Dr. Amy Parish is a Biological Anthropologist, Primatologist, and Darwinian Feminist who has taught at University of Southern California in the Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, and Anthropology programs and departments since 1999. She received her undergraduate training at University of Michigan and her graduate school education at University of California-Davis and then taught at University College London. She conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Giessen in Germany on the topic of reciprocity. The Leakey Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Center for Feminist Research, and Sigma Xi have funded her work.
Dr. Parish has been studying the world’s captive population of bonobos for the last fifteen years. The bonobo, whose name derives from the ancient Batu word for ancestor, is one of the two species comprising the chimpanzee genus. Bonobos and chimpanzees are the two closest living relatives of humans living today. The social system of the Bonobo is unusual in many respects: females form real and meaningful bonds in the absence of kinship, females attack and dominate males, and all possible age and gender combinations participate in sexual interactions. She has also studied the mating system of white-handed gibbons in a rain forest in Thailand for two and a half years.
Dr. Parish also has a project on female mate choice decisions in human females. In all of her research, Dr. Parish uses an evolutionary approach to shed light on the origins of human behavior. Dr. Parish currently teaches courses at USC on love, marriage and the experience of being a wife and on the cultural impact of Darwin’s theories. Her course for graduate students in the School of Education teaches future marriage and family therapists about human sexuality. She also teaches courses in USC’s new alternative premed major in Health and Humanities in addition to courses in Gender Studies and Anthropology. In 2008, she received a Mellon Award for excellence in faculty mentoring of undergraduate students. Dr. Parish teaches with the goal of helping students to internalize learning enough to pursue it in the future in their own ways. She wants active learners to emerge—students who made sense of the world through their own eyes, experiences, and values, so that they might be significantly enriched by their educational experiences. She also hopes to engage the students in activist pursuits that might lead to more community involvement in their post-campus lives.
Dr. Parish is on the Board of Directors for the Arusha Project, a non-profit organization devoted to helping HIV infected women in Tanzania. Other activities include a position on the Board with the organization Up the River Endeavors, which is devoted to addressing sustainable development, global peace and social justice. Her work was recently featured in Ms. Magazine and she has appeared on Nova, National Geographic Explorer, NPR, and Discovery Health Channel productions. She gives numerous public lectures: the most recent and upcoming include giving the keynote address at the “Women in Science: Molecules to Ecosystems” conference at Indiana State University, lectures in the School of Medicine and the School of Journalism at USC, and a lecture for at the Human Ethology meetings in Bologna, Italy.
Education
Ph.D. Biological Anthropology, Univ. of California-Davis, 6/1996
Postdoctoral Training
Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Univ. of Giessen, Germany, 1996-1998
Honors and Awards
Board of Directors, Up the River Endeavors, 6/1/2006-
Board of Directors, Arusha Project, 1/1/2006-
USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring of Undergraduate Students, 2007-2008 Center for Feminist Research Travel Grant, 5/1/2006-6/30/2006
