News Archive
See the Yale Sociology front page for the latest Department news. Current and past news items and announcements are archived below.
Stanton Wheeler Dies at 77
December 10, 2007 On Friday, very unexpectedly, Stanton Wheeler, The Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of Law and Social Sciences, died. Stan joined Yale in 1968 and achieved a stellar reputation, among else, in the Sociology of Law, especially White Collar Crime, Adult Socialization, and the Sociology of Sports. From 1984 to 1991, he served as Member and Chair of the National Academy of Sciences on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. In 1985, he served as the President of the Amateur Athletics Foundation of Los Angeles. He was a highly respected and truly beloved member of our department whom we will greatly miss. I have conveyed the condolences of all of us to his wife Marcia Chambers. Uli Mayer
Yale Law School Mourns Death of Professor Stanton Wheeler
Professor Immanuel Wallerstein Lecture: “Yesteryear: The Days of Glory of the African Liberation Movements” · December 7th, 2007
December 3, 2007 On Friday, December 7th, Yale University Library presents Professor Immanuel Wallerstein: “Yesteryear: The Days of Glory of the African Liberation Movements” (Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall Street, 4 p.m.). This Lecture is Free and Open to the Public. Reception to Follow. Please enter the library via Wall Street. Presented in conjunction with the exhibit AMANDLA! Southern African Liberation Posters from the Collection of Immanuel Wallerstein. Memorabilia Room, Sterling Memorial Library. www.library.yale.edu
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Department of Sociology Holiday Party · December 13th, 2007
November 8, 2007 Eat, Drink and Be Merry. You are cordially invited to the Department of Sociology Holiday Party on Thursday, December 13th, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, SOM Dining Hall (opposite Williams Hall). Family and friends invited. Be sure to bring your children. Please RSVP to: ann.fitzpatrick@yale.edu
CIQLE Workshop: Introduction to Causal Inference for Time-Varying Treatments · November 10, 2007
October 5, 2007 This one-day workshop provides a broad conceptual introduction to counterfactual causal inference for time-varying treatments as developed by Jamie Robins and colleagues in biostatistics. The workshop starts with a refresher lecture on the basics of the counterfactual approach (potential outcomes, fundamental problem of causal inference, experimental analogy, matching). Next, it introduces Judea Pearl’s directed acyclic graphs (DAG) as a powerful and remarkably intuitive tool for deriving non-parametric identification results for a wide range of causal questions. Finally, the workshop uses DAGs to explain the particular challenge of causal inference for time-varying treatments, the inadequacy of standard regression models, and intuition for one solution (marginal structural models and inverse probability of treatment weighting). For more details, visit the CIQLE Workshop page.
Hollingshead Lecture: Hans Joas · November 2, 2007
September 12, 2007 On Friday, November 2, Hans Joas will deliver the Department's annual Hollingshead Lecture, with a talk entitled “Violence and Human Dignity: The Experience of Violence and the Genesis of Values” (HGS Room 211, 320 York Street, 5-6:30 p.m.). Professor Joas is Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany.
Department of Sociology Reception · September 23, 2007
September 12, 2007 On Sunday, September 23rd, 4:00-6:00pm, the Department of Sociology welcomes Professors Elijah Anderson and Richard Breen, the new graduate students, new staff, and our visitors to celebrate the beginning of the fall semester. Presidents' Room, Memorial Hall (corner of Grove and College). Spouses and Guests welcome. RSVP: 203-432-3320 or ann.fitzpatrick@yale.edu.
Elijah Anderson Joins Yale Sociology Faculty
July 1, 2007 Elijah Anderson joined the Department of Sociology in July, 2007. He is one of the nation’s most respected and influential sociologists in the field of black urban studies. Anderson is the author, among many other publications, of A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (1978; 2nd ed. 2002), Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (1990) and The Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999). He is currently working on a monograph on the black middle class. Before coming to Yale, Anderson was the Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he first began teaching in 1975. Prior to his appointment at Penn, he taught at Swarthmore College. Among the awards and honors Anderson has received are the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2000 Komarovsky Award. He was also named the Robin M. Williams, Jr., Distinguished Lecturer for 1999–2000 by the Eastern Sociological Association. He has served as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. (See also: Philadelphia Inquirer story.)
Vida Maralani Joins Yale Sociology Faculty
July 1, 2007 Vida Maralani will join the Department of Sociology beginning July 1, 2008. She received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. She is currently Robert Wood Johnson Health and Science Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Vida will join Hannah Brückner, Averil Clarke, Richard Breen and Uli Mayer in the quantitative training of both undergraduate and graduate students. She combines expertise in the areas of social stratification and demography with highly advanced competence in statistical methods and formal models. Her pathbreaking work on the racial gaps in educational attainment succeeds for the first time in merging individual level models on the intergenerational effects on women’s educational attainment with aggregate models on fertility regimes. In addition she has done significant work on college transitions, as well as legal custody effects.
Hannah Brueckner Promoted to Professor
July 1, 2007 Hannah Brückner has been promoted to Full Professor effective on July 1, 2007. Beginning next term she will also take over from Ivan Szelényi as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Hannah Brueckner received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000. She taught and conducted research at The Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Columbia University. She joined our department in 2000. Her major research areas are gender, labor markets, inequality, social networks of adolescents, sexuality as well as women’s careers in science. She is an expert in the methodology of large-scale longitudinal studies. Hannah Brückner is the author of Gender Inequality in the Life Course: Social Change and Stability in West Germany, 1975–1995 (2004) and co-author of “After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges” (2005), “Opposite-Sex Twins and Adolescent Same-Sex Attraction” (2002) and “Promising the Future: Abstinence Pledges and the Transition to First Intercourse” (2001). In 2006 Brückner was awarded the Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship which she has used for advanced study in epidemiology and genetics.
Linz Symposium · January 20, 2007
December 26, 2006 A symposium honoring Juan José Linz, Sterling Professor of Political and Social Sciences, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, January 20, 2007. This event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of Political Science, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Event details…
Hollingshead Lecture: Frances Fox Piven, October 27
October 6, 2006 On October 27 Frances Fox Piven will deliver the Department’s annual Hollingshead Lecture, with a talk entitled “Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America” (HGS Room 211, 320 York Street, 4-5:30 p.m.). Professor Piven is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. She is the author, with Richard Cloward, of Poor People’s Movements (1978) and Regulating the Poor (1993). Her most recent books are Challenging Authority (2006) and The War at Home (2006).
Richard Breen Joins Yale Faculty
September 15, 2006 Richard Breen joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology beginning in the Spring Semester of 2007. Professor Breen is an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy — the National Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences. His most recent book publication is Social Mobility in Europe (2004). Professor Breen is an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy — the National Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences. His most recent book publication is Social Mobility in Europe (2004).
Criminologist Albert Reiss Dies at 83
May 5, 2006. Updated: May 26, 2006 William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology Emeritus Albert J. Reiss, Jr. died on April 27, 2006 at the age of 83. An essay honoring Professor Reiss and his work on policing is published in the Yale Bulletin and Calendar, “In Memoriam: Albert J. Reiss Jr.,” and an obituary discussing his work on violence is provided by Lawrence W. Sherman (University of Pennsylvania), “Criminologist Albert Reiss Dies at 83 [pdf].”
CCS Conference: “Reality, Representation, Solidarity” (April 22, 2006)
April 8, 2006 On April 22, the CCS Spring Conference for 2006 will feature papers focusing on multiple solidarities and ways that representations mediate our construction of reality in everyday life, the mass media and social theory. See the CCS Conference 2006 page for details.
CIQLE Workshop: “Longitudinal Data Analysis” (March 24 and 25, 2006)
February 2, 2006 Longitudinal data has become increasingly important in social science research. This workshop provides basic data management skills as well as an introduction to event history analysis and panel regression, with a special emphasis on event history analysis. Data from the German Life History Study will be provided for hands-on exercises. See the CIQLE Events page for details.
Conference: “Creating Poverty and Wealth in Contemporary China” (January 6–8, 2006)
November, 2005 The Yale Sociology Department, along with the Council of East Asian Studies, will host “Creating Poverty and Wealth in Contemporary China” in early January. The conference is funded by grants from the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, the American Sociological Association, and the Ford Foundation. Please contact eastasian.studies (at) yale.edu or 203-432-3426 by Friday, December 16, 2005 to register for this event.
CCS Conference: “Culture in the World” (May 6–9, 2005)
March, 2005 The Center for Cultural Sociology’s inaugural conference, “Culture in the World,” brings the Center’s diaspora of Senior and Faculty Fellows to New Haven for four days of dialogue and debate at the forefront of research in the field. The conference will feature six plenary lectures delivered by Senior Fellows, nine regular sessions featuring 20-minute papers by Faculty Fellows, and a day of graduate student papers. See the Conference web site for further details and full program information.
CCR Conference: “Bourdieuian Theory and Historical Analysis” (April 28–May 1, 2005)
March, 2005 One of the most influential social thinkers of the late Twentieth Century, Pierre Bourdieu is probably best known for his work on the role of culture in the reproduction of socio-economic inequality. Can his theory also be used to describe and explain social change and historical transformations? Does it provide a credible alternative to other universalizing theories, such as Marxism and neoclassical economics? Is a universalizing approach to historical phenomena possible or desirable? In hopes of addressing these questions, this conference assembles a diverse group from history, the social sciences and the humanities, who have applied Bourdieuian theory in their own work. (Download the poster [pdf].)
Inter-Ivy Sociology Symposium 2005: “Re-Imagining Community” (April 9, 2005)
December, 2004 On April 9, 2005 the Yale Sociology Department, along with the Yale Graduate School, will host the First Annual Inter-Ivy Sociology Symposium. The event will provide a platform for sociology graduate students among Ivy-League Sociology departments to present their research in what is hoped will be the beginning of an ongoing annual event. Papers on all areas of sociological research are welcome. See the conference web site for further details.