Biography

Kathryn Cramer Brownell has been selected to receive the 2023 Lu Ann Aday Award, which recognizes a Purdue University faculty member who has made a major impact in the field of the humanities and social sciences.

Brownell, associate professor of history and director of graduate education for the Department of History, is recognized internationally as a leader in the fields of political history as well as policy and media history. She is the author of two nationally acclaimed books, “Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life,” and the recently published, “24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America.”

“Dr. Brownell’s record reflects important, field-expanding contributions to U.S. political history and modern American history more broadly,” said Margaret O’Mara, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American History at the University of Washington, in nominating Brownell for the award. “Her scholarship is of the highest quality, rigorous in its research and generative in its interventions; and her public engagement and professional leadership has been extraordinary.”

A Purdue faculty member since 2013, Brownell is cofounder and leader of high-impact projects that are bridging the gap between scholarly and public audiences including the “Made by History” opinion section (previously housed at The Washington Post and now at TIME magazine), which has received over 47 million page views and 36 million unique visitors online. She also leads the biennial American Political History Conference. Currently, she is working on a third book about the politics of scandal in modern America as well as a new textbook on the American presidency.

Among many accolades, Brownell received three professional awards in 2022 alone: Purdue’s Trailblazer Award, given to faculty within the Purdue libraries and the colleges of liberal arts and health and human sciences whose recent pioneering and innovative research has made a significant impact within their disciplines; the Friend of History Award from the Organization of American Historians for historical research and public presentation of American history; and the College of Liberal Arts’ Excellence in Discovery and Creative Endeavors Award, which recognizes the quality, impact, breadth and reach of discovery activities.

“I am thrilled and deeply honored to receive this award,” Brownell said of the Aday honor. “It would not be possible without support from my colleagues at Purdue, especially in the Department of History, the Brian Lamb School of Communication, and the Purdue Policy Research Institute. I am also very grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with so many historians across the country to bring rigorous and relevant history to millions of people and make public scholarship a professional priority.”

Brownell adds that she hopes her ongoing work will help the public better navigate modern political and media landscapes that often are designed to distract and divide them.

“At a time in which the study of the past is frequently weaponized to serve various partisan and ideological agendas, I firmly believe that public engagement by scholars is essential to bring insights of empirically grounded historical research to better understand a range of contemporary political challenges and forge enlightened solutions.”

Abstract

Democracy and Technological Disruption: How the Past is Prologue
Is technology a boon or a threat to American democracy? That question percolates as deepfakes and disinformation abound and political division and discord intensify. It is common to blame twenty-first century technology—from social media to AI—for ushering in political polarization and media excess. And yet, such developments are rooted in political debates over how to structure and use the dominant medium of the twentieth century: television. From the 1960s through the 1990s, federal regulators, elected officials, and entrepreneurs engaged in a political battle over the future of cable television, a medium with tremendous democratic potential during the age of network broadcast television oligopolies. But this civic promise faded as political biases, self-interest, public pressures, and economic incentives combined to turn cable television into a medium designed to disrupt and divide Americans by tethering politics to profits. Today, the values that cable television brought to the political and media landscape—disruption, branding, targeting, fracturing—have become pillars of our modern information age. Understanding how we got here is essential to navigating this world and illuminating how new technology can enhance, rather than undermine, the democratic process.

Biography

Professor Ellen Ernst Kossek is an award-winning social scientist who helped advance the U.S. and international work-family-life research policy field. She is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor at the Krannert School of Management and the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network. She studies how work-life boundaries, work-life-family and diversity employment practices impact women’s workplace inclusion and career equality. A recent Stanford study rated her in the top 2% of top researchers to the business and management field. She teaches classes on leading management of diversity and inclusion and managing global organizational behavior and human resources.

Professor Kossek has organized a research-to-practice conference series on breaking bias to advance gender and diversity and an NSF workshop bringing together scholars on management and diversity on the organizational science of fostering work-life inclusion in universities. She has won many awards, including the Work-Life Legacy award for helping to build or advance the work-life movement; the Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award, for contributing breakthrough thinking to the work-family field; the Sage Scholarly achievement award from the Academy of Management’s Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division for advancing understanding of gender and diversity in organizations; and won and also been a multi-year finalist for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter award for work-family research excellence and a best paper award for research on diversity climate. Her research has been published in top academic and management journals and featured in national media outlets, including NPR, CNN, WSJ, Financial Times, and the Harvard Business Review.

Abstract

The Future of Work-Life Leadership and Flexibility
COVID-19 has increased awareness of the growing challenges in managing job, family, and personal responsibilities. In response, some employers create well-being initiatives to help and retain people. Yet more than wellness policies, yoga classes, or free healthy snacks, employers make two common errors. First, many overlook scientific evidence identifying supervisors as having the greatest impact on employees’ turnover and well-being. In fact, there is a 50% perceptual gap between managers’ and subordinates’ views of work-life support. Leadership development designed to increase family supportive supervisor behaviors can close that gap. Second, although the pandemic has shown flexible working can help employers maintain productivity, as I recently argued in the Harvard Business Review, many firms implement flexibility problematically. Common approaches are ad hoc work-life accommodation or 24-7 boundaryless working. Neither approach is sustainable. Evidence suggests a future need for a more balanced approach to flexibility that jointly helps people, profits, and society.

Biography

Jayson Lusk is a food and agricultural economist who studies what we eat and why we eat it. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University. He earned a BS in food technology from Texas Tech University in 1997 and a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University in 2000. He held previous faculty positions at Mississippi State University and Oklahoma State University, and worked as a visiting scholar with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.

Lusk has been interviewed and published editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Washington Post, and has appeared on numerous national network and cable television shows. Lusk has published more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including several of the most-cited papers in agricultural economics. He has authored six books, including “The Food Police” and “Unnaturally Delicious.” Lusk has received numerous awards, including the Borlaug Communication Award from the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. He currently serves on the executive committee of the USDA National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education and Economics Advisory Board, and has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. Lusk is a fellow and past president of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

Abstract

Food Policy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Food policy has emerged as an important area of inquiry as politicians, regulators and activists attempt to confront the conflicting challenges of obesity and hunger, the environmental and animal welfare impacts of food production, the globalization and concentration of agricultural production and food manufacturing, and increased demands for new food quality attributes. In his lecture, Lusk will tie together several streams of his research to explore when and which food policies fail to achieve their desired outcome, and what might be done to improve the way we eat.

Research Accomplishments

As a preeminent food and agricultural economist, Lusk is widely sought out by governments, private industry and media. For his research insights on consumer demand for food, food policy and impacts of consumer acceptance of food and agricultural technologies is His research primarily centers on the following topics:

• Food Policy: Although food and agricultural policies are often motivated by noble intentions, economic analysis provides a framework for estimating consequences and understanding tradeoffs. Lusk has analyzed the consequences of numerous policies such as impacts of food labels, bans on controversial agricultural technologies, food assistance programs, fat and soda taxes, crop insurance subsidies and animal welfare laws.
• Emerging Food Issues: Food preferences and technologies are constantly evolving, and as such, much of Lusk’s research has focused on providing economic analysis and insight into consumer preferences for emerging food issues. His work has been on the cutting edge of emerging issues such as animal welfare, biotechnology, cloning, nanotechnology, growth promotants, local foods, lab-grown meat and food insects.
• Consumer Behavior: Predicting consumers’ responses to food marketing and policy initiatives requires an understanding of why people do what they do, which means studying preferences for risk, time, fairness, social status and more. A key question driving much of Lusk’s research is, why do consumers say they will do one thing in a survey but do something entirely different when shopping in the grocery store? He has pioneered theories about the gap between intentions and behavior, and has developed methods to lessen hypothetical bias.
• Livestock and Meat Technology and Marketing: Animal agriculture represents the highest share of farm cash receipts, and as such, Lusk has focused much attention on livestock, poultry and meat marketing and the impacts of technologies on these sectors.
• Research Methods: Lusk has created and improved experimental, survey and statistical methods to better understand how consumers will react to food marketing and policy initiatives. He helped create new consumer research methods such as inferred valuation, incentive compatible conjoint, calibrated auction-conjoint, basked based choice experiments and calibrated choice experiments, and his work has led to further developments in best-worst scaling, choice experiments and experimental auctions.

Biography

Shelley M. MacDermid Wadsworth is a professor of human development and family studies and director of the Center for Families and the Military Family Research Institute. She joined the Purdue faculty in 1989 after completing her MBA, MS, and PhD in human development and family studies at Penn State University.

Her research focuses on links between work conditions and family life, with a special focus on military families. MacDermid Wadsworth has received grants from the National Institutes of Health, the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture, state governments, and numerous private philanthropies. She has served on federal advisory committees for the National Academy of Medicine and the Department of Defense, and has testified in Congress on multiple occasions regarding military and veteran families.

MacDermid Wadsworth has authored and co-authored over 100 articles, 37 book chapters, and made over 300 conference presentations nationally and internationally, including many invited, keynote, and plenary presentations.

At Purdue, MacDermid Wadsworth has been recognized with the Violet Haas, Women in Leadership, Faculty Engagement Fellow, and the Morrill Awards. Nationally, she is a fellow of the National Council on Family Relations, which recently recognized her with the Felix Berardo Scholarship award for mentoring. The Military Family Research Institute earned the Kellogg Award from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the Higher Education Civic Engagement Award from the Washington Center, and the Laura A. Wheeler Behavioral Health Champion Award from the U.S. Army National Guard.

Abstract

Military Families: At the Intersection of Science and Service
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, propelled the U.S. into the longest armed conflict in its history. Over 2.7 million service members, most with family responsibilities, have deployed overseas since then. This new generation of combat‐exposed veterans presents scientists with both opportunities and challenges. In her lecture, Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth will consider three questions:

• Why should scholars consider families in their research?
• What is the scientific importance of military families, and what can they teach us?
• How should scientists respond to times of war, and how can they maximize their impact?

Research Accomplishments

MacDermid Wadsworth has generated important insights about how involvement in work, family, and other roles relates to healthy human development and how workplace characteristics, policies, and practices affect workers and their families. Her studies of military families, among the first conducted during the current conflict, have examined the impact of military service and deployments on families.

Specifically, she and her collaborators have:

• Mapped trajectories of individuals and relationships functioning over the course of deployment cycles.
• Traced reverberations within intimate relationships of the impacts of deployment, revealing ways that partners “decouple” and “recouple” in response to separation.
• Documented connections between deployment experiences and parenting, such as changes in parent behavior and how families “stage-set” or “gatekeep” interactions with service members during deployment.
• Scrutinized systems of care to evaluate access, availability, and barriers
• for families.
• Built over the past decade a series of International Research Symposia on Military and Veteran families, which generated four edited volumes of research that included 185 contributors from seven countries in 38 disciplines or subdisciplines, which ultimately led to a book series edited by MacDermid Wadsworth.

Findings from her research are informing prevention and intervention strategies to minimize risk and maximize resilience among families, such as by identifying specific skills or supports that might help family members capitalize on their strengths and reduce the most important negative impacts of family separation and deployment.

Distinguished Lecture Video

Biography

Kenneth Ferraro is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the founding director of the Center on Aging and the Life Course at Purdue University.

Ferraro earned his PhD in sociology at the University of Akron and joined Purdue in 1990. He is the author of 120 peer-reviewed articles on health and aging, and his research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Institute on Aging. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the former editor of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

In 2018, Ferraro published “The Gerontological Imagination: An Integrative Paradigm of Aging.” Considered the first book of its kind to identify intellectual common ground among different disciplines studying aging, reviewers have called it a “signal contribution to the field.” The book won the 2018 Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America.

While at Purdue, Ferraro served 15 months as interim head of the Department of Sociology and four years as a resident scientist with the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging, part of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.

His mentorship of graduate students was recognized by the Gerontological Society of America with the 2011 Distinguished Mentor Award and by Purdue with the 2016 Provost’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentor. In 2014, he received the Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association.

Abstract

Frontiers in the Science of Aging
Recent breakthrough discoveries in the science of aging are transforming the way we think about growing older and are stimulating cross-disciplinary research to make the most effective use of the aging process.

In his talk, Ferraro will identify two notable discoveries:

• Early origins of adult health — how exposures during childhood have long-term consequences on adult health.
• Multidirectional change, including the possibility of reversing functional trajectories associated with growing older.

Both discoveries highlight the modifiability of the aging process and are core to the integrative paradigm he discusses in his book, “The Gerontological Imagination.”

Research Accomplishments

Ferraro is considered a pioneer in evidence-based research showing that misfortunes during childhood and adolescence substantially increase the risk of disease in later life, including heart disease and cancer. He also has theorized how social stratification unfolds over the life course. His cumulative inequality theory, which he has tested empirically, describes how developmental and demographic processes stratify life chances and choices.

Over the past decade, Ferraro and his collaborators have:

• Provided compelling evidence that negative exposures during childhood are pluripotent on adult health, raising the risk of multiple diseases, including cancer, stroke and osteoarthritis.
• Identified that the racial gap in health emerges early in life and persists, in part, due to differences in medical care during adulthood.
• Developed cumulative inequality theory to explicate how social stratification unfolds over the life course and influences health.
• Created an integrative paradigm for cross-disciplinary studies of aging, which are discussed in “The Gerontological Imagination.”

Evidence reveals that insults during childhood and adolescence substantially increase the risk of disease later in life. With support from the National Institute on Aging, Ferraro has shown the health consequences of early negative exposures, such as poverty and child abuse, and has demonstrated their influence decades later.

Biography

Michele R. Buzon is a professor in the Department of Anthropology. She came to Purdue University in 2007 as an assistant professor of anthropology. She was promoted to associate professor in 2010 and to professor in 2017.

She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology from Loyola University Chicago. She earned her master’s degree and PhD in anthropology, specializing in bioarchaeology, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining the Purdue faculty, she was an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta (Canada), working in the Department of Anthropology and the Radiogenic Isotope Facility. She previously taught in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Calgary.

Her research interests are in bioarchaeology, with a focus on paleopathology, biological relatedness and strontium isotope evidence for residential mobility in the ancient Nile Valley. She also has served as a bioarchaeological consultant on projects in the United States and Peru.

Buzon’s work has been published in the top publications for her discipline, including American Anthropologist, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Journal of Archaeological Science and International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. She serves as the Reviews Editor for the International Journal of Paleopathology. In 2014, she was named a Purdue University Faculty Scholar.

Abstract

Life and Death by the Nile: Tales from the Tombs of Tombos
Beginning about 1500 B.C., the New Kingdom Egyptian Empire expanded into its southern neighbor, Nubia, in search of resources such as gold and cattle. Over the next few hundred years, interactions between the ancient Egyptians and Nubians would include violent encounters, trade and exchange, political relationships and the establishment of interethnic communities. One Egyptian colonial community established in Nubia — Tombos in northern Sudan — spans the period from Egyptian expansion through the empire’s decline, allowing for rare perspective on this socio-political transition.

In her talk, Buzon will explore the processes of change and the consequences of contact for the people who once lived in Tombos. Evidence of disease stress, nutritional deficiencies, immigration from Egypt to Nubia and the biological relatedness between inhabitants will be presented. Osteobiographies of specific individuals from Tombos will be described to highlight how the rich archaeological record can be used to understand past societies.

Research Accomplishments

Professor Buzon is a leading researcher in bioarchaeology, making significant contributions using an interdisciplinary and contextual approach that incorporates several types of skeletal data with material remains from burials to reconstruct lives and deaths of people in the past.

Much of her research has focused on understanding the processes of change and consequences of contact between people who inhabited the ancient Nile River Valley of Egypt and Nubia during the New Kingdom Egyptian occupation of Nubia (approximately 1530-1070 B.C.), and through the later Nubian Napatan rule of Egypt (approximately 750-650 B.C.). Research highlights include:

• Established strontium isotope variability in the ancient Nile Valley.
• Determined temporal trends in immigration of Egyptian colonists into Nubia during the New Kingdom period using strontium isotope data.
• Demonstrated biological and cultural interaction at Tombos using craniometrics and mortuary analyses from New Kingdom to Napatan periods.
• Provided paleopathological evidence for biological resilience of ancient Nubians at Tombos — few signs of infectious disease, nutritional deficiencies, interpersonal violence and physical trauma.

Buzon and her interdisciplinary research teams use a combination of research methods to provide a window into disease stress and nutritional deficiencies. She explores biological connections between individuals and groups using cranial measurements and nonmetric traits. Through strontium isotope analysis, she demonstrates the presence of first-generation immigrants at ancient sites. Her work also integrates cultural and ethnic identity with biological markers via mortuary analyses of tomb types, burial rituals, artifacts and Egyptian writings.

She has examined groups within the study populations, including indigenous and immigrant, elite and non-elite, women and men, and adults and children. During her research on health and population dynamics, she has studied over 1,000 individuals from several ancient Nile Valley sites, curating more than 200 of them from the site of Tombos in her skeletal collection at Purdue.

Over the last 17 years, Buzon and Professor Stuart Tyson Smith, an Egyptologist and archaeologist, have used an interdisciplinary approach on her project at Tombos to understand how socio-political transitions affected different aspects of people’s lives during these periods of change. Through biological and isotopic evidence, her work has established the interaction and collaboration of Nubians and immigrant Egyptians at Tombos to produce a healthy community during the New Kingdom Egyptian colonial period. The community continued to thrive and influence the postcolonial and subsequent Napatan population.

As a result of her expertise in bioarchaeological methods, she has been involved in collaborative research outside of the Nile Valley, including isotopic and paleopathological analyses of sacrifice and decapitation in ancient Peru, the Gold Rush era, prehistoric burials in California and Illinois, and the transition to agriculture in the American Southwest. She has published several articles on bioarchaeology that are widely read and cited.