Department of Sociology and Anthropology

David L. McConnell

 Mural

B.A. Earlham 1982; M.A., Ph.D. Stanford 1991.

David L. McConnell is a professor of anthropology at The College of Wooster, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1992. He is a leading authority on Japanese society, culture, and education, as well as U.S.-Japanese relations. He has also conducted fieldwork on the relationship between education and modernity among the Maragoli people of Western Kenya and the Amish of northeast Ohio. His teaching and research interests include anthropology and education; family and childhood in cross-cultural perspective; and the anthropology of development and contemporary anthropological theory.

McConnell received his B.A. from Earlham College (1982). He then went on to earn his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1991). In 1991-92, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University as well as a research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

McConnell has been honored with a Spencer Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a Fulbright Grant, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.

His book, Importing Diversity: Inside Japan’s JET Program (University of California Press, 2000) was awarded Japan’s prestigious Ohira Prize in 2001 by the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Foundation.

 

Courses Taught:

  • Introduction to Anthropology
  • Peoples and Cultures of Japan
  • Family, Childrearing and Culture
  • Education and Sociocultural Process
  • Contemporary Anthropological Theory

 

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e-mail: dmcconnell@wooster.edu