Mary Shenk

During her time at CASBS, Mary Shenk will focus on a book on the evolution of marriage as species-typical behavior that emerged deep in human evolutionary history to solve a series of complex and interrelated adaptive problems. The text will weave together four threads of inquiry: historical and contemporary theories of marriage, the historical and cross-cultural record of marriage practices (including her own two decades of marriage research), evolutionary ecology research on pair-bonding, parenting, and cooperation across species (birds, mammals, humans and other primates), and cultural evolutionary approaches to the development of institutions.

Shenk is an anthropologist and demographer whose work has focused on understanding shifting patterns of fertility, marriage, family, and kinship systems with economic development and market integration. She has conducted field research on the economics of marriage and parental investment in urban South India; the causes of rapid fertility decline in rural Bangladesh; the effects of economic development on wealth, social networks, and health in Bangladesh and China; and the mechanisms underlying the relationships between religiosity, fertility, and child outcomes. She has published over 60 articles, and her work has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the John S. Templeton Foundation. She is currently professor of anthropology, demography, and Asian studies at The Pennsylvania State University.  She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington.