Retirement celebration in honor of John J. MacAloon to include panels on scholarship, mentoring, and more
The May 23 event will feature a roundtable reflecting on the distinguished career of the MAPSS Director Emeritus
In celebration of his storied career, the Division of the Social Sciences will host Scholarship, Teaching, Leadership: A Conference in Honor of John J. MacAloon on Monday, May 23. The event will be capped off with a roundtable discussion featuring MacAloon himself.
The event is free and open to the public. Registration is requested here.
MacAloon is Director Emeritus of MAPSS; professor in the Social Sciences Graduate Division and the College; and associated faculty in the Department of Anthropology. MacAloon was director of the MAPSS Program for more than two decades.
“John is the architect of the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences as we know it today. Whether they took a class with him or not, all MAPSS students benefited from his vision, which created this singularly effective program,” said John Mark Hanson, Faculty Director of MAPSS and the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science.
His work as an anthropologist and historian has focused theoretically on cultural performance theory and substantively on the modern Olympic Movement and Olympic Games.
He taught the history of modern social theory to graduate and undergraduate students for more than 30 years and received the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1980.
The conference will be held at the University’s David Rubenstein Forum and will open with a Scholarship and Pedagogy Panel moderated by John Kelly, AM’82, PhD’88, the Christian W. Mackauer Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Panel participants include Amy August, AM’12, of the Department of Sociology at San Jose State University, Douglas Hartmann, AB’89, AM’90, of the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and Marko Živković, AM’91, PhD’01, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.
The following panel, Mentoring and Advising, will be moderated by Chad Cyrenne, Executive Director of the MA Program in the Social Sciences. Panelists will include Elizabeth Davies, AM’91, PhD’04, of the Department of Psychology and Dean of Arts and Sciences at St. Francis University; Margaret Mueller, AM’97, President and CEO of the Executives’ Club of Chicago; and Marianthi Thanopoulos, AM’05, Business Development Coordinator of the Village of Wheeling.
Lastly, MacAloon will participate in a roundtable, Reflections on a Career, with John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, Dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History, and Elisabeth S. Clemens, AM’85, PhD’90, the William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology. The program will conclude with a reception and retirement celebration.
MacAloon also previously taught at Emory University, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the University of California-San Diego. His authored and edited numerous books, including This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games; Rite, Drama, Festival Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance; General Education in the Social Sciences; Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-colonial Worlds; Olympic Games and Intercultural Exchange in the World System; and Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement.