Department of Sociology

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.