Ayala Emmett Associate Professor Office: Lattimore 437, Telephone: (585) 275-8736 E-mail: AEMT@mail.rochester.edu CV | Courses | Publications | Research | Seeds For College

Professor Emmett received her B.A. from the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem Israel, in English Literature, Sociology, and Anthropology and
her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Rochester.
Professor Emmett's research interests include politics, gender, peace and
justice, medical anthropology and text analysis. The United States and
Israel have been her main geographic research areas. Her research in the
United States includes fieldwork at Strong Memorial Hospital focusing on
adolescent pregnancy and infant feeding patterns and among dual career
families. Her research on parenthood, work and gender was supported by the
National Institute of Mental Health. In 1990-91 and in 1993 she did
fieldwork in Israel on politics, gender and peace. She has published a
book, articles in edited volumes and journals and has edited two special
volumes.

Women in Black Peace Vigil, Jerusalem, 1990

Professor Emmett's book on Israeli politics and women's peace activism, Our Sister's Promised Land: Women, Politics and Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence, was supported by a grant from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and published by The University of Michigan Press in 1996. Her book was reissued in a paperback 2003 edition with a new, updated introductory chapter.

Professor Emmett's current research focuses on women and religion in America and the ways that the public square and secular ideas on gender, citizenship and justice have penetrated and affected faith communities.  She is doing fieldwork on Jewish women who in their synagogues take on traditionally religious male rituals, objects and roles; this research follows her earlier fieldwork among Presbyterian women ministers. Professor Emmett has widened her scholarly, publication, and teaching interests to include creative ethnography. She was the recipient of the 2000 Humanistic Anthropology Fiction Award for her story "Going to America Under the Jacaranda Tree." The story was published in Anthropology and Humanism in the June 2001 issue. Professor Emmett is currently revising her ethnographic novel, After the Disappearance, about the shocking disappearance of a beloved and well-known Israeli journalist in the 1950s.

Professor Emmett is the founder of Seeds for College, a university affiliated and community-based foundation with the goal of helping inner city minority children to successfully graduate from high school and awards them seed money to go to college. Professor Emmett is an Associate Editor of Sex Roles. She is the 2008 Chair of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Fiction Award.

Curriculum Vitae

Last modified: Tuesday, 04-Dec-2007 16:05:05 EST