Susan Cotts Watkins *80 Led Research on AIDS in Africa

Susan Cotts Watkins *80 came to Princeton in 1974 with her husband, a Foreign Service officer who had a fellowship at the School of Public and International Affairs. Through their global postings, Cotts Watkins — who had majored in history at Swarthmore 20 years earlier — had grown interested in what caused fertility rates to change, and she decided to audit a course in demography.

“She just totally fell in love,” says Ann Swidler, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a friend and collaborator who co-wrote with Cotts Watkins A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa (2017).

Cotts Watkins divorced and entered Princeton’s Ph.D. program in sociology. She would become a leading researcher on social networks, gender, fertility, and AIDS in Africa, making up for her late start in academia with burning curiosity and an insatiable appetite for work, according to Jane Menken *75, who began a lifelong friendship with Cotts Watkins in graduate school.

From the start, Cotts Watkins shone. Her dissertation on age patterns in European marriage, advised by preeminent European demographer Ansley Coale ’39 *47, earned her the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the Graduate School’s highest honor. Shortly after, in 1986, she co-edited with Coale The Decline of Fertility in Europe.

Cotts Watkins brought a new perspective to population work: Widespread changes in fertility had as much to do with tips and tricks moving through social networks as with medical advances.

“It was about women gathering and communicating with each other,” Swidler says. “It wasn’t a matter of technology.”

After a short stint at Yale, Cotts Watkins settled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she would spend the bulk of her career. She published an award-winning monograph on European fertility and edited a volume on early 20th-century U.S. immigration.

But she grew frustrated with historical research, yearning to ask her subjects directly about their decisions. In her mid-50s, she began to research fertility in Africa, where it was a contemporary question.

“Susan could have rested on her historical laurels but instead started a whole new career to answer questions that the historical record can’t address,” her Penn colleague Sam Preston *69 said in an obituary of Cotts Watkins.

Cotts Watkins began research in southern Malawi in 1997. As AIDS tore across Africa, HIV transmission eclipsed fertility as the focus of her work.

She quickly learned that live subjects are tricky, documenting that Africans didn’t readily open up to outside researchers about their sexual beliefs and behaviors. To obtain the accurate insights needed to slow HIV transmission, Cotts Watkins devised an innovative methodology.

She recruited locals to log in journals what they heard friends, family, and community members say about HIV, and used those journals to supplement survey data. The journal project continued for 16 years, and the surveys still run today.

The work produced valuable data that drew in collaborators, and Cotts Watkins shared generously. She would intone, almost magically, “Come to Malawi!”

Many did. Cotts Watkins expected a lot from mentees but also gave them room to pursue their own ideas. Hans-Peter Kohler, a Penn economics professor, first joined the Malawi project as a graduate student and now serves as its principal investigator.

“In some ways, Susan’s contribution was opening the doors for young scholars, myself included, and giving them the opportunity to shape a research agenda,” he says.

Cotts Watkins was a powerful personality, but she welcomed intellectual debate. “Susan loved engaging,” Swidler says. “We often disagreed in ways that were tremendously fruitful.”

Kohler received the news of Cotts Watkins’ death in August at a lodge in Malawi where the two had spent time together.

“It was very striking to get the news at a place that Susan loved,” he says, “surrounded by people who continue the work she initiated.”

Cameron Scott ’93 is a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California.