NOTE: This lecture has been canceled for Sept. 21 and will be rescheduled.

Coontz

Best-selling author Stephanie Coontz will give a public lecture, "Courting Disaster? The Worldwide Revolution in Marriage," Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 4:45 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium. Her lecture is sponsored by the Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS) at Cornell in conjunction with its "Evolving Family" theme project.

Coontz is the author of five myth-busting books on family history, including the recent "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage" (Viking, 2005). In the book, she looks at the phenomenon of more changes occurring in the institution of marriage over the past three decades than in the previous 3,000 years.

"The timing was fortuitous with this book coming out, to quite great acclaim," said Elizabeth Peters, professor of policy analysis and management and Evolving Family team leader.

On Sept. 22, Coontz will participate in a seminar with Peters and will be a guest in a Fatherhood, Marriage and Family Policy class. She also will meet with Becker House residents and talk about the history of family life and contemporary research into changing families.

Coontz teaches family studies and history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her other books include "American Families: A Multicultural Reader" and the award-winning best-seller "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap."

The Coontz lecture is the first of several events on themes of family and fatherhood planned for the coming academic year, including an April conference on marriage. "We want to give the whole university a chance to get involved in the topics we will be dealing with," Peters said.

The Evolving Family: Family Processes, Contexts and the Life Course of Children is a three-year interdisciplinary theme project, coordinated by the ISS and continuing through 2007. The project for 2005-08 is Getting Connected: Social Science in the Age of Networks. Theme projects involve about 12 faculty members from Cornell and beyond, with research and other activities in collaboration with students, and they engage both the Cornell and wider communities in discussions of social sciences topics of interest. Proposals for a new project for 2006-09 are being accepted through Oct. 20.