Ilsa S. Lottes has spent nearly six decades circling a single, deceptively difficult question. How do you measure something as contested, and as easy to invoke and hard to define, as a right? It is a question she has asked as a mathematician, a statistician, a sexologist, and, most recently, as the author of a book turning that same empirical instinct on the state of human welfare in America.
Her path there was anything but linear. Lottes began her academic life in mathematics, earning a B.S. from Purdue University in 1965, graduating with distinction in the School of Science, followed by an M.S. in 1967. For the next several years, she taught mathematics in classrooms in Indiana and Pennsylvania, work that included designing curricula and authoring instructional manuals for the Hatboro-Horsham School District outside Philadelphia.
It was a solid, useful career, and she might have stayed in it. Instead, in the early 1980s, she found her way to the University of Pennsylvania, where she began work as a research methodologist and statistical consultant for graduate students in Penn’s sexuality program. That role became early evidence of the pairing that would define her scholarship, applying rigorous measurement to subjects most people treat as matters of opinion. She completed her Ph.D. in Measurement and Evaluation at Penn in 1986, earning a meritorious rating on her dissertation and oral defense.
From there, Lottes moved to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as an assistant professor in 1988. She would remain at UMBC for the rest of her academic career, rising to associate professor in 1995 and to full professor in 2011, a tenure spanning more than three decades in which she taught courses in research methodology, statistics, marriage and family, and, most distinctively, sexuality in sociological and cross-cultural perspective.
It was at UMBC that Lottes built the research program that would define much of her later career. She led a sustained effort to define and measure what she came to call sexual rights, treating a concept usually left to advocacy rhetoric as something that could be operationalized, surveyed, and compared across populations. Her 2003 paper with Charles Adkins on the properties of a sexual rights instrument, and her 2013 article in the Journal of Sex Research, “Sexual Rights: Meanings, Controversies and Sexual Health Promotion,” were frequently cited by other researchers in the field. Her 2011 study with Tapani Alkula mapped sexuality-related attitudes across 32 European countries.
Much of that comparative instinct was sharpened abroad. Lottes held visiting faculty appointments in the Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki in the late 1990s and again in the mid-2000s. In 2012, she was named a Fulbright Specialist at Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, returning as a consultant the following year. Her co-edited volume with Osmo Kontula, New Views of Sexual Health: The Case of Finland, published in both English and Finnish, grew directly out of those years of collaboration, and out of a conviction, she has said, that no single country’s assumptions about health, rights, or policy are the only ones worth taking seriously.
Lottes was, throughout, as devoted to mentorship as to research. Over more than two decades, she chaired or served on committees for dozens of master’s and doctoral students in UMBC’s Applied Sociology and Public Policy programs, and mentored undergraduates through the university’s research and creative achievement program, several of whom went on to co-present findings at national conferences. She served on UMBC’s Institutional Review Board, sat on the Faculty Senate, and has served on the editorial board of Sexuality Research and Social Policy since 2005.
That long record of measuring rights, mentoring researchers, and comparing nations converges in her latest project. In Quality of Life and Human Rights Policies in the U.S., Lottes applies the same empirical discipline she brought to sexual rights to a broader subject, the state of human welfare across the United States, examined through internationally recognized human rights frameworks. It is, in many ways, the natural culmination of a career spent insisting that rights are not simply claims people make, but conditions that can be defined, counted, and evaluated.
The book is available on Amazon.
