Eliot Circular

Prof. Metz Wins Goldschmidt Fellowship

photo by tom humphrey

Prof. Tamara Metz [political science 2006–] was awarded the Maure L. Goldschmidt Memorial Research Fellowship in 2014 to support her research into the politics of care. 

Metz is investigating conflicts between the demands of care and political freedom in liberal democratic thought and practice. In this tradition, to be free is to be left alone and obligations are incurred by consent. In reality, human beings are inevitably and, at times, utterly dependent on the energy and attention of others. Neither individuals nor societies can survive without care. In the late modern context, feminist and care theorists have argued, the state has a crucial role to play in ensuring the demands of care are met and the benefits and burdens of care are justly distributed. Metz aims to contribute to the reformulation of conceptions of freedom and to develop a theory of politics that resists the imperatives of neoliberal rationality without sacrificing individual autonomy.

The fellowship was established by David M. Goldschmidt ’65 in memory of his father, Prof. Maure Goldschmidt. Maure Goldschmidt graduated from Reed College with the class of 1930. He returned to his alma mater to serve as a member of the political science faculty for 33 years, holding the Cornelia Marvin Pierce Chair in American Institutions.

Metz is the author of Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce and the coeditor of Justice, Politics, and the Family.