Visiting Scholar
Dr. Wagner-Pacifici is the Gil and Frank Mustin Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College. Her teaching and research interests include political violence, discourse and events, and collective memory.
Professor
Wagner-Pacifici is the author of The Art of Surrender: Decomposing
Sovereignty at Conflict's End (Chicago,
2005), as well as Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (Cambridge, 2000), which
won the 2001 Culture Section of the American Sociological Association's Best
Book Award. Her work analyzes violent events, focusing on the language and
images by way of which these events are accomplished, represented and managed. The
Art of Surrender analyzes the conventions and ceremonies of military surrenders
as former antagonists quit the violence of war and resume pacified
relations. The book performs its analysis by exploring surrender
documents, history paintings, photo-journalism and other media that make peace
happen. Theorizing the Standoff examines Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Republic of
Texas and other clashes between anti-system groups and authorities; two earlier
works, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs. MOVE and The
Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama focused, respectively on the 1985
MOVE disaster in Philadelphia and the kidnapping of former Italian Prime
Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978. Wagner-Pacifici’s current
project involves analyzing the recent transformation in the conception of
"national defense" in the United States. She received her
B.A. from Brown University
in 1976 with a concentration in Comparative Literature, and her Ph.D. in
Sociology from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1983.