Kathryn "Jay" Elliott, Professor

Education

• 1990 Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, Harvard University
• 1981 M.A. in Regional Studies - East Asia, Harvard University
• 1978 A.B., magna cum laude, and with honors in Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College
• 1976-1977 Junior Year Abroad, Foreign Students' Division, Tokyo, Japan, Waseda University

Profile

Dr. Elliott was born and raised in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. She received her A.B. (1978) magna cum laude and with honors in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, her M.A. (1981) in Regional Studies – East Asia from Harvard University and her Ph.D. (1990) in Anthropology, also from Harvard University. She conducted her doctoral research as a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark, examining the way elders see themselves and how this personal view of aging differs from, and sometimes conflicts with, the way the Danish welfare state views "pensioners" and structures services and institutions for them. She received postdoctoral training in social gerontology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and in ethno-gerontology and medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Elliott then spent three years working as a researcher and clinician at the University of California, San Francisco's Memory Clinic and Alzheimer's Center on a project funded by the National Institute on Aging and involving Chinese dementia patients, their families and the Chinese elder-service community in San Francisco's Chinatown. She joined the faculty at Minnesota State University, Mankato in 1998. Her areas of specialization include social/cultural anthropology, applied anthropology, medical anthropology and the anthropology of aging. Europe, East Asia and the U.S. are her geographic areas of specialization.

Courses Taught at MNSU

• ANTH 101 - Introduction to Anthropology
• ANTH 230 - Peoples & Cultures of the World
• ANTH 250W - Portraits of Culture
• ANTH 332 - Anthropology of Religion
• ANTH 421W - Health, Culture, and Disease
• ANTH 436W - Anthropology of Aging
• ANTH 437 - Applied Anthropology
• ANTH 443W - Peoples and Cultures of East Asia
• ANTH 497 - Anthropology Internship
• ANTH 498 - Internship:  Teaching Anthropology
• ANTH 499/677 - Individual Study
• ANTH 601B - Seminar: Cultural and Linguistic Theory
• ANTH 697 - Internship
• ANTH 698 - Internship: Teaching Anthropology
• ANTH 699 - Thesis