Obama's Mother's Dissertation Set for Release

Barack Obama knows a little bit about popular writings. On Thursday, his mother's scholarly work may get similar publicity to her son's.

Duke University Press is set to release the doctoral dissertation of Ann Dunham—the president's mother, who died 14 years ago—at the American Anthropological Association conference in Philadelphia. After unveiling Dunham's writings on life in Indonesia, the university press will hold a session devoted to Dunham's life and work, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

The dissertation, which will be published under the title Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, "still definitely has a lot of relevance," Laura Sell, a Duke University Press publicist, told the Duke Chronicle in May. "We sent it out to a lot of pretty high-powered reviewers, who all said it's a worthy work of scholarship and people can learn a lot from it."

Dunham received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1992, but she had worked and studied in the field for more than a decade before that. You can read a fantastic and detailed profile of Dunham's life and influence on her son.

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