Duran Bell

Last updated

Duran Bell, Jr.
Born (1936-04-21) April 21, 1936 (age 85) [1]
Nationality United States
Spouse(s)Huiqin Zhao
Institution University of California, Irvine
Field Social economics
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
ContributionsModels of social processes

Duran Bell, Jr. (born April 21, 1936) [2] is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. He was formerly a professor there in two departments, Economics and Anthropology. [3]

Contents

Education and early career

Bell received his B.A. in economics in 1960 and his Ph.D. in agricultural economics in 1965, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He then joined the faculty in the Economics department at the University of California, Irvine in 1965. [1]

Research

Bell was a research associate with the Brookings Institution from 1971 to 1973 and a senior economist with the RAND Corporation from 1973 to 1976. Bell's main research focus was on non-market exchange processes, and eventually he found ethnography the most effective theoretical grounding for his work. He later joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine in 1965. [1]

Bell is a founding member of the Social Dynamics and Complexity Group in the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at U/C Irvine. [4]

Personal life

Professor Bell's father, Duran Sr, became a fulltime plowboy at the age of seven and received little education. He escaped the share cropping economy of rural Arkansas at the age of 15 and became a pipe fitter in Little Rock, where he met his wife, Juanita Jones. Having become a cement mason during WWII, he was able to enlist his fifteen-year-old son, Duran Jr, as an apprentice. By the time that Duran Jr graduated from high school, he had learned the skills of a "journeyman" cement mason; and by working during the summer months, he was able later to maintain himself as a self-supporting, full-time, student at the University of California, Berkeley, enrolling in 1954. Bell's mother had been raised in the city of Little Rock and possessed a high school education. Financial issues prevented her from attending college; however, she considered herself to merit the middle class status of a school teacher and rejected the very backward ghetto in North Richmond, CA, to which they moved during the war. Consequently, she conveyed to her son a belief in the incompatibility of their residence with their much higher social potential. Bell credits his mother for his escape from the debilitating mentality of their ghetto-environment.

Early in his Berkeley life, Bell became involved with the Young Socialist League, a splinter group relative to more established Trotskyist organizations. This involvement was clearly a distraction from his academic responsibilities, yet it was an essential palliative, given the racist ideologies of the social sciences. After considerable personal turmoil and two wasted years, Bell discovered economic theory, a field whose mathematical, deductive, character was appealing. Economics also did not exude an obvious racism.

During his senior year, he was noticed by an agricultural economist from the Davis campus, who was teaching a course on Industrial Organization. This professor recommended Bell to Berkeley's Department of Agricultural Economics, which immediately offered Bell a "full ride" research assistantship—a welcomed escape from the inadequacy of summertime construction work. Bell performed well in this Department and produced a doctoral dissertation that was awarded two national awards in agricultural economics, in 1964. However, since his race was indicated in the Department's announcement of new graduates, Bell received no interviews from universities or from the Department of Agriculture. Since the Department's graduates were heavily recruited by departments of agricultural economics, Bell's situation was an embarrassment. However, after a year of failure, Bell was brought to the attention of Prof. James G. March, who was to become the Dean of Social Sciences for the new Irvine campus of the University.

Bell received his promotion to Associate Professor in 1970, on the basis of the publication of his dissertation and another paper. However, he took leave of the Irvine campus to become a research associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, where he worked for two years, publishing papers on issues related to Black workers. Then, he returned to Irvine on a half-time basis and combined it with a position at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, where most of his work dealt with the economics of aging. However, upon returning to full-time work at the University in 1975, he had a dispute with the Dean, which was demoralizing, leading to a five-year hiatus in research. It was only in the early 1980s that Bell returned to energetic research efforts, having become interested in economic anthropology. Most of the work that he produced between 1990 and 2008 can be found on his Personal Website. However, he has continued to publish after that date, with a capstone, major book which he hopes to be published in 2021: Corrupted Sciences: Ethnocentrism and racism in the study of prehistoric migrations.

Between 2001 and 2005, Bell did ethnographic research in a Chinese village, under the stewardship of Zhao xudong, who had produced his dissertation with rearch in this village. Hence, upon his retirement, Bell decided to return to Beijing and become associated with institutions there. However, after two years, and his marriage to Zhao huiqin (no relationship), he returned California, but continues to travel frequently to China. In recent years, he has been teaching a summer course at the prestigious Renmin University in Beijing, with the blessings of his friend, Zhao xudong, who is now Chair of Anthropology.

Professors Bell's family life has been somewhat tumultuous. He married Alice Ida Brunner, in 1960, as he begin graduate school, but divorced after one and one-half years. Alice completed her Ph.D. in psychology at Berkeley and became a professional counselor. He then married Ingeborg Breitner Powell in 1965 and she joined him as a faculty member at Irvine with a Ph.D. in Sociology from Berkeley. This marriage lasted five years. Then, he met Stephanie Ellman in 1972 and she jointed him when he returned to California in 1973. This marriage lasted until 2004 and they have two children: Nathan Ellman-Bell, a talented percussionist, and Catherine Ellman-Bell.

Related Research Articles

University of California, Irvine Public university in Irvine, California

The University of California, Irvine is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and professional degrees, and roughly 30,000 undergraduates and 6,000 graduate students are enrolled at UCI as of Fall 2019. The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity", and had $436.6 million in research and development expenditures in 2018. UCI became a member of the Association of American Universities in 1996. The university was rated as one of the "Public Ivies” in 1985 and 2001 surveys comparing publicly funded universities the authors claimed provide an education comparable to the Ivy League.

William F. Sharpe

William Forsyth Sharpe is an American economist. He is the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Erwin Chemerinsky American lawyer and scholar

Erwin Chemerinsky is an American legal scholar known for his studies of United States constitutional law and federal civil procedure. He served as the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law from 2008 to 2017, and is currently the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

Robert Duncan Luce was an American mathematician and social scientist, and one of the most preeminent figures in the field of mathematical psychology. At the end of his life, he held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine.

Edward Hetsel Schafer was an American historian, sinologist, and writer noted for his expertise on the Tang Dynasty, and was a professor of Chinese at University of California, Berkeley for 35 years. Schafer's most notable works include The Golden Peaches of Samarkand and The Vermilion Bird, which both explore China's interactions with other cultures and regions during the Tang dynasty.

Paul Dourish British-American computer scientist

Paul Dourish is a computer scientist best known for his work and research at the intersection of computer science and social science. Born in Scotland, he holds the Steckler Endowed Chair of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2000, and where he directs the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the British Computer Society, and is a two-time winner of the ACM CSCW "Lasting Impact" award, in 2016 and 2021.

Daniel Aldrich

Daniel Gaskill Aldrich, Jr. was the founding chancellor at the University of California, Irvine from 1962 to 1984. He also served as acting chancellor at the University of California, Riverside from 1984 to 1985, and acting chancellor at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1986 to 1987.

Robert Garfias is an American ethnomusicologist and musicologist. He is a professor of Anthropology and a member of The Social Dynamics and Complexity Group at the University of California, Irvine as well as a professor at the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology in Senri, Osaka.

Eric Maskin American Nobel laureate in economics

Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and 2007 Nobel laureate recognized with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University.

University of California, Irvine School of Social Sciences

The School of Social Sciences is an academic unit of the University of California, Irvine (UCI) that studies the social sciences. The School is the largest academic unit in the university with an enrollment of over 5,300 students. More than a third of the bachelor's degrees conferred at UCI are from the School of Social Sciences. It is home to the departments of Anthropology, Chicano-Latino Studies, Cognitive Science, Economics, Logic and Philosophy of Science, Political Science, International Studies, and Sociology.

David Neumark is an American economist and a Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also directs the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute.

The University of California, Irvine has over fourteen academic divisions.

University of California, Irvine School of Physical Sciences

The School of Physical Sciences is an academic unit of the University of California, Irvine (UCI) that conducts academic research and teaching in the field of physical sciences. It offers both pre-professional training and general education in the departments of chemistry, earth system science, mathematics, and physics and astronomy. The school enrolls 1,400 undergraduate and graduate students and is one of the top schools in the nation in the number of degrees it confers in the area of physical sciences. It also offers specializations such as biochemistry, statistics, math for economics, applied and computational mathematics, astrophysics, applied physics, biomedical physics, and education. In 1995, the school gained international prominence when Frank Sherwood Rowland, a professor in chemistry and Frederick Reines, a professor in physics, won the Nobel Prize in their respective fields. It was the first time two people won the prize in the same year in two different fields at the same public university.

Pranab Bardhan Indian economist

Pranab Bardhan is an Indian economist who has taught and worked in the United States since 1979. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Harold Colyer Conklin was an American anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia and was a pioneer of ethnoscience, documenting indigenous ways of understanding and knowing the world.

Drew Fudenberg is a Professor of Economics at MIT. His extensive research spans many aspects of game theory, including equilibrium theory, learning in games, evolutionary game theory, and many applications to other fields. Fudenberg was also one of the first to apply game theoretic analysis in industrial organization, bargaining theory, and contract theory. He has also authored papers on repeated games, reputation effects, and behavioral economics.

George Stanford Tolley was an agricultural economist at the University of Chicago. Along with the faculty at the University of Chicago, he has worked on the faculty of North Carolina State University. In 1965–1966, he was Director of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture, and in 1974–1975 he was Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of Treasury.

Dan L. Burk

Dan L. Burk is Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and is a founding member of the law faculty. His areas of expertise include intellectual property, gene patenting, digital copyright, electronic commerce and computer trespass.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Defining Marriage and Legitimacy". Current Anthropology. 38: 237–253. 2011. doi:10.1086/204606. JSTOR   2744491.
  2. ↑ U.S. Public Records Index, Vols 1 & 2 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010.
  3. ↑ "Emeritus Faculty: UCI Economics". economics.uci.edu. 2011. Archived from the original on August 1, 2012. Retrieved July 5, 2011.
  4. ↑ "Social Dynamics and Complexity Group faculty". socsci.uci.edu. 2011. Retrieved July 5, 2011.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.