Thomas Cushman is professor of sociology at Wellesley College where he teaches courses in social theory, comparative sociology, human rights, international justice, and war and peace. He has been a member of the faculty since 1989 and held the Whitehead Associate Professor Chair in Critical Thought from 1999 to 2001. He is the Director of the Human Rights Concentration in the Department of Sociology.
Professor Cushman earned a B.A. degree at St. Michael's College, Vermont, in 1981. He earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia in 1983 and 1987.
He is the editor of a collection of essays featuring prominent liberal writers, academics, and political figures who supported the Iraq war on humanitarian grounds. It is entitled A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, published by the University of California Press in July 2005 (see http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10415.html).
He also has written a book on war, ethics and the war in Iraq titled Human Rights in the 'War on Terror' (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Cushman has published widely in the areas of theoretical sociology, the sociology of knowledge, Russian and East European societies, countercultures, patriotism, genocide, international law, human rights and humanitarian intervention, with particular reference to the wars in Bosnia and Iraq. His book, Notes From Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia (SUNY Press, 1996) focuses on the social organization of musical culture in Russia and the relationships between capitalism and culture in post-communist social contexts. He is co-editor of an edited volume entitled This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York University Press, 1996) and author of a monograph entitled Critical Theory and the War in Bosnia and Croatia (University of Washington, 1997). He was the principal organizer of the George Orwell Centenary Conference, a gathering of leading scholars and writers to discuss Orwell's continuing influence, held at Wellesley College in May 2003, the proceedings of which appeared in an edited volume entitled George Orwell into The Twentieth Century (Paradigm Press, 2005)
Cushman is the founding and has been the editor of Human Rights Review and founding editor and has been the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Human Rights, an international quarterly journal. He was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow in 2002 and a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar Academic Core Session on International Law and Human Rights. In 2004, Cushman became a faculty associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University.
He is consulted frequently by the press on issues pertaining to human rights and global social movements, on issues in media studies and popular culture, human rights, genocide, and, especially, ethical and legal arguments for the war in Iraq and Western responses to the war in Iraq. In addition, he has offered numerous guest lectures on these topics locally and internationally.
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Profile last updated: 3/08