August 29, 2008  

Family, friends, and colleagues gathered at Brown this week for memorial services for Marsha Pripstein Posusney, a Watson adjunct professor, who died of cancer August 22 at the age of 55. A Middle East specialist, she was a professor of political science at Bryant University with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

She was remembered as a “quintessential scholar-activist,” award-winning author, teacher, and mentor to junior scholars – as someone whose passions included academic freedom, human rights, and feminism.  As one colleague remembered: “When she saw something that was wrong, she did something about it.”

She was author of Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and Economic Restructuring (Columbia University Press, 1998), which won the prestigious Albert Hourani Book Award for outstanding publishing in Middle East studies. She was also the co-author of three other edited volumes on labor unions, women's rights, and the Middle East, including Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), which showed the downside of globalization for the region’s women.

She was also a member of the board of the Middle East Studies Association, an editor of the Middle East Report, consultant to the World Bank and other organizations, and organizer of many conferences, including one, last year at Watson, on “The Study of the Middle East and Islam: Challenges after 9-11.”

Having joined the Watson Institute in 1996, “she was a vigorous presence and a fine, fine scholar,” Adjunct Professor Abbott Gleason said at the service.  “Marsha was one of the most honest people I have ever known. And one of the most straightforward. I would venture to say that at least in my acquaintance, she was incapable of guile. She was a truth-teller, although of course the full and final truth eludes us all. But she tried always – in the language of the ‘60s – to tell it like it was – really was.

“She was also a person of great courage and warmth. She faced the illness that tracked her for so long with absolutely exemplary courage and was kept going by her family, her work, and – here I speak from personal experience – by her capacity – perhaps I should say her unusual talent – for friendship.”

Donations in her name can be sent to support the Miriam Hospital Cancer Center or 4B Nursing at the following address: Miriam Hospital Foundation, Box H, Providence, RI, 02901.