Susan Cotts Watkins died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Santa Monica on August 26, 2024, at the age of 85. She had joined the IUSSP in 1981 and served as a member of the Committee on Anthropological Demography (1998-2002).
Susan was an eminent demographer and sociologist and a leader in research on social networks, gender, fertility, and AIDS in Africa. She spent her professional life trying to unravel the mysteries of dramatic, widespread, and consequential changes in sex and death: first the historical declines in fertility in Europe and the U.S., then the global spread of fertility control, and finally the role of informal social networks in responses to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. She served as President of the Social Science History Association in 1993-4, Vice President of the Population Association of America (PAA) in 2000, and, in 2005, was awarded the Irene Taeuber Award by the PAA for exceptionally sound and innovative research.
Susan graduated from Swarthmore in 1960. She married soon after, travelled with her husband on diplomatic assignments around the world, and had two children before enrolling in graduate school to study demography and sociology at Princeton University, where she earned her PhD in 1980. Although her initial academic appointment was in the Department of Sociology at Yale University, her professional home for most of her career was as a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania (1982-2007). In 2007 she moved to Santa Monica to be closer to her family and became a Visiting Scholar at the California Center for Population Research, University of California, Los Angeles.
As a graduate student at Princeton, Susan worked with Ansley Coale on the European Fertility Project where they established the importance of understanding historical fertility transitions. She demonstrated that what’s important is not just the changing number of children ever born, but the ideas that influence these decisions. These collaborative efforts came to fruition under their co-edited book The Decline of Fertility in Europe.
In her early years at Penn, Susan expanded her vision, delving deeply into the ways that culture and attitudes shaped demographic outcomes. Her widely praised From Provinces into Nations (1991) was innovative both theoretically and empirically. It documented the growing homogeneity of demographic processes within countries in Western Europe and the growing demographic differences across borders as nation states consolidated culturally. The book earned the First Annual Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Population Section in 1992. Then, along with Penn colleagues, she turned to important topics in U.S. demographic history including a deep examination of a unique sample of the 1910 U.S. population. This project culminated in the edited After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (1994). In work that prefigured her work in Malawi, she interviewed older women in the Philadelphia area to understand cultural attitudes, leading to two important articles, one about childhood healthcare practices in the early 20th century (1994, with Alice Goldstein and Ann Rosen Spector), and another about women’s gossip networks and fertility change (1995, with Angela Danzi).
The subjects of her historical projects couldn’t tell their stories, however, so Susan made a remarkable pivot in the second half of her career – at the age of 56 – to study fertility in Africa. In the words of Sam Preston, “Susan could have rested on her historical laurels but instead started a whole new career to answer questions that the historical record can't address.” In Africa, she could talk to, and more importantly listen to, people about how they made decisions about childbearing. With funding from the NIH, she began this work in Kenya, designing a longitudinal survey along with in-depth qualitative fieldwork (1994-2000), and subsequently moved the project to Malawi (1997-2015). Susan quickly realized that HIV on the continent was becoming a massive, deadly scourge at a scale unprecedented in modern times, affecting every aspect of African life, and it became the central focus of the rest of her career.
It was around this time that Susan began to develop and use an innovative adaptation of classical ethnography, employing unique methodological approaches to understanding everyday conversations around the AIDS epidemic. This approach grew from her long interest in social networks and gossip as ways that social information and ideas travelled and her growing frustration with the limitations imposed by survey and interview methods for capturing the content of those interactions. In the southern district of Malawi, which became her home base upon her regular visits, she worked closely with local researchers, asking them to write down conversations that they overheard about life, sex, and HIV in their day-to-day comings and goings: at the bus stop, the hair salon, the market, or the clinic.
Through this practice, these local ‘cultural insiders’ became journalists of who-said-what-to-whom in conversations that they overheard or participated in. Their careful recollections of everyday conversations grew into the Malawi Journal Project (1999-2015), a treasure trove of rich documentation of how Malawians’ conversations about and strategies towards HIV changed over the height of the AIDS epidemic. A key focus of the journals was gossip and how Malawians used it to develop strategies to avoid and to cope with HIV. This method has been adopted by scholars who want to know what people say to each other, not just what they say to researchers, and was featured on an episode of “This American Life.”
True to her brilliant intellectual adventurousness, in later years Susan turned her attention to a critical analysis of the enterprise of international development and received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 to develop this area of research. Until a few years before her death, she continued to write and publish prolifically with her collaborators, notably publishing with Ann Swidler, A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa (2017), a project of which she was particularly proud. In the book, Ann and Susan describe the contradictions in the efforts of deep-pocket donors and individual volunteers from foreign countries to turn the tide of the AIDS epidemic in Malawi and to postpone the deaths of those who are HIV positive.
In addition to her academic writings, Watkins’ intellectual contributions are carried forward through her numerous collaborators and mentees. She famously invited graduate students and faculty to Malawi to help with fieldwork whenever she had the chance and contributed to mentoring many dozens of graduate students from her home institutions and ones further afield. Neither of us were (initially) students in her program, and yet she left an indelible mark on us, shaping the types of research questions we ask and how we answer them. She also mentored scores of Malawian researchers, interviewers, and local ethnographers, many of whom affectionately called her gogo (grandmother).
Susan had and continued to develop many joys in her personal life, including murder mysteries, swimming, movies, Rachel Maddow and Trevor Noah, and, in later years, European soccer. She loved nothing more than a night at the opera and a weekend with friends and family at the family cottage in Bethany Beach, Delaware. She is survived by her brother, Gerald Cotts; her sister, Virginia Cotts; daughter, Katherine Watkins; son, Timothy Watkins; and four grandchildren.
Michelle Poulin, University of California, Berkeley
Sara Yeatman, University of Colorado, Denver