Congratulations to David Cort who received a grant from the Social Science Research Council to support the development of his dissertation project on the intergenerational and contextual processes affecting immigrants socioeconomic attainment.

2004 ASA Student Paper Award 

This year’s Student Paper Award went to Sarah Burgard for her paper “Does Race Matter?  Children’s Height in Brazil and South Africa,” published in November 2002 issue of Demography.  Sarah received her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2003, and is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan.  Sarah will join the faculty at the University of Michigan in the Sociology Department following her fellowship.  The Student Paper Award committee was chaired by Peter Brandon (University of Massachusetts) and included Leah VanWey (Indiana University) and Sarah Curran (Princeton University).

ASA Plans for the Coming Year.  Incoming Chair, Anne Pebley, has planned an exciting program for the 2005 annual meetings that is posted on our web site.  The 2005 annual meetings in Philadelphia represent the ASA Centennial Celebration, and will focus activities on centennial themes.  We anticipate Population Science and the accomplishments of population scholars will be showcased during the Centennial meetings in various special sessions.  For the coming years, we have identified the following priorities that will guide Population Section activities within the ASA: student involvement in the Section, the importance of training in population science, and mentoring junior scholars within our field.  The Section is in good hands under the current leadership who will pursue these priorities.

For an abstract of Sarah's paper and to view the ASA Newsletter in full, please click on title.

Cameron Campbell's new book is widely regarded as a major contribution to the historical analysis of population processes:

"Life Under Pressure Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900" by Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell and James Z. Lee

This highly original book -- the first in a series analyzing historical population behavior in Europe and Asia -- pioneers a new approach to the comparative analysis of societies in the past. Using techniques of event history analysis, the authors examine 100,000 life histories in 100 rural communities in Western Europe and Asia to analyze the demographic response to social and economic pressures. In doing so they challenge the accepted Eurocentric Malthusian view of population processes and demonstrate that population behavior has not been as uniform as previously thought -- that it has often been determined by human agency, particularly social structure and cultural practice. The authors examine the complex relationship between human behavior and social and economic environment, analyzing age, gender, family, kinship, social class and social organization, climate, food prices, and real wages to compare mortality responses to adversity. Their research at the individual, household, and community levels challenges the previously accepted characterizations of social and economic behavior in Europe and Asia in the past. The originality of the analysis as well as the geographic breadth and historical depth of the data make Life Under Pressure a significant advance in the field of historical demography.

Tommy Bengtsson is at Lund University

Cameron Campbell is at UCLA

James Lee is at the University of Michigan