Neil J. Smelser

Neil J. Smelser
Harvard College, B.A., Social Relations, 1952
Oxford University, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, B.A. 1954; M.A. 1959
Harvard University, Ph.D., 1958.
San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, 1971

Neil Smelser is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.  He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, during the 1930s and 1940s as the middle child in a family of three boys.  After his time at Oxford, at the age of 26 he co-authored Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons, a renowned American sociologist.  He is a former president of the American Sociological Association.  He was also the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford from 1994 to 2001.   Professor Smelser is the author of over a dozen books, including The Theory of Collective Behavior.  His most current publication is The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys. It is a “very general study of taking leave from your daily circumstances and getting involved in something special.”  Travel continues to remain an important aspect of his life ever since he he hitchhiked all over Europe in his youth.

In which town in Missouri were you born?
Kahoka.  A small town in Clark County in the northeastern corner, very close to Iowa, Illinois, and the Mississippi River.

How would you describe your parents’ parenting style?
Background. They were both children of farm families in Missouri.  They were the only ones in each of their families that went away and received a college education.  They were people who were on their own ambitious.  They met at college, got married, and moved to Phoenix about the time I was born.

My mother was a kindly, patient, very independent woman who was very dedicated to her sons.  I would have to call her a very attentive mother, even though in our younger years she worked part-time as a substitute teacher.  When we were in adolescence, she resumed her interest in teaching and became a full-time teacher first at the elementary school level and then at the high school level teaching Latin and English.  I wouldn’t call her an effusive person.  She was very self-sufficient and she wasn’t  highly emotional.  Even though I’ve always felt her to be a warm, supportive, and loving person, her style was not in any way out of control, or extra-emotional.

My father was in many respects a more emotional man.  He was prone to expressing emotions, both positive and negative.  He was more the final authority in the family when it came to discipline.  He was the law.  He wasn’t the exclusive disciplinarian, but more inclined than my mother.  I always remember my father  as having a stern side to his life.  At the same time, I never doubted how much he loved his sons.  He was always supportive of us in anything we did.  I once told him when I was in fourth grade of a question that the homeroom teacher had asked of the class.  She asked what is it about your parents that you like most of all.  I remember giving the answer that I appreciated most of all the independence my parents extended to me and I felt I had the freedom to become what I wanted to be.  I came home from school on that very day and told my parents what I had said.  They were obviously very moved and very positive.  This rang a really wonderful bell with them.

Jeremy Dauber

Jeremy Dauber
Harvard University, A.B., Social Studies, 1995
University of Oxford, D. Phil., Yiddish Studies, 1999

Jeremy Dauber grew up in Northern New Jersey, the oldest of three boys.  Before heading to college, he studied abroad for a year at a yeshiva in Israel.  He is currently an associate professor in the Germanic Languages and Literatures department at Columbia University, where he is also the director of the Yiddish studies program and director of the university’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.  He has written Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature and co-edited and co-translated (with Joel Berkowitz) an anthology called Landmark Yiddish Plays.  He has also written a television and movie review column for the Christian Science Monitor.

We spoke in August 2008 during the Beijing Summer Olympics.

Barnaby Marsh

Barnaby Marsh
Cornell University, A.B. Summa cum laude,  Economics, Psychology, and International Affairs, 1996
University of Oxford, D. Phil., Zoology, 2000

Barnaby Marsh is the oldest of five children.  At an early age, he moved with his family from Pennsylvania to Alaska.  He spent most of his formative years growing up in the Alaskan wilderness near Denali National Park.  His parents home-schooled him and cultivated a problem-solving outlook.  He did not receive any formal educational training until he enrolled at Harvard for his freshman year.  After a year at Harvard, he transferred to Cornell, where he chose to take double course loads for the challenge and to get the most out of his undergraduate experience.  He currently works for the John Templeton Foundation as the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives.  He is also the Managing Director of the Templeton Philanthropic Leadership Network, defined as “a group of world leaders in business and philanthropy who aim to find innovative ways to address philanthropic challenges.” [link]

Carolyn Conner Seepersad

Carolyn Conner Seepersad
West Virginia University, B.S., Mechanical Engineering, 1996
University of Oxford, B.A., Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 1998
Georgia Institute of Technology, M.S., Mechanical Engineering, 2001
Georgia Institute of Technology, Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, 2004

Carolyn Conner Seepersad grew up in West Virginia, where she also attended college.  She was West Virginia University’s twenty-fifth Rhodes Scholar.  At an early age, she excelled in math and science.  She is currently an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Clyde Seepersad

Clyde Seepersad
University of the West Indies (Barbados), B.S., Accounting, 1996
University of Oxford, M.B.A., 1997
University of Oxford, M.Sc., Economics for Development, 1999

Clyde Seepersad grew up on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, the second child of an attorney and schoolteacher. He was one of two students from the Commonwealth Caribbean in 1996 to be awarded the Rhodes Scholarship. Professionally, he has worked at the Finance Ministry in Trinidad and Tobago and was a principal at the Boston Consulting Group. Most recently, he was a senior vice president at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Supplemental Publishers. He just started his own consulting firm in Austin, Texas.

Russ Feingold

Russ Feingold
University of Wisconsin-Madison, B.A., Political Science, 1975
University of Oxford, B.A., Jurisprudence, 1977, M.A., 2008
Harvard Law School, J.D., 1979

Russ Feingold is a United States Senator for the state of Wisconsin.  He was born and raised in Janesville, Wisconsin along with three siblings.  His father was a lawyer and his mother was an abstractor at the title company which Leon Feingold owned.  In his teens, his heroes were John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. whom he heard speak in Chicago in 1966.  In high school, he was on the championship-winning debate team. Although he was not the top student in school, he was still a very good student, whom others have described as being well-organized and disciplined.  After attending Harvard Law School, he returned to Wisconsin where he worked as an attorney in two private law firms in Madison until 1985.  His political career began when he became a Wisconsin state senator in 1982.  He was re-elected twice.  Then in 1992, he was first elected to the U.S. Senate, winning 53 to 47 percent against the incumbent Republican Bob Kasten.  Feingold is probably best known for co-sponsoring the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.  He also stands out as the only Senator to oppose the USA Patriot Act in 2001.  When not in Washington, D.C., he makes his home in Middleton, Wisconsin.

Elisabeth Köll

Elisabeth Köll
University of Bonn, Germany, 1984-86, Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, and Business Administration
Fudan University, Shanghai, China, 1988, B.A. equivalent, Chinese language and economic history
University of Bonn, Germany, 1992, M.A., Chinese Studies (major), Japanese Studies and Business Administration (minors)
University of Oxford, England, 1998, D. Phil., Modern Chinese History

Elisabeth Köll is a Rhodes Scholar from Germany, who has studied and researched extensively in China. She specializes in Chinese business and socio-economic history and is fluent in English and Chinese and proficient in Japanese.  From 1998 to 2007, she was taught modern Chinese business and social history at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.  In July 2008 she joined the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School as an associate professor with teaching assignments related to business history and doing business in China for the elective MBA curriculum and the doctoral program.

Dayne Walling

Dayne Walling
Michigan State University, 1996, B.A., Social Relations
University of Oxford, 1998, B.A., Modern History
University of London, 1999, M.A., Urban Affairs

Dayne Walling was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. In addition to winning a Rhodes Scholarship, he is also a recipient of a Truman scholarship. He has worked on the staff of Mayor Anthony Williams in Washington, D.C. and for the Urban Coalition and Ready for K in Minnesota. In 2006, he moved back to Flint. One year later, he ran for mayor. He lost by only 581 votes to the incumbent in the closest Flint mayoral race in 30 years. Despite his loss, he continues to focus on the challenges the city faces. He started a citizens group called Flint’s Future Now. He is also the founder of 21st Century Performance, a management consulting firm. He plans on running for office again.

Michael Cannon

Michael Cannon
Washington University, 1973, A.B., Economics
University of Oxford, 1975, B. Litt., Politics
Yale Law School, 1978, J.D.

Michael Cannon grew up in Peoria, Illinois, with one older brother. After graduating from law school, he began his career as a federal prosecutor of government corruption cases for the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division. He went on to work at several private law firms in Washington, DC. Then, in 1993 he returned to St. Louis, Missouri, where he had done his undergraduate studies at Washington University. He is currently the university’s Executive Vice Chancellor and General Counsel. He is also the uncle of Ben Cannon, who won a Rhodes Scholarship in 2000.

Maggie Little

Maggie Little
University of Iowa, 1983, B.A., Philosophy
University of Oxford, 1985, B.Phil., Philosophy
University of California Berkeley, 1994, Ph.D., Philosophy

Maggie Little grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, the youngest daughter of a computer consultant and an insurance executive.  She has one brother and a sister.  From on early age, she started asking the big questions about life.  Her curiosity led her to pursue the study of philosophy.  Most of her work has focused in some form or another on ethics.  She is currently an associate professor in Georgetown University’s philosophy department and a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a think-tank specializing in bioethics. She is also finishing a book entitled Intimate Duties:  Re-Thinking Abortion, the Law, and Morality.

Carlisle Ford Runge

Carlisle Ford Runge
University of North Carolina, 1974, B.A., American Studies
University of Oxford, 1977, M.A., Politics and Economics
University of Wisconsin, 1980, M.A., Agricultural Economics
University of Wisconsin, 1981, Ph.D., Agricultural Economics

Ford Runge grew up in Wisconsin with two younger sisters, a stepbrother, and a stepsister. He is currently a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law and Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. He also regularly contributes public opinion pieces that appear in the Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune, and the Financial Times. He also writes longer pieces. His most recent contribution is an article in Foreign Affairs called “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.” It is representative of the work he does, which is designed to get people’s attention.

Scott Bear Don’t Walk

Scott Bear Don’t Walk
University of Montana, 1993, B.A., Philosophy
University of Oxford, 1993-1994, Modern History
New York University, 2007, M.F.A., Creative Writing

Scott Bear Don’t Walk was born in Helena, Montana, but grew up mainly in Billings. He has one older brother and a younger sister. As the middle child, he describes himself as very diplomatic, careful, soft-spoken, wary, and pleasing. He is a member of the Crow tribe. His father, an attorney, has worked with various tribes throughout his career. His mother dedicates her time to work on American Indian health issues. He is the twenty-seventh Rhodes Scholar from the University of Montana. Recently, he completed a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at NYU, where he had the opportunity to work with writers Sharon Olds, Breyten Breytenbach, and Kimiko Hahn.  He is a published poet and his long-term goal is being a writer.  He is currently in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago at the Committee on Social Thought trying to fuse epic poetry and academics into something that matters on the reservation.

Jonathan Skinner

Jonathan Skinner
St. John’s College, 1991, B.A., Liberal Arts
University of Oxford, 1993, B.A., English Language & Literature
University College London, 1996, M.A., Translation Studies
State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005, Ph.D., English

Jonathan Skinner was born and raised in a classic nuclear family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has also lived in Mexico, England, Italy, and France. He is the author of a poetry collection called Political Cactus Poems and the editor of ecopoetics, a journal exploring creativity mainly in the written form and ecology. Currently, he is an environmental studies professor at Bates College in Maine. He teaches a freshman writing seminar that emphasizes experiential learning. His class included a climb of Mt. Adams in the Presidential Range in New Hampshire and a canoe float on the Androscoggin River. And when he’s at home, he has a view of a wild island populated with bald eagles.

Steven Umin

Steven Umin
Yale College, 1959, B.A., Modern Literature & Philosophy
Universty of Oxford, 1961, Bachelor of Medicine
Yale Law School, 1964, J.D.

Steven Umin grew up in the Bronx during the 1940s and 1950s as the eldest son of a lower middle class family. He has only one younger sister. He did his undergraduate studies at Yale, where he was ranked first in his class. He planned on becoming a doctor before deciding to pursue law. After law school, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart. Over the years, he has been involved in a wide variety of cases in civil and criminal litigation. He is currently a senior member at Epstein, Becker & Green in Washington, D.C. And since 2000, he has been a mediator for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. Besides making time for art, music, and friends, he also devotes himself to the fight against multiple sclerosis. He is a member of the board of the Multiple Sclerosis International Foundation in London, England, and the Sylvia Lawry Center in Munich, Germany.

David Satter

David Satter
University of Chicago, 1968, B.A., General Studies in the social sciences
University of Oxford, 1975, B. Litt., Political Philosophy

David Satter grew up in Chicago as the oldest of five children. He has one brother and three sisters. He is a journalist/author and a well-known Russia scholar. After his time at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship, he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and in 1976 became the Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He has written two books, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. His numerous articles and essays have been published in the Los Angeles Times, National Review, New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal. His first book, Age of Delirium, is also being made into a documentary film to be finished this year. In addition, he has made appearances on Russian television networks, CNN, C-Span, and the Charlie Rose Show. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Jonathan Blake

Jonathan Blake
Yale University, 1960, B.A., History
University of Oxford, 1962, B.A./M.A., Jurisprudence
Yale Law School, 1964, LL.B.

Jonathan Blake grew up in a small seaside town in New Jersey called Rumson. He is the eldest of three sons. He attended the school where his father was the headmaster and spent his high school years at Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Connecticut. He has been a communications lawyer at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. since 1964 when he started out as an associate. He remains physically active by playing in three to four tennis tournaments annually and since the first U.S. oil crisis in 1973, he’s been running to work. He has been described as one of the finest lawyers in America and “the most ethical person I can imagine in the law profession.”*

Tope Folarin

Oluwabusayo Temitope Folarin
Morehouse College, 2004, B.A., Political Science
University of Oxford, 2006, M.Sc., African Studies & M.Sc.,Comparative Social Policy

Oluwabusayo Folarin, or “Tope” as he likes to be called, was born in Ogden, Utah. He has four younger siblings-three brothers and a sister. At the age of 14, his family moved from Utah to Texas. Although he completed his undergraduate degree at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, he spent a year at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and a semester in South Africa studying at the University of Cape Town. He also worked for an NGO where he interviewed Parliament members about including anti-child prostitution laws within the South African constitution and aided in the development of HIV/AIDS training clinics for rural South Africans. During the summer of 2004, before heading to Oxford, he was a Galbraith Scholar dealing with issues of inequality and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He finished his studies at Oxford last summer and he now works for Google in London.

The first part of our exchange was conducted via email. We then continued the conversation by phone.

David Quammen

David Quammen
Yale University, 1970, B.A., Scholar of the House in English
University of Oxford, 1973, B. Litt., English

David Quammen is an award-winning writer, perhaps best known for his nature column called “Natural Acts” in Outside magazine from 1981 to 1995. His first novel, To Walk the Line, was published when he was 22 years old. He has authored three other works of fiction and seven non-fiction books, including Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, The Song of the Dodo, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. He is also a regularly contributing writer for National Geographic.

Below is the transcribed record of a verbal conversation. Neither David Quammen nor I have tried to make it read like a polished, fully grammatic piece of writing. It is what it is: human talk.

Faith Salie

Faith Salie
Harvard University, 1993, B.A., History and Literature
University of Oxford, 1995, M. Phil., Modern English Literature

Faith Salie was born in Boston, but grew up mainly in Atlanta, Georgia, the youngest of three children. At an early age, she found a love for theater. She attended Northwestern University for a year before transferring to Harvard, where she won the Jonathan Levy Award for most promising actor at the university. She had a brief stint on “Sex in the City” involving a gold lamé outfit and portrayed a genetically enhanced mutant on a couple of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” episodes. She has also done years of stand-up comedy and improv, including two seasons in the BRAVO sitcom, “Significant Others.” You can now find her hosting a public radio satirical news and entertainment show called “Fair Game” from Public Radio International.

Katherine Eban

Katherine Eban
Brown University, 1989, BA; English Literature with a minor in Creative Writing
University of Oxford, 1990, M. Phil., English Literature
University of East Anglia, 1991, M.A., Creative Writing

Katherine Eban grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She is the younger of two daughters. Her father practices and teaches law, but he is also a statistician. Her mother is a theater scholar and critic. Katherine is an investigative reporter focusing on public health and homeland security issues. Her work has appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and Vogue. In her first book, Dangerous Doses, published in 2005, she unveiled the spread of counterfeit prescription drugs in the American supply chain. Her most current piece appears in the July issue of Vanity Fair. In the article called “Rorschach and Awe”, she exposes the role of CIA-contracted psychologists in military interrogations and torture.