Department of Sociology

Research interests: Cultural sociology, organizations, morality, identity processes.

Sorcha Brophy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale University and a junior fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology and the Center for Comparative Research. Her research focuses on how ideas about morality diffuse throughout culture, and on how moral frameworks provide resources for group identity.

Her dissertation project examines institutional processes of “moral review” in two diverse settings: the American medical field and a large Protestant denomination. This project investigates how institutionally-embedded actors tasked with determining standards of behaviors and practices--such as those on ethics committees and regulatory boards--make determinations of right/wrong, good/bad, and on the extent to which these “official” frameworks diffuse throughout these domains.

Sorcha holds an AB in the Comparative Study of Religion (with high honors) from Harvard University, and an MA and MPhil from Yale University.