Lecture: Jennifer Pierce, University of Minnesota

Jennifer L. Pierce is a Professor in the Department of American Studies, a Paul Frenzel Endowed Chair in the College of Liberal Arts, and a former director of the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.  She also holds affiliated status with the Departments of Sociology; Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies (GWSS); and the Law School.  Pierce is a recipient of a residential fellowship from the Rockefeller Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy and numerous grants and fellowships for her research.  She has served on a number of editorial boards for academic journals such as Contemporary Sociology, Gender & Society, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Qualitative Sociology, and she was the faculty chair for the faculty editorial board of the University of Minnesota Press.  Her research has followed two related trajectories, one in the area of inequality in workplace organizations and several collaborative projects developing aspects of her methodological expertise in ethnographic and oral history research.  Her most recent books include Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action (Stanford University Press, 2012) and Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Cornell University Press, 2008) with M.J. Maynes and Barbara Laslett.  She is also the member of the LGBT Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota, an editorial collaborative that produced the book, Queer Twin Cities (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).  She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in Sociology.