麻豆传媒

Professor Hertz has taught at Wellesley College for 35 years in both the sociology and women鈥檚 and gender studies departments. She teaches courses on the contemporary reproduction, changing families and social inequalities, global families and social policies, the social construction of gender, and women鈥檚 leadership at work.  She also teaches a first year seminar on 鈥淭he Body.鈥� Hertz believes that working independently and individually with students is one of the hallmarks of a small college and her favorite way of teaching and sharing knowledge.  She always has undergraduate research assistants on her projects.

Hertz is known for her research on the intersection of families, work and gender. For the past 25 years, she has focused on the emergence of new family forms and how they expand our understanding of kinship. She is especially interested in how the Internet is revolutionizing the choices people make as they enter into third-party reproduction arrangements (e.g. sperm and egg donor use) and also how the Internet has become a site of new possibilities for connection between genetic relatives.   Her 2006 book, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice captured popular attention with its finding that the age-old desire for motherhood was in fact reinforced by new scientific advances in reproduction. Her new book, Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings and the Creation of New Kin, with her coauthor Margaret K. Nelson, examines the contemporary interplay of genetics, social interaction, and culture expectations in the formation of web-based donor sibling kin groups. A new set of complexities emerge as donor siblings attempt to expand our understanding of kinship. (Oxford University Press 2019). 

She continues her focus on how social inequality at home and in the workplace shape the experiences of women and men. Her first book, More Equal than Others: Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages and also Working Families (edited with Nancy Marshall) address inequalities that persist between spouses and within the broader economy and how people attempt to resolve them.   Most recently, she is interested in the pivotal moments that influence the behavior of women as leaders and how they stretch their thinking about what is possible, often resisting and productively 鈥渂reaking rules.鈥�

Hertz has had a long-standing interest in social science methodology. This includes new conventions in data collection and ethnographic writing. For example, Random Families  presents an innovative way to study donor sibling networks. In this research the researchers crisscrossed the U.S. in order to gather in-person interviews and technology based interviews with over 350 parents, children and sometimes the children鈥檚 donor who are genetically related. In other books and articles she addresses issues of reflexivity and voice as well as studies of elites.  In addition, she has edited several volumes about how social scientist autobiographical accounts influence their research. She is the former editor of Qualitative Sociology.

Hertz received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Most recently she has held appointments at Harvard鈥檚 Law School in the Petrie-Flem Center and at the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland. Most recently the National Science Foundation and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation have funded her research.

She is frequently quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, 麻豆传媒week, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe. She appears in the broadcast media commenting on social problems for local news specials.

I came to Wellesley straight out of my PhD program in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1993 to develop courses in Asian American women's and gender studies鈥攚hich remains my personal, intellectual, and theoretical passion. 
 
My research and teaching have long engaged with questions of the representation of Asian American women from the silent film era to the pop culture phenomenon known as #AsianAugust 2019.  My first two books, Imagining Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NYU Press, 2004) and Following Her Own Road: Min茅 Okubo (University of Washington Press 2008) focus on the gendered legacy of wartime Japanese American internment camp experience in art, culture, and historical American memory.
 
More recently, I spent eight years doing archival research on Japanese women and photography that was a pure labor of love. Shadow Traces examines visual archives of four groups of Japanese/American women from the early to mid-twentieth century in America. My analyses include photographs of indigenous Japanese Ainu women at the 1904 St. Louis World鈥檚 Fair, picture brides at the turn of the century, photographs of the incarceration of the Japanese-American population during WWII, and a postwar picture album kept by my own Japanese war bride mother. My study builds a case for understanding the influential role of photographic archives in shaping Asian/American women鈥檚 history.
 
When people ask me, 鈥淲hat do you teach?鈥� I enjoy confounding them with my long and eclectic list of courses that include: Elvis Presley, Techno-Orientalism, Asian Women in Film, and Rainbow Cowboys and Cowgirls (a multicultural approach to the history of the American West). Right now, I鈥檓 in the early stages of planning a new interdisciplinary course that will be called 鈥淲omen and Horses.鈥�
 
Twenty-three years ago, my colleague, good friend (and apparently a prophet), Geeta Patel said, 鈥淐reef, you really need to develop a research project on horses.鈥� I remember asking her at the time, 鈥渂ut what would that even look like?鈥�  I had no idea that it would take me two decades to launch myself headlong into the world of sacred Lakota horse rides and communities in the Dakotas. Since I started this journey in 2013, I have never looked back.  These days, I literally follow the change of seasons according to the schedule of sacred Lakota prayer rides I鈥檝e been privileged to support and participate on that include The Future Generations Ride (formerly known as The Chief Big Foot Ride) to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the Victory Ride to commemorate the Battle at Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) in Montana, the Dakota 38 Ride in Mankato, Minnesota, and the recent ride to Fort Laramie, Wyoming to observe the 150 year anniversary of the signing of the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty.
 
My hope is that by working in partnership with my Lakota friends, we can produce some invaluable documentation of these rides that can be shared in public form鈥攁s podcasts, photo-essays, and as a book that can be used for teaching Native youth about this rich history and legacy.