Anthropologist Meredith Small to Speak Here

Meredith Small - photo courtesy Cornell Chronicle

The University of Rochester welcomes anthropologist Meredith Small on April 11 at 3:00 p.m. in the Welles Brown Room at the Rush Rhees Library. The event, organized by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, is co-sponsored by the Warner School.

Small, a professor of anthropology at Cornell University, will speak on "The Natural History of Babies," which is based on her 1998-publication Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent (Anchor Books, 1998).

Small has dedicated herself to investigating, from an anthropological perspective, the line we trace between biology and culture. She works comparatively across cultures, as well as with theories of evolution, psychological experiments, and biomedical data, to analyze how human societies organize themselves, for example, by looking at the birthing process, or at the rearing of children.

The event is free and open to the public.