MULLINGS, Leith (Patricia) 1945-

PERSONAL: Born April 8, 1945, in Mandeville, Jamaica; daughter of Hubert Waite and Lillieth (Gayle) Mullings; married Jarvis Tyner, December 21, 1973; children: Alia Tyner, Michael Tyner. Education: Attended Queen's College, 1961-63; Cornell University School of Nursing, B.S., 1966; University of Chicago, M.A., 1970, Ph.D., 1975.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of Anthropology, City College of New York, 138th St. and Convent Ave., New York, NY, 10031. E-mail—lmullings@gc. cuny.edu.

CAREER: Educator and author. Yale University, New Haven, CT, lecturer in anthropology, 1972-74; Columbia University, New York, NY, lecturer, 1974-75, assistant professor, 1975-81, associate professor of anthropology, 1981-83; City University of New York, associate professor, beginning 1981, currently Presidential Professor in graduate anthropology program.

MEMBER: American Anthropological Association (fellow), Society of Medical Anthropology (fellow), Metropolitan Medical Anthropology Association (president, 1981-84).

AWARDS, HONORS: Kent fellow, Danforth Foundation, 1969; Hastings Center Institute of Social Ethics and the Life Sciences, postdoctoral fellow, 1979-80; French-American Foundation Prize, 1993-94; Society for the Anthropology of North America Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Healing, Religion, and Social Change in SoutheasternGhana (thesis), University of Chicago (Chicago, IL), 1975, revised as Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1984.

(Editor) Cities of the United States, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in theLives of African-American Women, Routledge (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with Manning Marable) Let Nobody Turn UsAround: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African-American Anthology, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2000.

(With Alaka Wali) Stress and Resilience: The SocialContext of Reproduction in Central Harlem, Kluwer Academic (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Manning Marable) Freedom: A PhotographicHistory of the African-American Struggle, Phaidon (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to professional journals, including Race and Class.

SIDELIGHTS: Educator and anthropologist Leith Mullings, a professor in the City University of New York's graduate program in anthropology, is also the author of several books that reflect her interests in gender, race, urbanism, and contemporary theory. Mullings's first published work, based on her Ph.D. thesis, was the enthnographic study Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana, which Times Literary Supplement reviewer Eva Gillies praised as an "achievement" due to the author's ability to weave together "the threads of traditional anthropology, ethnopsychiatry and the Marxist analysis of social change." Calling Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change both "densely packed" and "rewarding," Gillies added that the volume would likely "find its way on to many a specialized shelf, and not gather dust when it gets there."

On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of African-American Women collects Mullings's writings over two decades as an anthropologist and agent of social change, and in these essays she addresses health care and labor divisions, and questions the true sanctity of the "nuclear family" the family concerns as they play out within the lives of black women. According to Signs reviewer Assata Zerai, the author's own story as revealed through On Our Own Terms is inspirational to younger anthropologists who wish to "do good scholarly work and to make a valuable contribution to people-centered progress." Praising Mullings's "transformational viewpoint," Zerai concluded that her writings present a workable framework for developing "real solutions to the problems faced by the African-American community."

Other volumes by Mullings include several books produced in collaboration with educator Manning Marable, among them the edited collection Let NobodyTurn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African-American Anthology. Their 2003 work Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Struggle, "breaks new ground" in its use as a photo-history collecting 546 images following the story of black America from before the Civil War through the civil rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century, according to Library Journal contributor Eric Linderman. Noting that "the scope of the project is monumental," Suzanne Rust added in the Black Issues Book Review that although the book "doesn't offer any visual revelations," Freedom contains "wonderful glimpses into the lives of everyday folk."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Anthropologist, March, 1988, Mary Anna Thornton, review of Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana, p. 186; September, 1988, Leonard Plotnicov, review of Cities of the United States: Studies in Urban Anthropology, pp. 748-749.

Black Issues Book Review, September-October, 2002, Suzanne Rust, review of Freedom: A Photographic History of the African-American Struggle, p. 12.

Booklist, February 15, 2000, Mary Carroll, review of Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, p. 1077.

Choice, April, 1985, E. Wellin, review of Therapy,Ideology, and Social Change, p. 1199; March, 1988, E. Wellin, review of Cities of the United States, p. 1136.

Gender and Society, August, 1998, Ife Modupe, review of On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of African-American Women, p. 487.

Journal of Southern History, May, 2002, Charles Pete Banner-Haley, review of Let Nobody Turn Us Around, p. 432.

Library Journal, April 1, 2003, Eric Linderman, review of Freedom, p. 95.

NWSA Journal, summer, 1998, Lena Ampadu, review of On Our Own Terms, p. 174.

Psychology of Women Quarterly, September, 1998, Heather E. Bullock, review of On Our Own Terms, p. 517.

Race and Class, January-March, 1998, Angela Gilliam, review of On Our Own Terms, p. 98.

Signs, autumn, 2000, Assati Zerai, review of On OurOwn Terms, p. 274.

Times Literary Supplement, June 7, 1985, Eva Gillies, "Restoring Right Relations," p. 633.*