Staff Name: Elizabeth Stassinos

  
Title: Associate Professor                       
Office Location: MOD Building, Office #100D 
Phone: (413) 572-5731
E-Mail Address: estassinos@wsc.ma.edu

Biography
Elizabeth Stassinos is an anthropologist from the University of Virginia (1998) who studies deviance and cross-cultural and interdisciplinary "anomie."  She writes articles on the rehabilitative value of educational (creative writing) programs for prison inmates and has volunteered as an observer/facilitator in three ten-week prison seminars during 2006 at  the Ludlow Minimum Pre-Release Facility for "Voices from Inside," a prison outreach group affiliated with and trained by Amherst Writers and Artists.  Her anthropological work includes essays on the study of deviance by Boasian anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the "culture and personality" theorists who began the study of cross-cultural "deviants" and how the person who inhabits this social role has a unique critical perspective on their culture's values and norms.

She teaches Introduction to Criminal Justice, Theories of Crime, Corrections and upper level courses on Crime and Culture (Deviance, Subcultures of Violence and Drug Abuse) and Corrections (Prisons of the Body, Mind and Society) as well as special topics courses that cross list with Multicultural and Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, English and Communications (Terrorism and Communications:  The reciprocal relationship between the media and terrorist ideology).  Her recent areas of inquiry include Agnew's social strain theory inspired work on "storylines of crime," Goffman's "stigma" in prisons and "total institutions" as described in inmates' creative writings and Lacanian analysis applied to American cultural "anomie."

If you have any questions for Professor Stassinos, please feel free to write.