Janelle L. Wilson 
Associate Professor  
Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology 
University of Minnesota Duluth 

phone: 218-726-6364 
  e-mail: jwilson2@d.umn.edu 
URL: http://www.d.umn.edu/~jwilson2/ 

When I took Chuck Bowden's Introductory Sociology course at Mid Michigan Community College in 1987, I decided that I wanted to make Sociology my major. At the time, I had a new awareness of social problems that exist in society and a growing sense of social responsibility. As a naive 18-year-old from a small town in mid-Michigan (Farwell) I had big dreams, big hopes, and a zeal to learn. After receiving my Associate of Arts from MMCC, I transferred to Saginaw Valley State University. This was my first time living away from home ( I lived in the dormitories at SVSU). The intellectual, social, and personal growth that had begun while at MMCC continued. I received my B. A. (majoring in Sociology and double-minoring in English and Communication) from SVSU in 1990. I knew that I wanted to be a professor, so the next step was graduate school. I went to Western Michigan University, where I received my M. A. in 1992 and my Ph.D. in 1995. 

Even as an undergraduate, the theoretical perspective which was most "warm and fuzzy" to me was Symbolic Interactionism. This perspective is a micro-level approach which concerns itself with how individuals construct meaning. In graduate school, classes that I took with social psychologist Dr. Robert Wait fueled my interest in symbolic interactionism in general and, more particularly, in the socialization process and the social psychology of emotions. Classes that I took with Dr. Lewis Carlson in the History Department at WMU sparked an interest in popular culture and oral history. I have since combined these interests in my own work. The focus of my research has been on collective memory, the reconstructed past, and Generation X. Much of my recent work has focused most on the relationship between nostalgia and identity.