Recent Placements
Cassie Hays
Postdoctoral Fellow, Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia
Dissertation Topic: A Sociology of Safari: Native, Nature and Nomos in Tanzanian Conservation.
Research interests: Cassie's dissertation, a social history of the East African safari, examines events and technologies on tour that not only explicate the culture of the Tanzanian safari but convey the normative contours of broader American society. Specifically, it investigates the perceived boundaries between external and internal nature as they are mediated by history, technology, and narrative. Since before the African colonial era, technology has allowed American and European travelers to interface with a place and people different from their own, establishing a scrim between visitors and visited. The narratives accompanying these technologies signify the value of timelessness, placelessness, violence, and an imagined safari community in conceiving of Africa, Africans, and African nature—including Nature and 'native' or 'other' more generally. This dissertation further depicts the many ways in which Tanzanians seek to challenge or subvert technological domination and its related narratives. Ultimately, it is an allegory about the need to examine movement rather than stasis, a call to explore social norms and attributes in travel, rather than at home.
The book is structured by the narrative of safari, with chapters devoted to mass media, automobility, performing the park, photography, cultural tourism, and the transnational souvenir. Cassie's field work has employed a range of interdisciplinary methods, including semi-structured interviews and ethnographic research in English and Kiswahili, photographic ethnography and documentation, and archival study in Tanzania and the United Kingdom. In the 2007-08 academic year, Cassie's dissertation writing was supported by a Yale Leylan Dissertation Writing Fellowship in the Social Sciences. Her 2006 dissertation research in Tanzania was funded by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship and a National Science Foundation DDRI grant. Pre-dissertation and Master's research in Tanzania and the United Kingdom were funded by two Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships as well as grants from various centers at Yale, including the Summer Language Institute, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Program in Agrarian Studies, the Tropical Resources Institute, and the Ford Foundation's 'Revitalizing Area Studies' Program. Cassie currently teaches in Mt. Holyoke College's Department of Sociology and Anthropology as a full-time Visiting Lecturer. She is a fellow at Yale's Center for Comparative Research.
Education: B.A., High Honors in the Biological Sciences, Smith College (1999); M.E.S., Environmental Science, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University (2002); M.A., Sociology, Yale University (2004); M.Phil., Sociology, Yale University (2005); Ph.D., Sociology, Yale University (expected, 2009).
Ben Herzog
Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College
My primary teaching and research interests are: Sociology of Law, immigration and Citizenship; Qualitative and Comparative Historical Methods; Political Sociology; and American and Canadian History and Politics. Recently, my dissertation The Loss of Citizenship: The Regulation of Loyalty in “Immigration Countries” in Sociology at Yale University was approved, and I began my appointment as a visiting assistant professor at Dartmouth College.
My doctoral dissertation analyzes the changing perception of citizenship in the contemporary global world. I compare the policies of three democratic states that revoke citizenship from their subjects – The United States, Canada and Israel. The puzzle addressed is why such policy exists and why it changes. After analyzing Congressional (Parliamentary) documents in the three countries, I argue that expatriation policy is an attempt to regulate and enforce the national world order. The practice of taking away citizenship was mainly introduced to eliminate dual citizenship which poses a great challenge to the national logic that assumes full loyalty to one’s nation-state.
While there is a clear link between the belief in a national world order and the initiation of expatriation policies, I found that there is not one unique factor that has dictated the abandonment of expatriation practices in different countries. While the revocation of citizenship laws in the United States has shifted in accordance with real (or imaginary) threats, Israel has shaped its policy around the need to incorporate maximum numbers of Jewish immigrants into the newly established state. Conversely, following transnational processes, Canada has adopted a lenient attitude toward dual nationality which in turn removed the main grounds for expatriation. I argue that states do not restrict their expatriation policies as they suddenly accept multiple national allegiances. Accommodating dual citizenship, which has been partially adopted in Israel, formally legislated in Canada and is tolerated in the United States, is not directly related to a specific ideology but is a practical response to transnational migration and particular national stresses.
Selected publications:
Herzog, Ben. Forthcoming in 2010. “The Revocation of Citizenship in Israel.” Israel Studies Forum 25 (1).
Herzog, Ben. Forthcoming in 2009. “The Road to Israeli Citizenship – the Case of the South Lebanese Army (SLA).” Citizenship Studies 13 (6).
Herzog, Ben. 2009. “Between Nationalism and Humanitarianism: The Global Discourse on Refugees.” Nations and Nationalism 15 (2) 185-205.
Education: B.A. Sociology and Political Science - Tel Aviv University (2000); M.A. Sociology, with distinction - Tel Aviv University (2003); M.A. Sociology - Yale University (2004); M.Phil. Sociology - Yale University (2007); Ph.D. Sociology - Yale University (approved by committee 2009).
Kevin Irwin
Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Connecticut College
Dissertation topic: “The Context of HIV Transmission Among Injection Drug Users in Russia.”
Research interests: My work is best described as public health sociology. I am a Research Associate at the Yale School of Public Health, and a member of the Methods and Biostatistics Core of the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). My efforts lie at the intersections of deviance and health sociologies, focusing on disease prevention and health improvement for high risk groups like drug users and sex workers. I have previously conducted field research on opiate misuse in rural Maine, peer-driven interventions for crack users, drug users syringe access and injection practices, and participated in a number of community-led AIDS prevention projects. In clinical settings I have studied the feasibility of non-occupational post-exposure HIV prophylaxis, and investigated patient and provider satisfaction with buprenorphine therapy. I am a consultant for the California Department of Health Services, Office of AIDS (DHS/OA) for the initiative; Peer-Based HIV Prevention among Injection Drug Users and Satellite Syringe Exchangers. As an outgrowth of these activities, I am a co-investigator for the Study of Research Ethics with Active Users of Illicit Drugs aimed at developing resources for researchers and strengthening the capacity of Institutional Review Boards in the design and execution of research with out of treatment drug users (supported by the Donaghue Initiative at Yale). My dissertation is drawn from my current work as Field Team Coordinator for the study HIV Transmission in Russia through Liquid Drug Manufacture and Injection, an interdisciplinary, twelve-city study of homemade drug manufacture, use, and consequences. In India, I am the project director for Understanding HIV-Relevant Stigma in Health Care Settings in Pune, India, an in-depth examination of HIV/AIDS stigmatization in three government hospitals. I am also the research coordinator for the evaluation of community-led structural interventions with high-risk groups in India (supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).
Education: B.A. summa cum laude (Syracuse University); M.A. Sociology (Yale University)
Lisa McCormick
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Haverford College, Haverford, PA
Dissertation topic: “De-fusing the Elements of Musical Performance: A Cultural Sociology of the International Music Competition.”
Research interests: Lisa is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Yale. The aim of her dissertation is to develop a new theoretical framework that approaches musical performance as a mode of social performance. This new approach will be elaborated through the analysis of a particular context for musical performance: the international music competition. Through a combination of methods and the comparison of case studies, her research explores the cultural contradictions of the music competition event, the social construction of the performer, competing images of musical genius, the cultural logic of musical judgement, and the problems of musical performance. An accomplished cellist and proponent of new music, Lisa has participated in new music programmes at the Aspen Music Festival, the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies, and has performed in the Warsaw Autumn Festival. After completing a B.Mus and a B.A. at Rice University, she attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar (1998 Prairies & Corpus Christi). Her Master’s thesis, “Hommages à Sacher: A Case Study in the Commissioning, Composition, and Performance of New Music in the 1970s” investigated the artistic collaboration and social circumstances that produced twelve important new works for solo cello. Her areas of interest include cultural sociology, the sociology of music, and social theory. Lisa is co-editor (with Ron Eyerman) of Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, a collection of path-breaking essays published by Paradigm Press.
Education: B.A. Sociology, summa cum laude, and B.Mus. Cello Performance, summa cum laude (Rice University); M.Phil. Music Performance & Interpretation (University of Oxford); M.A. and M.Phil. Sociology (Yale University)
Isaac Reed
Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder (Fall, 2007)
Dissertation topic: “Meaning and Social Knowledge: The Interpretive Logics of Sociological Explanation.”
Research interests: Isaac Reed is Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at Yale, who has published in the fields of sociological theory and cultural sociology, and is currently conducting research in historical sociology and the sociology of sex and gender. His dissertation concerns the theoretical logic of interpretive sociology, and aims to provide a new epistemological footing for qualitative, cultural, and historical work in the social sciences. In it, he develops “interpretive explanation” as model for sociological knowledge explicitly differentiated from positivism and scientific realism. His case study of the Salem Witch Trials operationalizes this theoretical framework by developing an explanation of the Trials which focuses on tensions in the Puritain religious system, the performance of gender in public spaces, and the emergence of skeptical discourse concerning the trials in Boston. The study thus connects to larger theoretical questions concerning gender, rationality, and the public sphere.
Education: B.A. Mathematics, and Sociology & Anthropology (Swarthmore College); Phi Beta Kappa
Sebastian Schnettler
Starting Jan. 2010: Research Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
Research interests: Sebastian Schnettler, Fellow of the Center for Research on Inequality and the Life Course (CIQLE). Previously worked as research assistant in the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and the German Center for Gerontology (DZA), and as teaching assistant at Free University Berlin where he taught an undergraduate course on social structure for 2.5 years. In a one-year traineeship he also gained experience as a consultant and researcher for non-profit organizations and industry associations in Washington, DC. His primary interests are in life course sociology, social inequality, biosociology, network analysis, survey methodology, and social mechanisms. For his Master’s thesis he compared the social support networks of childless individuals with those of parents, drawing on data from the first wave of the German Aging Study, a dataset on the situation of the German population aged 40 to 85. He has since continued working on this topic and is currently writing a paper that looks at the situation of the childless in more detail and also incorporates data from the second wave of the same study. Sebastian is writing his dissertation on differential parental treatment, focussing particularly on the causes of why parents would treat their children differently. For this project he uses data from the genetic sample of the Adolescent Health Study and compares parent-offspring dyads within and across families to test biological, economic, and sociological hypotheses on the parental motivations to invest differentially in their children.
Education: M.Phil. Sociology, Yale University, 2008; M.A. Sociology, Yale University, 2006; Diplom Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin, 2003; Erasmus Exchange Semester, Lunds Universitet, 2000
Selected Recent Publications:
Schnettler, S. (2009): “A structured overview of 50 years of small-world research.” Social Networks., doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2008.12.004
Schnettler, S. (2009): “A small world on feet of clay? A comparison of empirical small-world studies against best-practice criteria.” Social Networks. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2008.12.005.
Schnettler, S. (2008): “Ohne Kinder alt werden. Die sozialen Unterstützungsbeziehungen von Kinderlosen und Eltern in Deutschland. [“Aging without children. The social support relations of the childless and parents in Germany.”] Saarbrücken: VDM.
Anthony Spires
Assistant Professor of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Fall, 2007)
Dissertation topic: “Between Domestic Constraints and Foreign ‘Help:’ The Development of Grassroots NGOs and Civil Society in China.”
Research interests: Anthony J. Spires is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. His dissertation examines the development of Chinese grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the context of globalization. Drawing upon 14 months of extensive ground-level research in China’s Guangdong province and another six months in the US, his dissertation analyzes how grassroots NGOs are able to emerge and survive in a hostile political environment. Through intensive participant observation as a volunteer, he further examines the potential of grassroots NGOs for nurturing democratic skills and values in their members. A third component of his project investigates the ties of Chinese NGOs to major agents of global civil society, such as foreign foundations, to assess the impact that resources and experience from outside China are having on local NGOs. Using this inside-outside dual-perspective approach, his research speaks directly to key sociological debates about the implications of civil society growth in China and how globalization may stimulate social and political change in an authoritarian state.
Education: B.A. Asian Studies (Occidental College); M.A. East Asian Studies, M.A. and M.Phil. Sociology (Yale University)
Katarzyna Wilk
Political Adviser, Bureau of European Policy Advisers, European Commission
Dissertation topic: “Attitudes Toward European Integration in Old and New Member States: Effects of Social Class, Generation, and Gender and How Post-Communist Multiple Transitions Influence Those Effects.”
Research interests: Katarzyna Wilk is a Ph.D. candidate. Her dissertation research, based on survey data, investigates how the multiple post-communist transitions modify effects of class, gender, generation and political value on attitudes to the EU among new member states. The qualitative part of her dissertation focuses on mechanisms shaping those attitudes across different generations and social classes in two post-communist countries, Hungary and Poland. Katarzyna’s other interests include: cross-national comparative methods, quantitative and qualitative research design, and statistical methods.
Education: M.A. Sociology, magna cum laude (Warsaw University); M.A. Economics, magna cum laude (Warsaw School of Economics); M.A. and M.Phil. Sociology (Yale University)
Julia Zhang
Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois, Springfield (Fall, 2007)
Dissertation topic: “Contested Modernity: Chinese Avant-Garde in Transition, 1979–2006.”
Research interests: Julia Zhang is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Yale. Julia’s long-standing research interests include, but not limited to classical and contemporary cultural theory, cultural sociology, sociology of the arts which mostly concerns a new, meaning-centered approach of examining the relationship between cultural production and the social structure; aiming at combining the unpacking of the complex symbolic meaning and formal quality embedded in works of art and the necessary examination of the field of artistic production, to understand both the larger social processes in which art is produced. The other common thread among her past researches is an area focus on modern and contemporary Chinese society, with special attention given to Chinese intellectual history.
Her dissertation is a cultural sociological study of how the market economy and globalization gradually transformed the production, circulation and reception of Chinese Avant-Garde art in the past 25 years and how Chinese Avant-Garde artists — active agents from the previously politically charged dissident aesthetic movement of the late 1970s — actively evolved their artistic styles as well as their role in the society to adapt to a new social reality. The theoretical implication of this investigation is to transcend the limits of the Bourdieuian approach of seeing cultural production as a mechanism crudely governed by economic logic (as is or reversed) by acknowledging the larger historical processes which are often idealist and normative in nature, while still being able to incorporate the necessary intelligence of understanding the cultural creator’s social ambitions as well as the immediate micro-structural frameworks within which they operate (Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” is thus reflexively retained). On the one hand, she uses criticisms of Adorno, Bourdieu, Bataille, Said, Bhabha and others to examine the subject position of Chinese contemporary artists, their strategies to survive and obtain recognition, the social value of their works, as well as the process of producing, exhibiting and disseminating their works in an unprecedented global economy in which everyone (be it the state, the gallerist, the curator, the auction houses, the audience) is a stakeholder; on the other hand, she evokes the theories of the neo-Durkheimian School in Cultural Sociology to illustrate the idealist, normative dimensions of this development.
Fellowships: Enders Research Fund; Yale Yung-Wing Presidential Fellowship; Henry. H. L. Fan Doctoral Fellowship; Yale Council on East Asian Studies Dissertation Fellowship.
Areas of Specialization: Cultural Sociology, Social and Cultural Theory, Comparative Social Change, Contemporary Chinese Society, Chinese Intellectual History and Visual Culture.
Education: B.A. Sociology, Honors (Nanjing University); M.A. and M.Phil. Sociology (Yale Univerisity).