Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Charles Moskos Visiting Professor Department of Sociology Areas of Interest:  Sociology of War and Violence, Sociology of Culture, Discourse Analysis

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Robin Wagner-Pacifici is the Charles Moskos Visiting Professor of Sociology for the Fall, 2007 Quarter.  She is the author of The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End (Chicago, 2005), as well as Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (Cambridge, 2000), which won the 2001 Culture Section of the American Sociological Association's Best Book Award.  Her work analyzes violent events, focusing on the language and images by way of which these events are accomplished, represented and managed.  The Art of Surrender analyzes the conventions and ceremonies of military surrenders as former antagonists quit the violence of war and resume pacified relations.  The book performs its analysis by exploring surrender documents, history paintings, photo-journalism and other media that make peace happen.  Theorizing the Standoff examines Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Republic of Texas and other clashes between anti-system groups and authorities; two earlier works, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs. MOVE and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama focused, respectively on the 1985 MOVE disaster in Philadelphia and the kidnapping of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978.  Major current projects include analyzing the recent transformation in the conception of “national defense” in the United States, and developing a theoretical framework for analyzing the multi-genre life of events. She received her B.A. from Brown University in 1976 with a concentration in Comparative Literature, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.

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