News from Jan Lin '83

"Greetings from a class of '83 graduate who is quite thrilled to reconnect with the Williams AnthSoc community and learn about faculty/student work, travels, and gastronomical festivities! Here is my personal update. I obtained a contract major in Anthropology (the major wasn't official yet). Gillian Feeley-Harnik was chair of the program at the time and Louis Lindsay (Political Science) supervised my senior thesis on Racial Conflict in Britain. I went on to the London School of Economics to pursue a master's degree in sociology and returned to the U.S., where I found a job doing evaluation research with the Division of Employment Services in Boston. I spent over two years writing reports based on database work and field visits to declining mill towns (such as North Adams) throughout Massachusetts. Then I moved to New York City to start a Ph.D. in sociology at the New School for Social Research, where I was trained in methods applying concepts of globalization to community and urban studies. I did my fieldwork in New York's Chinatown and Lower East Side. After finishing my degree, I taught three years at the University of Houston and four years at Amherst College. I'm now an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles. I'm pleased to be in L.A., which I regard as an intriguing research and teaching laboratory. I teach and publish in the areas of globalization, community/urban sociology, race and ethnic studies, and Asian American studies. I have published a book titled Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). [See cover left] I also have published a number of articles, the most recent of which is "A Globalization and the Revalorizing of Ethnic Places in Immigration Gateway Cities," Urban Affairs Review 34, 2 (November 1998): 313-339. I'm available to communicate with any students interested in my academic areas or research on Los Angeles."

-- Jan Lin, Sociology Department, Occidental College 1600 Campus Rd. Los Angeles, CA 90041-3314, Email: jlin@oxy.edu