Barry Wins International Achievement Award

3-28-96
Kathleen Barry, professor of human development in the College of Health and Human Development, has won the University's 1996 International Achievement Award. She will receive the award at the Faculty/Staff Achievement Awards ceremony at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 31 at the Nittany Lion Inn.

The $1,000 award was established to recognize faculty and staff members who have contributed significantly to the international mission of the University through their research and teaching and through participation in international projects.

Dr. Barry, a sociologist, joined Penn State in 1988, having already established herself as an international researcher and women's rights activist whose work addresses the economic and social exploitation of women in various parts of the world. From her research, she has developed international public policy under the auspices of the United Nations and UNESCO; most notably, she developed a proposed new U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Sexual Exploitation.

She has initiated student and faculty exchanges and research linkages between Penn State and universities in Vietnam. She developed and led the 1993 Penn State/Vietnam seminar, "Family and the Conditions of Women in Society," held in Vietnam. Her latest book, "Vietnam's Women in Transition" (St. Martin's Press), resulted from that meeting and is an anthology of cross-cultural dialogue and research on women in Vietnam.

She developed and coordinated a 1991 Penn State conference, "Sexuality and Violence: Multicultural Feminist Perspectives," and was the 1992 keynote speaker for the Sexual Assault Awareness/Prevention Series sponsored by the Center for Women Students. She lectures widely throughout the United States and abroad.

She was a 1995 recipient of a Fulbright Award to lecture and conduct research at the University College in Dublin, Ireland, where she initiated a new research project on family modernization in Ireland. At the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in France she also undertook a 10-city university lecture tour in France, where she spoke on the history of feminism in the United States.

She was one of only two U.S. women named in 1995 by the French magazine Marie Claire as being among 100 people who have changed the world for women.

She is also the author of the books "Female Sexual Slavery" (1979), "Susan B. Anthony: A Biography" (1988), and "The Prostitution of Sexuality" (1995), all published by New York University Press. "Female Sexual Slavery" has been translated into six other languages.

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