Elissa Koff is the Margaret Hamm Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College. She teaches courses concerned with the relationship between brain and behavior (Biological Psychology, Drugs and Behavior), and conducts research in two areas: female development and the neuropsychology of emotion. Much of her research on female development has focused on early adolescent girls, and was conducted at the Wellesley Centers for Women, in collaboration with Dr. Jill Rierdan. The bulk of this work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, as well as by grants from Wellesley College.
Dr. Koff is particularly interested in the development of body image; the effects of puberty and menarche (the onset of menstruation) on body image; the relationship of body image, pubertal status, and the development of eating disorders and depression; and other factors that might place girls at risk for developing negative body image and disordered eating- and weight-related attitudes and behaviors.
At the Wellesley Centers for Women, she studied body image and psychosocial functioning in a cross-cultural context, in collaboration with several Wellesley students. She also collaborated on a grant from the National Institute on Aging on the processing of emotion in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and was a consultant to a project known as the “Bones Project” (Beat Osteoporosis: Nourish and Exercise Skeletons), which is seeking to develop interventions to maximize bone accretion and muscular strength in 1st and 2nd grade children. She collaborated with Dr. Nancy Genero, also of the Psychology Department at Wellesley, on psychological acculturation in 7th and 8th grade Hispanic and Brazilian girls in a Framingham middle school. Among the aims of this study was the documentation of the extent of acculturation stress in these girls, and the identification of factors that either protect against, or increase the risk of, acculturation stress.
Jean Hardisty was the founder and president emerita of Political Research Associates (PRA), a Boston-based research center that analyzes right wing, authoritarian, and anti-democratic trends and publishes educational materials for the general public. A political scientist with a B.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University, she left academia after eight years of teaching and researching conservative political thought to establish PRA in response to the emergence of the New Right in 1981. After 23 years, she retired from PRA in 2004 and served as a senior scholar with the Wellesley Centers for Women until her death in March 2015.
Dr. Hardisty was a widely published author and an activist for social justice issues, especially women's rights and civil rights, for nearly four decades. She served on the Board of Directors of the Highlander Center for Research and Education, the Ms. Foundation, the Center for Community Change. and the Center for Women Policy Studies. Her book, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers, first published by Beacon Press in 1999, is available in paperback. Her most recent work, on race and child care in Mississippi, is on the WCW website.
Senior Scholar
Michelle Seligson arrived at WCW in the fall of 1978 to begin work on a national research and action project on afterschool programs, for which she received a small Ford Foundation grant. Originally titled The School-Age Child Care Project, it is now known as the National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST). This work grew out of Seligson’s several years of community organizing and program development for the Town of Brookline where she was the assistant director of the Town's Human Relations/Youth Resources Commission. In that role she helped parents and others start afterschool programs in the public schools. When two mass-market magazines wrote about the Brookline programs, Seligson received thousands of letters from across the county, leading to her bringing the School-Age Child Care Project to WCW.
After more than 20 years as founding director of NIOST conducting research, technical assistance, training, and advocacy to stimulate more development of programs and policy in afterschool programs, Seligson began a new project at the Centers. This project, Bringing Yourself To Work: Caregiving in After School Programs, produced a book, Bringing Yourself to Work: A Guide to Successful Staff Development in After-School Programs (Columbia University, 2003), and a training program geared to adults who work with children. Its intellectual base is social-emotional learning and relational-cultural theory, among other theory frameworks.
Seligson has co-authored a number of publications through the years, beginning with School-Age Child Care: An Action Manual in 1982. During the mid-eighties, she embarked on an investigation of early childhood programs and the role of public schools, and this resulted in a book titled Early Childhood Programs and the Public Schools: Between Promise and Practice.
Seligson’s work at WCW reflects an interest and abiding belief in the power of good ideas to attract others to solve problems and a recognition that it takes at least 20 years to create a movement and a context in which that can happen.
In late September 2000, she embarked on a new venture in addition to her work on the Bringing Yourself to Work Project. She was accepted into the analytic training program at the Boston Jung Institute and participate in seminars and other activities associated with becoming a Jungian analyst. In 2003 she began collaborating on a documentary about mothers who are also women artists which is set for release in January 2008. Seligson retired from WCW in the summer of 2007.
Other interests have always been in the literary area—reading novels and writing poems, something she has done since adolescence. She is a swimmer, walker, and unabashed lover of her cat, Shadow. She is proud of her two adult children and their different life choices--one an attorney, and the other a musician and composer.
Former Associate Director
Director Emerita
Work, Families, & Children Research Group
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