Stony Brook Alum Named Distinguished Service Professor at SUNY Old Westbury

STONY BROOK , NY – Laura Anker (Ph.D. History, ’83) has been promoted to Distinguished Service Professor at SUNY Old Westbury.  Professor Anker has been part of the faculty at the SUNY College of Old Westbury since 1978 and attained the rank of full Professor in 1996. She is currently a faculty member of the American Studies Program, Director of the First-Year Experience Program and Project Director of the Community Engagement and Partnership Center.

The Distinguished Service Professor rank is above that of full Professor and can only be conferred by the SUNY Board of Trustees on the recommendation of the Chancellor, the System Administration, and the campus. The title not only recognizes the service an individual gives to a particular college or university within the SUNY system, but also their substantial contributions to the community at both local and state level.

At Old Westbury, Professor Anker has been heavily involved with developing curriculum and creating programs that engage students with their community. She served as a Pre-Law advisor, created the Interdepartmental Social Studies Adolescence Education Major, and is currently the Director of the First-Year Experience Program which focuses on first-year undergraduates. The First-Year Experience Program gives new students needed skills to excel in college – critical thinking, problem solving, time management, teamwork, and self-reflection. Under Dr. Anker's leadership, this program has been expanded to include a course-embedded, spring semester, community-based learning and action requirement for all first-year students.

Not only has Professor Anker been involved with a multiplicity of projects at Old Westbury, but she is heavily involved with community affairs on Long Island. She has served on the East Hampton Day Care Center Board of Directors and the Advisory Board of Project Most, an after-school program for elementary and middle school children. Professor Anker has also been a member of the East Hampton Union Free School District Board of Education since 1989.

Professor Anker received her M.A. in History from Brown University in 1970, and her Ph.D. in History from Stony Brook in 1983. She began teaching at SUNY Old Westbury in 1978, while continuing to work on her thesis. Her dissertation examined immigrant women’s oral histories from the late 1930’s from the Northeast. She concluded that women were at the center of creating a sustainable culture and community for kinship networks in their new homes in the United States. Previous studies, mostly from the modernization perspective, ignored women's roles. Anker challenged the notion that immigrant women and their families were passive subjects of modernization whereby they were homogenized into nuclear families. Her book, Women of Courage: Jewish and Italian Immigrant Women in New York (co-authored with Rose Laub Coser and Andrew Perin), was based upon oral histories conducted in the 1980's by the World of Our Mothers project at Stony Brook.

Being a graduate student during the 1970’s at Stony Brook was an exciting time for Professor Anker. She has said that it was a peak period of activism and renewed scholarship in the social sciences. Also there was a strong focus on interdisciplinary cooperation between academic departments, particularly History, Economics, and Sociology. The time and experience spent at Stony Brook reinforced her focus on educational, community and political activism.

Professor Anker lives in East Hampton, NY.

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