1983

Larry Hajime Shinagawa received his doctorate in 1994 from the University of California at Berkeley in Sociology. He is the Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College. Formerly, he was the longstanding Chair of the Department of American Multi-Cultural Studies and the Departments of Ethnic Studies at Sonoma State University. He is an acknowledged authority on research and methodology in race relations and Asian American Studies and a former director of the California State University Census Information Center.

My dissertation compared ethical behavior at two different types of boarding schools. As soon as my fieldwork at the schools was finished, I married a Swiss mathematician, Peter Stucker, and moved to Bern and here we still are, together with our son Thomas (born 1993). I wrote my dissertation in Bern and then turned it into a book, Practicing Virtues: Moral Traditions at Quaker and Military Boarding Schools, while working as a teaching assistant at the University of Bern sociology institute.

In the Berkeley sociology department, I found my intellectual home. I was drawn to Berkeley in part because it was teaming with smart, creative colleagues from the editorial collective of Socialist Review, and in part because it was far and away the best place to study historical sociology from a feminist perspective.

I arrived at Berkeley in the early 1980s, when many of us wanted to be writers, teachers, and activists rather than "professional sociologists."   The department offered a friendly home for the ambivalent and the eccentric. I entered wondering where the program would take me, and ended up becoming socialized into the academic milieu, or at least Berkeley's version of it.