Professor William E. Arens
Ph.D. University of Virginia, 1970
Contact Information:
email:
William.Arens@sunysb.edu
Phone: (631) 632-7619
Research Interests:
William Arens' present research is primarily literary in character. The first project involves an analysis of the travel literature available in English on Sweden and Scandinavia from the 18th to 20th centuries to determine the shifting image of these countries in other nations of the Western world. Sweden in particular has served initially as a model for a society based upon an accommodation with nature and then one which subsequently developed a contested model of an industrialized social system. The second project is a continuation of the deconstruction of the medical literature on kuru and its relationship to presumed cannibalism in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. This research and argumentation has implications for a present cultural understanding of new BSE diseases, (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) including Mad Cow Disease, in the industrialized west. There is also a continued interest in the social development of a community in Tanzania that was initiated as Ph.D. field research and has been the subject of a f ollow-up study by a current IDPAS student as a dissertation topic.
