Stjepan Meštrović

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Dr. Stjepan Gabrijel Meštrović (1955- ) (known as Steve Dudley, 1963-1979 ) is an American sociologist, professor, author of over fifteen books[1] and a distinguished expert in matters of war crimes. He testified on the trials regarding Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[2]

His latest book The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor is an account of the reality of the trials on which he served as an expert witness.[3]

Meštrović is presently a sociology professor at Texas A&M University and holds three degrees from Harvard University and a Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University.

His mother was a mentally challenged woman, and his father was an alcoholic who killed himself, leaving Stjepan and his brother Domingo, who had serious physical disabilities, in poverty. Later, Stjepan was abused by his stepfather. For a number of years, Stjepan changed his name to Steve Dudley. [4] He is a grandson of the renowned American and Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, whom he saw only once in his life. His names bears strong symbolism: the Greek name Stjepan means "wreath," and the Jewish name Gabriel means "strong man of God".

His best known book, Genocide after Emotion(1996) is an anthology edited by him . It attempts to resolve the contrasts of social upheaval and warfare, confusions of histories and manipulations of reality by introducing a theoretical construct he calls ‘postemotionalism’, which he considers to be a more appropriate term than postmodernism to ‘capture the fission, Balkanization, ethnic violence and other highly emotional phenomena of the late 1990s’.[5] The anthology contains a wide variety of interpretations and responses to the break-up of Yugoslavia, including a historical outline and analysis of the conflict through the Austro—Hungarian and Ottoman empires, responses and representations by the American media, and psychoanalytical interpretations of Serb—Croat ‘otherness’.

Books[6]

Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology, 1988.

The Coming Fin de Siecle: An Application of Durkheim's Sociology to Modernity and Postmodernity, 1991.

Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, 1992.

The Road From Paradise: The Possibility of Democracy in Eastern Europe, 1993.

Habits of the Balkan Heart: Social Character and the Fall of Communism, 1993.

The Barbarian Temperament: Towards a Postmodern Critical Theory, 1993

The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism With Postcommunism, 1994

Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist,1998

Genocide After Emotion: The Postemotional Balkan War, 1996

Postemotional Society, 1997

This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (co-edited with Thomas Cushman), 1996

The Conceit of Innocence: How the Conscience of the West was Lost in the War against Bosnia, 1997

Thorstein Veblen on Theory, Culture and Society, 2004.

The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor, 2007

Heart of Stone: My Grandfather, Ivan Mestrovic (in Croatian), 2007


[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Frank Elwell, Rogers State University
  2. ^ UWIRE: The Content Generation
  3. ^ Texas Lutheran University Events
  4. ^ UWIRE: The Content Generation
  5. ^ ?
  6. ^ http://sociweb.tamu.edu/faculty/mestrovic/vitaec.doc