neighborhood associations and
volunteer fire departments that have largely been overlooked by other
scholars,” she says.
Haddad taught Japanese
politics this past fall and is developing a course in Chinese politics that
she expects to teach in 2006.
Her
current research includes an examination of the ways traditional Japanese civic
organizations such as neighborhood associations, which were
instruments of social control used by the fascist state to manipulate the
people, have become institutions of democratic accountability now used by
citizens to lobby the government.
Haddad is the author
of a journal article “Community Determinants of Volunteer Participation: The
Case of Japan” published in “Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Research” 33:3,
September 2004 and a book review “The Voluntary and Non-Profit Sector in
Japan” published in “Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Research” 33:2, June
2004. She is working on a manuscript titled “Performing Their Civic Duty:
Voluntary Participation in the US and Japan in Comparative Perspective.”
Haddad said she is
very committed to liberal arts education, and that’s among the reasons she
came to Wesleyan.
“I was also attracted
to the ways that Wesleyan promotes both teaching and scholarship among its
faculty, without privileging one over the other,” she says.
Haddad lives in
Middletown with her husband Rami. She enjoys sports, outdoor activities and
pottery. Her first child is due May 3.
“May 3rd is the last
day of class, so people can see me waddle around campus this semester as I
grow increasingly round,” she says. |
