About the Founder of the Research Library:
Jeanne X. Kasperson
Jeanne X. Kasperson earned a master's degree in English from The University of Chicago in 1962
and a master's degree in library science from Simmons College in 1967. After working in academic
libraries at The University of Chicago, the University of Connecticut, and Michigan State
University, she joined Clark in 1977 as a Research Librarian for the Hazard Assessment Group
and subsequently served as Research Librarian for the University's Center for Technology,
Environment, and Development, and later the George Perkins Marsh Library. For the years 2000-2002,
Professor Kasperson was on leave from Clark with her husband and Clark Professor Roger
Kasperson, conducting research at the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden.
Throughout her career, Professor Kasperson was also an active researcher, pursuing scholarly
interests in the general areas of risk analysis and global environmental change. In 1993, she
was promoted to research associate professor in Clark's George Perkins Marsh Institute. She was
the author of more than 80 articles, books and technical reports, editor of several journals and
recipient of many research grants. She is also recognized by her colleagues as a key contributor
to much of the research undertaken by the George Perkins Marsh Institute. She was co-editor of
the Nature and Society section of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers
with Roger Kasperson. Professor Kasperson was particularly fond of words and tracking down
information that others believed could not be found, leading some colleagues to believe that
when she walked through the library "books talked to her."
Jeanne X. Kasperson was a key member of a highly productive research group at Clark University,
first at the Center for Technology, Environment, and Development (CENTED) and later in its
successor the George Perkins Marsh Institute. This group worked primarily on risk and hazard
issues and later on global environmental change. Jeanne's role was a combination of researcher,
bibliographer, and repository of deep knowledge on the relevant literature, and writer and
editor.
Her publications have a prominent place in risk/hazards and global change research.
Her early research with other group members focused on hazards theory and methodology,
substantially extending the earlier natural hazards paradigm. Perilous Progress: Managing
the Hazards of Technology, published in 1985, summarized theoretical work and case study
applications. Subsequent assessments with Robert Kates profiled the state of hazards research
in the mid-1980s. In the latter part of the same decade, she co-authored a series of works
addressing the "social amplification of risk," an integrated analytic approach addressing
how society processes and responds to the flow of hazards and hazard events. During the 1990s,
she collaborated with Roger Kasperson and Bill Turner on a comparative study of nine
environmentally endangered regions around the world, resulting in
Regions at Risk:
Comparisons of Threatened Environments
published in 1995 and a series of related regional monographs published over the next five years.
In 2001, she and Roger Kasperson published Global Environmental Risk, a work exploring the
use of risk analysis to understand global environmental change. A work is currently in
preparation collecting significant work of Jeanne and her husband Roger, which will be
published in 2003 by Earthscan Press.
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