Alexandra Perry

          My broad scholarship goals for the coming year are to narrow and focus my areas of inquiry as well as to delve more deeply into scholarship on leadership, and to complete some of the leadership projects that I have started.  Specifically, I am pursuing an Abe Fellowship through the Social Science Research Council that would support me from May through August 2015 so that I can conduct a comparative study of the way that disaster has shaped leadership and organizational social responsibility in healthcare.  The fellowship would allow me to spend some time in Japan working with medical school faculty and hospital administrators to compare healthcare in Japan after the 2011 tsunami with the Post-9/11 United States.  I received a letter of recommendation from the provost for this fellowship.

I am particularly excited about the prospect of receiving a fellowship to study healthcare in Japan because just this summer I finished editing a book on bioethics in Japan which will be published in September 2014.  The book looks at various medical ethics issues in Japan and how Japanese culture merges traditional Japanese values with contemporary medicine to address these challenges.  The topics include things such as the appropriate care for centenarians, organ donation, care ethics, and brain death.

          I was also able to attend a few conferences during my first year at MC.  I presented at two of the three annual national American Philosophical Association conferences.  At the Central division conferences I made two presentations, the first on obtaining a faculty position at a two-year college.  The second presentation was about faculty advocacy, leadership, and support at two-year colleges.  At the second APA conference (the Pacific Division) I presented two papers, the first on ethics, leadership, and autism, and the second on faculty leadership).  I also presented on organizational social responsibility in museum curation and exhibition at a conference this summer.  My paper focused on the ethical implications of the Smithsonian controversy, in which people debated how best to display material from Nagasaki and Hiroshima 

          I also worked quite a bit on writing over my first year at Marietta.  I had an article on leadership and mental health was published in The Journal of Ethics and Mental Health.  I also finished the manuscript for a book project on ethics, leadership, and neurodiversity, which I am currently revising.

          Currently I am working on a series of papers based on my dissertation, which focused on leadership and ethic during the WWII U.S./Japan conflict, and also a few papers that focus on healthcare and leadership.  I am also working with three other women in leadership to develop a prospectus for a book on modes and methods of civic engagement.  I also hope to contribute a chapter on globalization to a leadership book.  Finally, I am working on developing some research on corporate school responsibility, which will focus on the moral challenges and leadership opportunities that arise as a result of engineering and development.   For a more detailed list of my current projects, please see the research page of my academic portfolio.