WWU Professor Jay Teachman to Discuss ‘Lives of Veterans after Military Service’ On Nov. 9
Talk Part of Dean’s Lecture Series and WWU Veterans Day Ceremony
Jay Teachman, professor of Sociology at Western Washington University, will give a talk titled “The Lives of Veterans after Military Service: A Portrait of the Last 75 Years” from 11:25 a.m. to 12:25 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 9.
The free, public talk is an installment of the WWU College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean’s Lecture Series and is a part of Western’s Veterans Day Ceremony in the Viking Union Multipurpose Room, 516 High St., in Bellingham.
The university’s Veterans Day Ceremony will start at 11 a.m. with opening remarks by WWU President Bruce Shepard. A reception following Professor Teachman’s talk will be from 12:30 p.m. until 1 p.m.
Currently more than 21 million veterans live in the United States, which equates to about 10 percent of the population age 17 and older. These veterans have served during times of peace and during times of war, but they have all dedicated a portion of their lives to the service of their country. A growing body of literature has begun to outline the consequences of military service for the lives of veterans, yet our knowledge remains fragmented. In particular, it is difficult to understand the scope of effects of military service and how these effects may have changed over time.
In his talk, Professor Teachman will provide a simple descriptive analysis of the consequences of military service across various life course domains and historical eras using data taken from the 2013 American Community Survey. The life course outcomes considered include education, income, types of income, marital status, home ownership and health. The historical eras considered range from World War II to post-9/11.
Jay Teachman has been a professor in the Department of Sociology since 1998. He graduated from Western in 1974 and received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1978. Teachman has a longstanding interest in families and how families change over time. He has published a number of articles concerning topics such as military service, divorce, remarriage, child support and cohabitation. Teachman is co-principal investigator on several grants: “Determinants and Consequences of Military Service: 1940-1988;” “Military Service and Patterns of Marriage, Cohabitation and Union Dissolution;” “Impact of Military Service on Health,” all funded by the National Science Foundation; and “Stimulating Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research in Population and Health,” funded by the National Institute on Aging.
A story on Teachman and his research with Lucky Tedrow, director of Western’s Center for Social Science Instruction and the Demographic Research Laboratory, is featured in a Western Window magazine article titled Service Legacy.
Audience questions for the Nov. 9 talk will be welcomed.
For more information on this lecture, please contact Kirsten Anderson, WWU College of Humanities & Social Sciences, (360) 650-3763, or Kirsten.Anderson@wwu.edu.
The College of Humanities and Social Services (CHSS), the university’s largest college, includes the 13 departments of: Anthropology; Communication Sciences and Disorders; Communication Studies; English; Health and Human Development; History; Journalism; Liberal Studies; Modern and Classical Languages; Philosophy; Political Science; Psychology; Sociology, and as well as three interdisciplinary programs: East Asian Studies; Linguistics; and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.