9:03 a.m., Nov. 11, 2008----Marian Lief Palley, professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, recently returned from Korea, where she spent two weeks as a Fulbright Senior Specialist lecturing at Korea University and at the 2008 Korean Association for Public Administration (KAPA) conference, in Seoul.

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After being selected from the Fulbright Specialists Roster last July by a colleague in the public administration program at Korea University, Palley prepared three lectures for her visit, which she delivered to other public policy and administration scholars during her stay, as well as to graduate and undergraduate students at the university.

“I'd had my name on the roster for several years, so when a faculty member at Korea University invited me to the university, I said 'yes' with great enthusiasm,” said Palley, who has visited Korea several times since 1988, when she was a Fulbright Scholar at Ewha Women's University in Seoul.

“The Fulbright Specialists Program is designed to provide short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) for U.S. faculty and professionals,” Palley said. “The public administration program at Korea University wanted someone to come and discuss women and politics in the United States and women and the American election. I fit the bill.”

Palley lectured on “The Effect of Gender on Governance in the United States: Does it Matter?,” “The Impact of Women's Voting and Women Candidates on American Elections” and “Perspectives on Public Sector Responses to Women's Rights and Opportunities in a Globalized World.”

Besides lecturing and working with faculty and administrators at Korea University on their public administration program's academic programming, Palley also had the opportunity during her stay to visit with former graduate students who had earned their doctoral degrees in political science at UD. She also met with several Korean professors and scholars. Many of the people with whom she met have taught courses at UD and have spent sabbatical time here in past years.

Additionally, Palley said that the visit to Korea offered her a renewed perspective on the rapid rate of change that affects all industrialized nations.

“One certainly develops ideas and perspectives when one goes into another society and culture,” Palley said. “It's hard to see changes where you are. We don't sense change over a five-, 10- or 15-year period in one place, but when you go someplace else and think about what it was 10 years ago, then you can see the changes. It's a very different experience, and that is something that you certainly bring back to your classes.”

Palley earned her bachelor's degree in political science from Syracuse University, her master's degree in political science from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and her doctoral degree in political science from New York University. Before joining the University of Delaware in the fall of 1970 as an assistant professor of political science she taught at Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was a fellow at the National Center for Education in Politics in the Office of Mayor Henry Maier of Milwaukee.

Palley has received several awards, grants and fellowships, including UD's Graduate Advising and Mentoring Award in 2006 and the Trabant Award for Women's Equity, also in 2006.

In addition to her new two-volume book, Women of the World and Politics in Comparative Perspective, coauthored with Joyce Gelb of the City University of New York and due to be published by ABC-CLIO in February 2009, Palley is the author of 10 other books about public policy and politics, as well as numerous articles, papers and presentations on health policy, social welfare policy and women and politics.

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photo courtesy of Marian Lief Palley