Lisa Brush, PhD

  • Professor & Department Chair

Lisa D. Brush, Ph.D., holds appointments as Professor of Sociology and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA. Her first book, Gender and Governance, documents and explains the ways contemporary capitalist welfare/workfare states and social polices produce and position women and men as different and unequal, and the ways gender difference and inequality organize states and social policies. Her second book, Poverty, Battered Women, and Work in U.S. Public Policy, investigates what happens when “work/family conflict” becomes literal; how men’s control, coercion, and sabotage trap women in poverty and abuse; and the failure of women’s waged work to end poverty and abuse. Current collaborations investigate primary prevention of violence and abuse by engaging high school and middle school boys and their athletic program coaches in transforming gender.

Education & Training

  • PhD, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1993
  • MS, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1987
  • BA, University of Connecticut, 1985

Representative Publications

2019. Lisa D. Brush and Elizabeth Miller. Trouble in Paradigm: “Gender Transformative Programming” in Violence Prevention – anchor article for symposium in Violence Against Women. Vol. 25, No. 14: 1635–1656.

2015. Melanie M. Hughes and Lisa D. Brush. “The Price of Protection: A Trajectory Analysis of Civil Remedies for Abuse and Women’s Earnings.” American Sociological Review. Vol. 80, No. 1 (February): 140-165.

2014. Review Essay: “The Law, Gendered Abuse, and the Limits and Possibilities of Feminist Theory.” Tulsa Law Review. Vol. 49, No. 2 (Winter): 355-366.

2011. Melanie M. Hughes and Lisa D. Brush. “Work, Welfare, and Protection Orders: Modeling Changing Earnings in the Context of Group Differences and Institutional Shifts.” Special Issue on Methodological Advances in Analytic Techniques for Longitudinal Designs and Evaluations of Community Interventions. Violence Against Women. Vol. 17, No. 3 (March): 322-339.

2011. Poverty, Battered Women, Work, and U.S. Public Policy. Oxford University Press. Named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2011 by the editors of CHOICE. Reviewed in CHOICE, Contemporary Sociology, Sex Roles, Gender & Society, Women’s Review of Books.

2003 Gender and Governance. AltaMira Press (Rowman and Littlefield).

Research Interests

  • Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
  • Political Sociology
  • Politics & Culture
  • Social Stratification and Class Analysis

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