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Philip Smith

Philip Smith

Contact Information

Department of Sociology
Yale University
Office Location : 204 Prospect Street New Haven CT 06511-3553 USA
Delivery Address (for packages) : 140 Prospect Street New Haven CT 06511-8933 USA
Postal Address (all other mail) : P.O. Box 208265 New Haven CT 06520-8265 USA
Phone : +1-203-436-3773
Facsimile : +1-203-432-6976
Email :

Associate Professor of Sociology
Associate Director, Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS)

Philip Smith (Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 1993) researches in the areas of social and cultural theory, cultural sociology and criminology. Working mostly from a Durkheimian perspective, he is concerned with the role of symbolic codes, narratives, classifications, morality and rituals in social life and how these structure conflict, identity and action.

Philip Smith is author of Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez (Chicago, 2005), Punishment and Culture (Chicago, 2008), and is co-editor with Jeffrey Alexander of The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (Cambridge, 2005). He is also author of the benchmark textbook Cultural Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2001) which has been translated into Greek, Turkish, Korean and Chinese. Other textbooks include The New American Cultural Sociology (editor, Cambridge, 1998); Researching the Visual (with M. Emmison, Sage, 2000); and Law, Criminal Justice and Society (with K. Natalier, Sage, 2005). He has contributed around forty articles and chapters to venues such as: The American Journal of Sociology; British Journal of Criminology; British Journal of Sociology; The Encyclopedia of Nationalism; The Encyclopedia of Peace, Violence and Conflict; The European Sociological Review; Theory, Culture and Society; Theory and Society and The Sociological Review.

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