Thomas Cushman
Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology
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Areas of teaching and research: theories of modernity; the sociology of knowledge, intellectuals, and ideology; individualism and individuality; dissent and freedom of expression; emotions and society; most recently, non-Western nondualist philosophies and their relation to Western social theory.
Thomas Cushman received his graduate training at The University of Virginia, where he received a PhD in Sociology (1987) with a concentration in sociological theory, political sociology, and Soviet and East European studies. He received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the US Department of Education for intensive Russian language training and was awarded a certificate in Soviet and East European Studies from the University of Virginia Center for Soviet and East European Studies. In 1987, he began teaching at The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Sociology, where he assisted in the formation of the university’s Center for Soviet and East European Studies before joining the Wellesley College Department of Sociology in 1989.
His publications include Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia (State University of New York Press, “Series in the Sociology of Culture”, 1995), based on intensive urban ethnographic fieldwork in St. Petersburg. The book was named as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Books in 1995; Critical Theory and the War in Bosnia and Croatia (University of Washington, Henry Jackson School of International Affairs, 1997); George Orwell: Into the 21st Century, with John Rodden (Paradigm, 2005); A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, editor (University of California Press, 2005); Terror, Iraq and the Left: Christopher Hitchens and His Critics, edited with Simon Cottee (New York University Press, 2008); and The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity, edited with Thomas Brudholm (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Human Rights (2011), a standard reference work in the field, which presents 60 original essays from leading scholars across the world and across the disciplines on all areas of human rights. He was book series editor for “Post-Communist Cultural Studies” and “Essays on Human Rights”, both with Pennsylvania State University Press. In 2000, he founded The Journal of Human Rights, served as its first Editor-in-Chief until 2005 and continues as Editor-at-Large.
He received grants from The National Science Foundation to train in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language and to lead an extensive interview project on interethnic trust and mistrust in post-war Sarajevo. He published findings in Bosnian language journals and advised Bosnian leaders on projects to rebuild post-war society in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He published and spoke extensively in policy forums on the war and genocide against Bosnian Muslims and the indifference of Western liberal democracies and international organizations during the conflict. He organized internships for Wellesley students at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where they attended and studied war crimes trials of those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, including the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
He has been a Fellow of the Harvard Russian Research Center; an Associate of the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights; Visiting Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University; Visiting Professor of Law, School of the Humanities, at Birkbeck College, University of London; Honorary Professor in the Social Sciences at The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa; and a Senior Research Fellow at The Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. He is a Faculty Fellow at The Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.
Throughout his career, he has been actively involved in bringing social science perspectives to the understanding of international and national public policy issues. He has given talks in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, worked with and advised UK political leaders on human rights issues during the Iraq war, and offered testimony to the U.S. Congress Committee on Foreign Relations on human rights issues.
Since coming to Wellesley in 1989, he has taken an active role in the effort to enhance the public sphere at Wellesley by bringing over 100 speakers across a wide range of topics to the College: national and international academics across the disciplines, leading political and public policy figures, human rights scholars, jurists and activists, writers, and journalists. In 2012, he founded The Freedom Project at Wellesley College, a program devoted to fostering pluralism, debate, and freedom of thought and expression at the College and organizing student internships with international organizations based in Oslo and London, dedicated to resistance against authoritarian regimes around the world. Under his direction, he initiated Wellesley College’s partnership with Scholars-at-Risk, an organization dedicated to protecting international scholars and the freedom to think, question, and share ideas. He served as the first director of The Freedom Project until 2018.
He is a Founding Member of The Academic Freedom Alliance, a non-partisan association of American scholars that supports academic freedom and freedom of expression in American higher education.
On July 24, 2019, The United States Commission on Civil Rights appointed Professor Cushman to a four-year term as a member of its Massachusetts Advisory Committee, producing reports on a variety of civil rights issues in the Commonwealth.
A full research and professional profile and courses taught at Wellesley at the links in the Wellesley College Sociology Department Website.
Courses offered in 2023-2024
SOC104: The Individual and Society (Spring, 2023; Fall 2023)
SOC 252: Emotions and Society (Fall, 2023)
SOC 260: Dissent and Freedom of Expression in the Modern World (Spring, 2024)
SOC 304: Modernity and Social Change (Spring, 2023; Spring, 2024)
Education
- B.A., Saint Michaels College
- M.A., University of Virginia-Main Campus
- Ph.D., University of Virginia-Main Campus
Current and upcoming courses
Courage and Conscience: Dissent and Freedom of Expression in The Modern World
SOC260
Freedom of expression is considered one of the most fundamental human rights. Why is this the case? Why are people willing to suffer, fight, and die and to protect the right of freedom of expression? Why is freedom of expression so dangerous to those with political and social power? How do powerful elites mobilize against dissent and dissidents? What is the role of charismatic individuals and freedom of expression in social change? This course examines sociological theories of communication and freedom of expression; the idea of “civil courage” and its relation to social change; the origins of dissent and dissidents in comparative-historical perspective. Emphasis is on case studies of dissent and dissidents in authoritarian societies of the 20th and early 21st centuries in order to understand, sociologically, the elementary forms of dissent and “the dissident life.” The course introduces students to the life-history method of social research in examining case studies of dissent.
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Seminar: Modernity and the Self
SOC304
Sociology as a discipline emerged in 19 th and early 20 th century Europe as a response to rapid social changes that dramatically transformed traditional societies and ways of life. Classical sociological theorists such as Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Dubois, and Georg Simmel sought to explain the nature of these changes, but also offered critiques of what has been called “modernity.” The seminar begins with an exploration of these classical theories of modernity and continues with an examination of contemporary works that seek to understand and critique the consequences of modernity in a variety of social and cultural spheres. The seminar focuses on theories relevant to a central sociological question: how do large scale, transformative social and cultural changes affect individual self-identity, self-consciousness, and ways of being in the world? Central topics include: the challenges to individuality posed by pressures for ideological and social conformity; the quest for authenticity of the self; capitalism and the commercialization of emotions; the uncontrollability of the social world and the difficulties of experiencing resonance and harmony in social life; empirically-based, non-Marxist critiques of the state and other bureaucratic processes that challenge the quest for the autonomy and dignity of the self; the relationship between modernity and anxiety and the rise of the neurobiological imaginary in the treatment of mental health disorders; and the transformation of love and intimate relationships in the modern world. Particular attention is paid to non-Western social thought that is relevant to understanding the nature of the self in the modern world. This course fulfills one of the theory requirements for the Sociology major but is open to all interested students.