Thursday, January 08, 2009

What is Kathleen M. Blee reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Kathleen M. Blee, Distinguished Professor & Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Her entry begins:
I just finished Kwame Anthony Appiah’s terrific book, Experiments in Ethics (2008, Harvard University Press) which explores when people behave in accord with their sense of morality and when they do not. What I found particularly valuable is his distinction between an honest person and a person that behaves honestly across a range of circumstances. Too often....[read on]
Kathleen Blee's books include Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement and Women of The Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, now available in paperback with a new preface.

About Women of the Klan, from the publisher:
Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.
Learn more about Kathleen Blee's teaching and research at her faculty webpage.

Writers Read: Kathleen M. Blee.

--Marshal Zeringue