Mary Ann Maslak, Ph.D.

Professor of Education

Queens Campus:
Sullivan Hall, Room 426
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, NY 11439
(718) 990-2580

Manhattan Campus:
101 Murray Street, Suite 422
New York, NY 10007
(212) 277-5122

maslakm@stjohns.edu


 

Mary Ann Maslak is a professor of education at St. John’s University. Her research focuses on the relationships between and amongst females’ lives and formal, non-formal and informal educational opportunities and experiences. Her recent work makes use of social theory’s methodological relationism which demonstrates the ways in which agency and structure are inextricably and meaningfully integrated into the lives of girls and women. In so doing, her work seeks to reveal the dynamic interaction of both the micro and macro to help clarify and shed light on the relationship between females’ lives and education.

Her articles, book chapters, and books utilize an interdisciplinary theoretical focus and mixed methodological methods to investigate these relationships for girls and women in the China, Turkey, India, and Nepal. Several examples of her work include articles found in the International Journal of Educational Development, Education Review and Gender & Education, as well as her books, Daughters of the Tharu: Gender, ethnicity, religion and the education of Nepali girls, RoutledgeFalmer Press, 2003 and Structure and Agency: Engendering educational policies, practices and programs for adolescent girls and young women, SUNY Press 2008.

Dr. Maslak has served as the chair of the Gender and Education committee for the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES, 2001-2004), and on the organization’s Board of Directors (2005-2008). Amongst other distinctions, she was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Research Fellowship (People’s Republic of China, 2005-2006) for her project entitled “Toward Meeting National and International Goals: The Study of Gender Inequity in Chinese Ethnic Minority Communities” and a Fulbright-Hays Summer Study Fellowship for her work on women’s development in India (2005).

Dr. Maslak also teaches courses at St. John's. Most recently, she offers course on research methods and the sociology of education in the School of Education's graduate program and the methods in art and music for elementary school students in the undergraduate program. She founded and administers the Faculty Forum, a group dedicated to the dissemination and discussion of scholarly research in the School of Education.