STANDBY ONLY: Barbara Ehrenreich: Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joy, In Conversation with Amy Parish FREE January 16, 2007

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Barbara Ehrenreich
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
In conversation with Amy Parish, Lecturer in Anthropology and Gender Studies, USC

What are the deep origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture? Join us for an original and exhilarating look at one of humanity's oldest traditions.

Journalist, historian, and social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books. In 2001, Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America became a New York Times bestseller, and has since sold over one million copies. Nickel and Dimed, a trenchant examination of working-class poverty that chronicles Ehrenreich's own attempt to live on minimum wage, is now required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities. It has been adopted for the stage by Joan Holden and performed in major cities across the United States. In 2005, Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, also a New York Times bestseller, exposed the ever more prevalent phenomenon of white-collar unemployment.

A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, Ehrenreich has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. Her articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a range of national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington
Post Magazine, Ms., Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation, and newspapers throughout the world. In 2004, she received the Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship, given annually to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance."

In addition to her work on economic themes, Ehrenreich is a historian and author of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, which the New York Review of Books described as 'brilliant' and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Metropolitan Books 2007).

Dr. Amy Parish is a Biological Anthropologist, Primatologist, and Darwinian Feminist who teaches at University of Southern California in the Gender Studies and Anthropology departments. She received her undergraduate training at University of Michigan and her graduate school education at University of California-Davis and then taught at University College London. She conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Giessen in Germany on the topic of reciprocity. Dr. Parish has been studying the world's captive population of bonobos for the last fifteen years. The bonobo, whose name derives from the ancient Batu word for ancestor, is one of the two species comprising the chimpanzee genus. Bonobos and chimpanzees are the two closest living relatives of humans living today. The social system of the bonobo is unusual in many respects: females form real and meaningful bonds in the absence of kinship, females attack and dominate males, and all possible age and gender combinations participate in sexual interactions. She has also studied the mating system of white-handed gibbons in a rain forest in Thailand for two and a half years. Dr. Parish also has a project on female mate choice decisions in human females. In all of her research, Dr. Parish uses an evolutionary approach to shed light on the origins of human behavior.
Dr. Parish currently teaches courses at USC on love, marriage and the experience of being a wife and on the cultural impact of Darwin's theories. She also teaches courses in USC's new alternative premed major in Health and Humanities. She is on the Board of Directors for the Arusha Project, a non-profit organization devoted to helping HIV infected women in Tanzania. Other activities include an advisory position with the organization Up the River Endeavors, which is devoted to addressing sustainable development, global peace and social justice. Her work was recently featured in Ms. Magazine and she has appeared on Nova, National Geographic Explorer, NPR, and Discovery Health Channel productions.

Official Website: http://www.lfla.org/aloud/php/a.calendar.bioText.php?month=01&year=2007&day=16