Melanie Heath , Ph.D.
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Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Sociology, MS-28
Office: SH 370 |
Curriculum Vitae: PDF
Courses:
Spring 2008: SOCI 302 The Global Politics of Family and Sexuality
Areas of Interest
- Gender and sexuality
- Social inequality
- Sociology of culture
- Marriage and family
- Religion
- Qualitative research methods
Research Interests
Dr. Heath's primary research interests focus on cultural, political, and religious conflicts over transformations in gender, sexuality, and family on a local and global scale. Studying groups who organize against societal transformation, her research provides new insight into the power dynamics that link cultural uncertainties to political, economic, and global forces, and are necessarily contradictory and unstable in their effects. Her book, One Marriage Under God: Defense of Marriage Actions in Middle America, is the first ethnography to examine contemporary American marriage promotion politics on the ground. Her future research is a comparative historical analysis of Canadian, French, and U.S. regulation of polygamous marriage, an outlawed, secretive family form that one Christian evangelical polygamous organization recently called the next “civil-rights battle.”
Biography
Dr. Heath received her Ph.D. in Sociology and certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Southern California in November 2006. She has received numerous grants and awards for her research, including a dissertation grant from the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California and was selected as a finalist for the W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2004.
Recent Publications
- Heath, Melanie. One Marriage Under God: Defense of Marriage Actions in Middle America (under contract with New York University Press)..
- Heath, Melanie. 2007. “Fighting for [One-Man, One-Woman] Marriage: Marriage Promotion Conservative Gender Norms, and Unruly Outcomes.” Under review at Gender & Society.
- Heath, Melanie. 2005. "Matrimony, American-Style: Losing Sight of Shifts in Kinship and Family." Feminist Theory 6:355-65.
- Heath, Melanie. 2003. "Soft-Boiled Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender and Racial Ideologies in the Promise Keepers Movement." Gender & Society 17: 423-44.
- Heath, Melanie and Judith Stacey. 2002. "Review Essay: Transatlantic Family Travail." American Journal of Sociology 108: 658-68.