August 27, 2012 Esther Kim's 2012 Symbolic Interaction article, ‘Nonsocial Transient Behavior: Social Disengagement on the Greyhound Bus’, recently became a focus of intense media attention. See inter alia, NPR Radio Interview>>, The Atlantic>>. Upon completion of her Ph.D. in 2012, Esther will become a postdoctoral International Faculty Member at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
August 23, 2012 Professor Rene Almeling's book Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (University of California Press), has been awarded both the Best Book Award from the ASA Section on Body and Embodiment and the 2012 Diana Forsythe Prize. The Forsythe prize, given annually to "the best book on gender, work, science, technology, and medicine," is jointly awarded by two sections of the American Anthropological Association. Read More >>
August 17, 2012 Incoming G & TS chair Julia Adams and outgoing chair Sarah Babb are interviewed by editor A. Aneesh in the current Global Review. Click here for more>>
August 12, 2012 Elijah Anderson will lead a special session at the 2012 ASA Annual Meetings, featuring “Bringing Fieldwork Back In: Contemporary Urban Ethnographic Research,” a 2012 volume of the Annals of the America Academy of Political and Social Science. Professor Anderson will be joined by Annals special editors Dana Asbury, Duke Austin, Esther Kim, and Vani Kulkarni. Read more>>
August 8, 2012 Professors Andy Papachristos and Chris Wildeman have received a U.S. Department of Justice grant for their "Using Social Network Analysis for Crime Prevention and Evaluation." Prof. Tracey Meares of Yale Law School is a Collaborator on the grant. The award is tied to a violence prevention initiative funded by the state of Connecticut, private sources, and Yale that begins this August in New Haven. Read more>>
June 26, 2012 Juan Linz, Sterling Professor Emeritus, will address the 22nd World Congress of Political Science in Madrid on July 8th. Professor Linz taught in Yale Sociology and Political Science from 1968 to 1999. View Professor Linz's video address >>
June 21, 2012 Jeffrey Alexander's Trauma: A Social Theory has just been published by Polity. In it, Professor Alexander develops an original social theory of trauma and uses it to carry out empirical investigations into social suffering around the globe. More Details >>
May 21, 2012 At Yale's 311th Commencement today, William Julius Wilson, Professor of Sociology at Harvard, was one of nine recipients of honorary doctorates. Wilson, who is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, was honored as Doctor of Social Science for making the study of inequality his life's work. More in Yale News >>
May 4, 2012 The 2012 Mildred Priest Frank Memorial Prize has been awarded to Katherine Giaccone. Her Senior Thesis concerns corporate board interlock and the way that this can promote the uptake of corporate social responsibility. Running against the grain of conventional sociological wisdom it suggests that sometimes interlocking directorates can be a good thing. The award committee of Professors Smith, Hunter and Wildeman were impressed by the huge effort put into hand-building a database, a sophisticated network analysis of corporate board interlock and a research finding that has realistic policy implications. In addition they were impressed by Giaccone's performance in coursework within the Major and the way that her ethically motivated topic resonated with Mildred Priest Frank's own love of people.
April 30, 2012 Yale Sociology has created a new award, The 21st Century Dissertation Prize, given from time to time, at the discretion of the department, to a distinguished sociology dissertation that contributes to public policy or the public interest. The inaugural winner is Malik Martin (Ph.D. 2008), for his thesis "The Conqueror's Prize: Revenue, Information, and Conflict in British Bengal, 1765-1819." Congratulations, Malik!
April 27, 2012 Mira Debs has been chosen as the recipient of the 2011 Community Service Award of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She was recognized for her work associated with the creation of SchoolHaven (http://kidhaven.com/schoolhaven/). The formal presentation is at the Graduate School Convocation Ceremony on Sunday May 20th, at 2 pm at the Hall of Graduate Studies. Brava, Mira!
April 24, 2012 Andrew Papachristos, who joins the department July 1 as Associate Professor, has received the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award. The award recognizes outstanding scholarly contributions to the discipline of criminology by someone who has received the Ph.D., MD, LL.D. or analogous graduate degree no more than five years beforehand. Congratulations, Andy!
April 21, 2012 Christine Slaughter has been awarded a Research Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for Summer 2012 for her dissertation project, "Making Images Matter: Social Movements and Representational Campaigns." She will use the Beinecke's James Weldon Johnson Collection to investigate the ways early NAACP leaders theorized the relationship between cultural representations and social inequality, and how such theorizations informed their activism.
April 16, 2012 The CCS Annual Spring Conference will be held on April 27th and 28th at the New Haven Lawn Club. This year's special session, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Centennial is a highlight of our program. Full program and details are available on the CCS Website: CCS Spring Conference ~ 2012
April 4, 2012 This year's Marvin B. Sussman Prize for Best Dissertation has been awarded to Dominik Bartmanski for his "How Icons Work: Material Culture and Post-communist Transformation in Berlin and Warsaw, 1989-2009." The annual departmental prize was created and endowed in 1993 by Marvin Sussman (Ph.D. 1951). It is awarded to the graduate student whose dissertation, completed within the previous two academic years, is judged the most outstanding by a committee of department faculty. The recipient is invited to return to Yale to present her or his work to the Sociology department and the Yale community. Bartmanski was also recently awarded the Junior Theorist Prize of the International Sociological Association (R16: Sociological Theory) for his article “How to become an iconic social thinker: The intellectual pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault” in the European Journal of Social Theory. He will receive the prize at the 2012 ISA meeting in Trento, Italy. Congratulations, Dominik!
March 26, 2012 Matthew Mahler, who received his Sociology Ph.D. from SUNY-Stony Brook in 2011, will join the department this July as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow. Matt specializes in the study of American politics and ethnographic methods, and has also published in the areas of social theory and gender and sexuality. We look forward to his arrival!
March 16, 2012 The Stan Wheeler Memorial Jazz Concert, a springtime tradition to honor the memory of beloved professor and jazz musician, Stan Wheeler, will be held on Sunday, April 15, 2012, from 2:00-3:30 p.m. in Yale Law School’s Levinson Auditorium, 127 Wall Street, New Haven. Presented by the dean and faculty of Yale Law School and Yale Bands, the concert will feature the Yale Jazz Ensemble and Reunion Jazz Ensemble. Wheeler taught in Law and Sociology during his time at Yale, and his work shaped the academic field of sociology of law.
Admission is free and no tickets are required. Doors open at 1:30. The Yale Bands info line is 203-432-4113. More Concert Details >>
March 8, 2012 “The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Civility Amid the Faultlines of American Race Relations” was the topic of Professor Elijah Anderson's lecture to the Association of American Geographers on February 25 in New York City. http://www.ijurr.org/details/news/1491935/2012-IJURR-Lecture-at-the-AAG.html
February 16, 2012 We are delighted to announce that Dr. Andrew Papachristos will be joining the Sociology faculty this July 1 as Associate Professor. Andy, whose website can be found here http://www.papachristos.org/Welcome.html, holds a 2007 Ph.D. from University of Chicago, and specializes in the study of social networks; neighborhoods, crime, and public health, and the use of violence and honor as measures of social control. We look forward eagerly to his arrival!
February 12, 2012 The Laurel Award is bestowed annually by the board of the Foresight Network for outstanding services to futures thought. The Network's three thousand members vote on recipients, who have in the past included Richard Buckminster Fuller; Alvin Toffler; Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. Congratulations, Wendy!
February 6, 2012 This year's Hollingshead lecture on “Abundance,” will be presented by Andrew Abbott on Tuesday February 28 from 4-5:30 pm in the Sterling Memorial Lecture Hall (128 Wall Street). Abbott is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. The event will be followed by a brief reception in the library's Memorabilia Room. Download Poster >>
February 4, 2012 Professor Elijah Anderson's The Cosmopolitan Canopy Has Been Nominated for an NAACP Image Award, under the category of "Outstanding Literary Work: Non-Fiction." The awards ceremony takes place on February 17th. The book has been garnering local attention as well. For a recent interview with Elijah Anderson in the New Haven Register, see New Haven Register >>
January 25, 2012 Julia Adams spoke at the College de France in Paris, at a January 23 event dedicated to Bourdieu's posthumously published book Sur L'Etat. Her remarks will be published in Sociologica http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/main/index The colloquium is on line at http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/pierre-bourdieu/index.htm
January 18, 2012 The Winter 2011 issue of Habitus is out, in hard copy and on line [link here]. As a publication, Habitus was invented and designed by Yale sociology undergraduates, and the most recent issue foregrounds movements: social, political, intellectual. It's a great read! Check it out here...
January 17, 2012 Professor Hunter responded to a New York Times column by Joe Nocera on the "NCAA's Justice System." See his letter on Black Student-Athletes here: New York Times >>
December 22, 2011 Elizabeth Breese, currently completing her dissertation in the department, spoke on the current crisis of American journalism, as this fall's annual Association of Yale Alumni assembly marked Yale’s awarding of the first PhD in North America in 1861. The day-long event attended by over 400 leaders from across the University’s alumni community. For more, see Yale Graduate News >>
December 14, 2011 The Sociology department is delighted to announce that Dr. Lloyd Grieger will be joining Sociology and the Jackson Institute for International Affairs as Assistant Professor this July 1st. Dr. Grieger received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Public Policy in 2010 from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He specializes in social demography, and conducts research in both the United States and South Africa. Welcome, Lloyd!
December 13, 2011 Professor Ron Eyerman's new book, The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination: From MLK and RFK to Fortuyn and van Gogh, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Congratulations, Ron!
December 3, 2011 The November 2011 issue of Perspectives, the newsletter of the ASA Theory section, features items from section chair Philip Gorski (“After Kant: Protestant Ethics and Social Theory”), Jeffrey Alexander (“Morality as a Cultural System: On Solidarity Civil and Uncivil,” and a review of Isaac Reed's (Yale Ph.D. 2007) new book, Interpretation and Social Knowledge. Read more ...
November 10, 2011 Professor Elijah Anderson will deliver a talk on race and civility on Tuesday, Nov. 15, giving the first speech in a series of distinguished lectures organized by the School of Public Policy and Administration (SPPA) to commemorate its 50-year anniversary. Anderson’s lecture, which will take place at 5 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 15, in Bayard Sharp Hall, will examine his new book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.
November 1, 2011 Edited by Professor Philip Smith, it is now available on this website, sociology/yjs.html, and will soon be up on EBSCO as well. The YJS publishes a range of topics and styles of work, in the form of undergraduate senior theses, articles by Yale faculty, grad students, emeriti, and visiting scholars.
October 28, 2011 The editors of Habitus, an exciting undergraduate publication that serves as a forum for examining and commenting on the social world, has issued a new call for submissions. The theme? Movements. Last year's issue can be found here.
October 2, 2011 On Tuesday October 4, Bernice Pescosolido (Yale PhD '82) will speak on “Reining In Complexity: A Sociological Vision of Collective Life,” in Room 208, Whitney Humanities Center, at 53 Wall Street. Bernice Pescosolido is Distinguished and Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research. Later that evening she will receive the highest award of the Yale Graduate School, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, given annually by the Graduate School Alumni Association to a small number of distinguished alumni. It recognizes outstanding achievement in scholarship, teaching, academic administration and public service, areas in which the legendary Dean Cross excelled.
September 21, 2011 Friday, September 23rd, 4:30p–6:30p, 493 College Street. Families Welcome. Please Join us! For additional information please contact Kim Kuzina: kimberly.kuzina@yale.edu, or call 203-432-3320. Download Poster>>
September 20, 2011 Professor Rene Almeling has published Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. In Sex Cells, Professor Almeling provides an inside look at how egg agencies and sperm banks do business. Press and media coverage: The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Newsweek, NPR, Yale, Read More>>
September 18, 2011 Professor Hannah Brueckner addressed the collective level of vulnerability in turbulent times in a speech delivered at the plenary session of the same name at the European Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Geneva. In “Vulnerability, Sociology, and Intervention,” she argued that sociologists are uniquely qualified to study the social and cultural mechanisms by which a particular vulnerability, for example a genetic one, results in negative outcomes.
September 17, 2011 As a follow-up to his new book, Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power, Bloomsbury USA, Professor Jeff Alexander is in Cairo, Egypt, conducting interviews and writing a daily blog, accessible on the Center for Cultural Sociology Website
September 15, 2011 Tiffany Ho ’12, senior Sociology major, has, with seniors Jerry Choinski and Etkin Tekin, opened The Little Salad Shop at 45 High Street in New Haven. She notes that The Little Salad Shop “aims to encourage better eating by providing an affordable way to ‘eat healthy’ on a daily basis.” Read more >>
August 12, 2011 Julia Adams will serve for six years on the Executive Council of the Sociological Research Association, culminating in a year (2016-2017) as President of the Association.
August 1, 2011 The Sociology department is moving to new quarters this month. Faculty and some staff are relocating to 493 College, a beautiful building across the street from Woolsey Hall and Beinecke Plaza. The department's Centers and staff, graduate students and academic visitors will occupy most of two capacious adjoining Yale houses at 204 and 210 Prospect Street. Stay tuned for updates, and news of building warming(s) in the new semester.
July 30, 2011 In anticipation of his forthcoming book, The Cultural Sociology of Political Association, Ron Eyerman is interviewed by Rogier van Reekum for the Dutch journal Sociologie (2011 (7) 1. Interview with Ron Eyerman.
July 29, 2011 Professor Elijah Anderson will be the featured speaker at the third annual Beer Summit, which returns to Philadelphia Tuesday August 2 for a discussion on race, class, and power. Global Citizen and MLK365 will host the session at the Reading Terminal Market from 5 to 7 p.m. to discuss race relations in Philadelphia and around the nation. Read more >>
June 30, 2011 LaTisha Campbell '12, Sociology and African American Studies double major, was chosen to participate in the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) at Northwestern University. While preparing for graduate school, she is working with Professor Celeste Watkins-Hayes at Northwestern's campus in Evanston, Illinois.
June 20, 2011 Mary Jo Toothman, incoming senior major, has won the 2011 Yale College Fellowship for Research in Health Studies. She is spending summer 2011 working in an intentional community and studying the ways that understandings of health and illness are influenced by community values and social structure.
June 20, 2011 Rising Senior Kathleen Powers has won the Yale Class of 1960 Fellowship, which supports her senior thesis research on the role of social media in the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath in today’s Tunisia.
June 20, 2011 Raffi Greenberg, who will be a Sociology senior in fall 2011, is currently conducting research in rural Guatemala, having won an OFP Fellowship for Juniors in support of his senior thesis research.
June 20, 2011 Thomas Meyer, Yale Sociology ’11, has been named a Yale University Fox International Fellowand will be attending the University of Cambridge, England in academic year 2011-12.
June 1, 2011 Professor and DUS Phil Smith is delighted to report that congratulations are due to two of the department's recent graduates, Nathan Glaser and Isabel Jijon, who won prizes for their senior theses. Read more on the Students Awards page >>
May 24, 2011 Department of Sociology's Rui Gao was one of two Graduate School winners of the John Addison Porter Prize. She won for her dissertation “Eclipse and Memory: Public Representation of the War of Resistance in Maoist China and its Official Revision in Post-Mao Era”. The John Addison Porter Prize is given for a written work of scholarship in any field in which it is possible, through original effort, to gather and relate facts and/or principles and to make the product of general human interest. The award was established in 1872 by the Kingsley Trust Association (The Scroll and Key Society) in honor of the late Professor Porter, who received a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1842.
May 23, 2011 A special issue (vol. 43, issue 6) of the British publication FUTURES (The journal of policy, planning and futures studies) is devoted to articles dealing with, and inspired by, the work of Wendell Bell, Professor Emeritus. A link can be found here to early released digital versions: Science Direct: (click on the title of each article to view the brief abstract.)
May 10th, 2011 Professor Elijah Anderson will join PBS's Ray Suarez and a broad-ranging panel inspired by his new book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. This event is free and open to the public. Details from the website: Reading Terminal Market.
May 6th, 2011 Congratulations to Professor Chris Wildeman who received a grant from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research for his research on Incarcerating Parenthood? Paternal Incarceration and the Parenting Behaviors of Biological Fathers, Social Fathers, and Biological Mothers.
May 2, 2011 Professor Philip Gorski is this year's recipient of the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting. The prestigious prize recognizes a mid-career sociologist whose work holds great promise for setting the agenda in the field of sociology. Professor Gorski will be delivering the Coser Lecture at the ASA meetings in August 2012. Congratulations, Phil!
May 2, 2011 Habitus is here! Sociology majors at Yale have put out the first issue of an exciting new publication that combines undergraduate academic papers in the social sciences and work in other styles, including reviews, commentary, and other media. The launch of Habitus was supported in part by the Adam R. Rose Sociology Resource Fund. Habitus is available in print and on line, and the editors are interested in submissions for future issues. Read more about it here.
April 21, 2011 Professor Rene Almeling was interviewed by Rourke O'Brien, for the ASA Economic Sociology Newsletter, ACCOUNTS, Volume 10, Issue 2. Professor Almeling was asked about her views on the relationship between culture and economy and how gender shapes the market for sperm and eggs. Both topics are explored in her forthcoming book, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Click here to read the entire interview.
April 14, 2011 Sadia Saeed, an ACLS New Faculty Fellow, will join the Yale Sociology as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer for two years beginning July 2011. Dr. Saeed, a 2010 University of Michigan PhD, is currently the Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow of Law, Society, and Culture at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Her dissertation dealt with Muslim nationalism, law and state formation in Pakistan. We are delighted to have her on board.
April 4, 2011 Ates Altinordu, currently Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Istanbul's Sabanci University, has been awarded the Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize for his outstanding 2010 thesis, "The Rise and Transformation of Religious Politics: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparative Perspective." Read more >>
March 25, 2011 Yale University Bands and Yale Law School will present “Legal Jazz: The 2011 Stan Wheeler Jazz Concert” on Sunday, April 3rd, at 2:00 p.m. in Levinson Auditorium, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven. The concert will feature the Yale Jazz Ensemble (YJE) directed by Thomas C. Duffy, and the Reunion Jazz Ensemble. Admission is free and no tickets are required. Call 203-432-4113 for more information. More Concert Details > Download Poster >
March 5, 2011 The Sociology department is delighted to announce that Dr. Marcus Hunter will be joining us as Assistant Professor this July 1st. Dr. Hunter is a 2011 Northwestern University PhD. His dissertation is titled “In Search of The Philadelphia Negro: Black Philadelphia and Urban Change (1900-2000).” He has held fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and specializes in urban sociology; race, class, gender and sexuality; theory and history of sociology, and qualitative methods. Welcome, Marcus!
February 2nd, 2011 Kayla Vinson (Sociology and African-American Studies) has been named one of the 25 Fellows competitively selected for a Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowship for Aspiring Teachers of Color (WW-RBF). Established in 1992, the Fellowships have since become part of a suite of teaching fellowships that recognize excellence while recruiting effective teachers for the students and schools that most need them. Vinson was also just named as one of The Root's Young Futurists, recognizing the research that will culminate in her senior thesis. http://www.theroot.com/views/2011/young-futurists. Congratulations, Kayla!
February 1, 2011 Congratulations to Natalie Nitsche, who received a prestigious NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in the Division of Sociology. The grant supports high quality dissertational research and will fund methods training at the ICPSR summer program. Natalie’s dissertation investigates the relationship between second birth transitions and relative socio-economic resources within couples in Germany and the US.
July 2, 2011 Professor Elijah Anderson's new book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy, provides a jumping off point for reflections on America's car culture in Room for Debate at the New York Times. Read the article here >>
January 25th, 2011 CCR, The Center for Comparative Research holds their annual Graduate Student Conference, Frontiers of Sociological Research at the Quinnipiak Club in New Haven, Saturday, January 29th. Highlights of the conference include panels on Classification, Representaion and Social Life, The Politics of Space/The Space of Politics, Actors and Agents of Social Change, Regulation, Negotiation and Resistance. To view the schedule and presenters, please visit the website >>
January 24th, 2011 Thomas D. Pollard, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences announced that the Graduate Student Association has selected Julia Adams for the Graduate Mentor Award 2011 in the social sciences.
January 7th, 2011 Bernice Pescosolido (Yale PhD '82) will receive the highest award of the Yale Graduate School, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, on October 4, 2011. The medal is given annually by the Graduate School Alumni Association to a small number of distinguished alumni. It recognizes outstanding achievement in scholarship, teaching, academic administration and public service, areas in which the legendary Dean Cross excelled. Read more here...
December 31st, 2010 HABITUS, a new publication of undergraduate work in the social sciences, with a central focus on sociology, is currently seeking academic papers, essays, pieces on social theory, film and book reviews as well as images for their inaugural issue. For more details, or to submit, please click here, or email yalehabitus@gmail.com. Please submit by by FEB 4th for consideration.
December 19th, 2010 Marc Perelman talks to Philip S.Gorski, professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Comparative Research. They speak about 9/11 and its impact on religious freedom and the place of Islam in the West. Click here to catch the interview: France 24/International News
December 18th, 2010 Richard Breen has been named William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology at Yale. President Richard Levin made the announcement, noting that endowed chairs are awarded to those whose scholarship brings special distinction to the University. Congratulations to Richard from all of us in the department!
December 6th, 2010 Are you ready for some FUN? Come to our Holiday potluck on Thursday, December 9th. 4:30-6:30p. 8 Prospect Place, a.k.a. “The Diner” More Details...
December 6th, 2010 According to the study, lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) adolescents are about 40 percent more likely than other teens to be punished by school authorities, police and the courts. Published in the January 2011 issue of the journal Pediatrics, the study is the first to document excessive punishment of LGB youth nationwide. “
We found that virtually all types of punishment—including school expulsions, arrests, juvenile convictions, adult convictions and especially police stops—were more frequently meted out to LGB youth,” said lead author Kathryn Himmelstein, a NYC Teaching Fellow, who initiated the study while she was a Yale undergraduate. The research was supervised by Hannah Brueckner, professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale.
Brueckner added, “The study provides the first and only national estimates for over-representation of LGB youth in the criminal justice system.” Please read the complete public release here....
November 14th, 2010 Rene Almeling, Assistant Professor of Sociology, and co-investigator Shana Gadarian, a political scientist who will join the faculty at Syracuse University next fall, have been awarded $20,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California, Berkeley/UCSF. The funding will support a national survey examining how individuals respond to genetic risk information. Almeling and Gadarian are in the final stages of developing the survey, and data collection will occur in Spring 2011
November 8th, 2010 In a recent article for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jonathan Alter sums up his review of a group of newly published books about American politics, with mention of Jeff Alexander's book on Barack Obama and the 2008 Presidential campaign. In the article, Alter writes, “Jeffrey C. Alexander’s intriguing argument in The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power, a meticulous review of the 2008 campaign, is that his fellow sociologists have over emphasized impersonal social forces at the expense of the theater of public life — the way politicians perform “symbolically.” To read the full article, click here...
November 2nd, 2010 The Yale Urban Ethnography Project, directed by Prof. Elijah Anderson, will host its second conference this November 4-6 at the Greenberg Conference Center. A primary goal of the conference is to bring together ethnographers and cultural theorists from across the United States and abroad to share their work, to learn from one another, and to fellowship. Hence, we work towards developing a community of scholars that appreciates the value of fieldwork and continues to work in the traditions of DuBois, Park, Thomas, Blumer, Hughes, Drake and Cayton, Goffman, Gans, and Becker, among others. Conference organizers include Dana Asbury, Duke Austin, Esther C. Kim, Taly Noam, and Elijah Anderson. Conference Website: www.yale.edu/sociology/UEP/conference.html
October 27th, 2010 Visiting CIQLE Fellow Hiroshi Ishida delivered the 12th annual John W. Hall Lecture on Japanese Studies at Yale University, courtesy of the MacMillan Center's Council of East Asian Studies. His topic was "Social Inequality among Japanese Youth: Education, Work, and Marriage in Contemporary Japan." Ishida is Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Tokyo.
October 7th, 2010 Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, in a lecture at the Library of Congress, will offer a new way of looking at the Democratic struggle for political power, discussing what happened and why during Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.
Alexander will discuss his book "The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power" at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 14, in Room 119 on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington D.C.
Alexander, a former distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center, argues that images, emotion and performance are the central features of the battle for power. Demography, strategy, money and issues matter, but power goes to the candidate with the most persuasive performances, whose carefully constructed heroic image resonates best with the audience of citizens.
Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. and director of the Center for Cultural Sociology, also at Yale.
Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are needed. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/. News Release: http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-204.html
September 27th, 2010 A memorial gathering for David E. Apter, who was the Henry J. Heinz II Professor Emeritus of Comparative Political and Social Development, will be held on Sunday, Oct. 17, at 3 p.m. in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. A reception will follow.
August 17th, 2010 The Department of Sociology intends to make a tenure-track assistant professor appointment beginning July 1, 2011. The department will consider all areas of the discipline, but has a preference for applications in the areas of race and ethnicity; urban sociology; urban ethnography; family; health; migration; poverty and inequality. Review of applications will begin September 15, 2010. For more information, please see http://www.yale.edu/sociology/jobs/.
June 3rd, 2010 Prof. Juan J. Linz, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political and Social Sciences, has been awarded the prestigious 2010 European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences. The Prize was established in 1987 at the initiative of the Italian Association of Sociology and is awarded annually at a conference by an international jury. Among earlier laureats are Norbert Elias, M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Charles Tilly, Raymond Boudon, Fraçois Furet, Niklas Luhmann, Alain Tourain and Richard Sennet. More here: http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=7658.
June 1st, 2010 The 2010 Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize has been dually awarded to Mary Barr and Anthony Spires. Mary's dissertation, “Black and White Together: Constructing Integration while establishing de facto Segregation” uses Evanston, Illinois as a case study to examine how social categories of race, class and gender are constructed and reproduced under the guise of racial integration. Anthony's dissertation “Between Domestic Constraints and Foreign ‘Help:’ The Development of Grassroots NGOs and Civil Society in China,” examines the development of Chinese grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the context of globalization. Congratulations to Mary and Anthony!
May 27th, 2010 Zi Pan, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology has been offered a tenure track Assistant Professor position at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, School of Public Economics and Administration. Congratulations to Zi!
May 21st, 2010 Congratulations to Patricia Maloney, who received a Prize Teaching Fellowship for 2010-2011. The award recognizes Patricia's outstanding talent and dedication for teaching, and is one of the highest honors a graduate student can attain at Yale. Patricia's research also focuses on teachers and teaching. Specifically, she is studying the conditions under which, and processes by which, recent college graduates in Teach for America become effective teachers in schools based in low-income communities.
May 17th, 2010 Congratulations to Cara McClellan and Anna Jo Bodurtha Smith, this year's winners of the Mildred Priest Frank Prize. The Mildred Priest Frank Memorial Prize was established by Adam R. Rose, ’81, in honor of his maternal grandmother. It is awarded each year to the graduating senior whose work in the Department of Sociology reflects the standards of excellence and love of people that characterize Mildred Priest Frank.
Anna Jo's senior essay "Politics, Proximity, and the Adoption of Public Preschool from 1965-2005" uses sophisticated quantitative methods, in combination with qualitative material from archival sources, to show that conventional explanations that see adoption of preschool grounded in economic or governance interests fall short of accounting for the timing and pace of the process. Rather, these interests are strongly mediated by politics and social connections between political actors. Her research was supported by the Adam Rose '81 Fund for Undergraduate Research and by a Yale College Dean's Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences. Anna Jo has served as co-coordinator of the Dwight Hall Executive Committee, and works at All Our Kin, a non-profit devoted to improving access to and the quality of childcare in New Haven.
Cara McClellan's senior essay "Teacher/Police: How Inner-City Students Perceive the Connection between the Education System and the Criminal Justice System," based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with disadvantaged youth in New Haven, argues that schools that deploy zero tolerance policies to enforce discipline create a school-to-prison pipeline. The code of the street that enables youth to survive in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty that are abandoned by the police leads schools and teacher to writing them off. Cara argues that rather than writing them off, schools should work to activate capacity for social control by fostering community among disadvantaged students. During her time at Yale, Cara taught poetry workshops and helped forge connections between New Haven high schools students and the Yale community. She is the Editor-in-chief of Sphere Magazine, a Peer Liaison and coordinates the campaign for Teach for America on campus. Cara also received support for her research from the Adam Rose ’81 Fund for Undergraduate Research.
May 17th, 2010 Congratulations to sociology major Andrew Udelsman, winner of this year's Yale Club of New Haven Richard Hegel Senior Essay Prize for his senior essay "Surviving the Forest: Ethnography of New Haven's Tent City." Dick Hegel, whom the prize honors, is a past president of the YCNH and a longtime member and supporter of the Club. He is also New Haven's City Historian, and is a veritable trove of information about the City and its history, about Yale and about the Yale Club. Andrew's essay investigates a group of formerly homeless people that have taken up residence in one of New Haven's parks. He describes both how they ended up living in their present condition and the factors that prevent them from leaving. The essay concludes that while life in Tent City is not easy, its residents have legitimate reasons for living there and it would be a mistake to forcibly evict them. Having lived in the New Haven area for many years, Andrew has been active in the community as a student mentor, soccer coach, and medical interpreter.
May 11th, 2010 Congratulations to Dana Asbury, who received The Graduate School Community Service Award. The award recognizes a graduate student whose exceptional commitment to volunteer effort has demonstrably benefitted the New Haven community at large. Dana Asbury has provided hundreds of volunteer hours in New Haven and Hamden for Camp Antrum, which offers underprivileged local children vital programs in personal development, recreation, and tutoring. Dana will be honored at a reception in May and receive $1000 in funding for her research.
May 10th, 2010 David Apter, beloved professor emeritus at Yale, who wove his expertise in political science and sociology into influential treatises on the often-tortured birth of developing nations, died last Tuesday at his home in North Haven, Conn. He was 85.
Apter, an expert on democratization and political violence in Africa, Latin America and Asia, both conducted field research and taught at many of the world's top universities, including Yale, Princeton (where he earned his Ph.D.), Oxford, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the Fondation des sciences politiques in Paris.
In his 46-year academic career, Professor Apter wrote or helped write more than 20 books that drew on social science and political theory and his own forays into impoverished lands, where he encountered peasants, politicians and sometimes terrorists.
Yale faculty remembered Apter as a deep thinker, a dear friend and a champion of interdisciplinary scholarship. “He was a tireless field worker, learning the fine grain of life out on the surfaces of the world where people actually live, and had a remarkable capacity to make broader theory out of it,” Kai T. Erikson, a former president of the American Sociological Association, said in an interview.
“It’s hard to pin him to the wall as a political scientist or a sociologist,” Professor Erikson said. “He had huge influence in both fields, bringing them together as an inventor of interdisciplinarity — almost the coiner of the term.”
Perhaps Professor Apter’s most influential work is “The Politics of Modernization” (University of Chicago, 1965), an analysis of the daunting development problems new nations face.
Apart from his extensive work in political science and sociology — he continued to publish books into the 1990s — Apter was also a skilled photographer. A 2007 exhibit of his work at the Whitney Humanities Center showed photographs taken as part of his research in Japan and China, as well as images of everyday life at his homes in Wallingford, Conn., and France.
Foster's wife, Karen, also a professor of near eastern languages and civilizations, added that Apter was an extraordinary person and friend.
"His wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, zest for life and genuine interest in other people made him a very special member of the Yale community," she said.
Read More: Yale Daily News, New York Times.
May 5th, 2010 Michael Yarbrough (Yale Law '09) has been awarded a 2010-11 Fulbright-Hays doctoral fellowship to fund field research on his sociology dissertation-in-progress: "Homemaking: Marriage Law Reform and the Construction of Family in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Yarbrough is exploring the ways that South Africans understand their conjugal, family, and other intimate relationships against the backdrop of a rapidly changing legal framework. He focuses in particular on two intersecting communities most directly affected by recent family-law reforms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexed South Africans; and South Africans who observe a system of indigenous or "customary" law. By placing these historically disadvantaged communities and the country of South Africa at the center of his research, Yarbrough hopes to open up new lines of inquiry into globally relevant questions about family diversity and the interplay between legal and cultural change.
April 28nd, 2010 Congratulations to sociology major Thomas Meyer, who is the recipient of a 2010 Yale College Dean's Research Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The fellowship will support his research project on code-switching among American soldiers engaged in counterinsurgent warfare.
April 22nd, 2010 Ivan Szelenyi, William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology, Professor of Political Science and former Chair of the Department, accepted an offer to become the Foundation Dean of Social Sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi. Professor Szelenyi will take up his new position at NYU Abu Dhabi on July 1, 2010. NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and science campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university.
April 2nd, 2010 Andrew Junker has been awarded a prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics (MMS) Program of the National Science Foundation. The MMS Program supports the development of innovative analytical and statistical methods and models. Andrew’s thesis, “Religious and Secular Protest in the Chinese Diaspora,” uses a hybrid methodology involving aspects of both in-depth qualitative and large-N quantitative research to analyze a database of narratives from two diaspora-based Chinese social movements. The methodology merges narrative theory, computing, and quantification to identify trends in very large collections of textual information. Because the materials are in Chinese, the project is also a springboard for assessing the method’s international reach.
March 27th, 2010 Richard Breen gave the 38th annual Geary lecture at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland on March 11th 2010. The Geary lecture series, http://www.esri.ie/publications/geary_lecture_series/, commemorates Roy Geary, the foremost Irish statistician of the 20th century. Previous Geary lecturers include Nobel laureates Gary Becker and Amartya Sen and sociologists Alvin Gouldner, Robert Merton and John Goldthorpe. The title of Breen’s talk was ‘Social Mobility and Equality of Opportunity’.
February 24, 2010 The 2010 Stockholm Prize has been awarded by its international jury to Professor David L. Weisburd for a series of experiments showing that intensified police patrol at high crime "hot spots" does not merely push crime around. This line of research encourages police around the world to concentrate crime prevention efforts at less than 5% of all street corners and addresses where over 50% of all urban crime occurs, yielding far less total crime than with conventional patrol patterns. The jury selected Weisburd's work on spatial displacement as the most influential single contribution of his wider body of work that has helped to bridge the gap between criminology and police practice. The jury noted that Weisburd has been a leader among the growing number of criminologists whose evidence shows how the application of research findings can help to reduce not only crime, but also the unnecessary impositions on public liberty from policing activities that do not address a predictable crime risk. David Weisburd is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice and Director of the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a distinguish professor in the Administration of Justice Department at George Mason Univeristy. Professor Weisburd explains the concept of hot spots policing.
November 29, 2010 Uli Mayer, Stanley B. Resor Professor and Chair of the Department, has been elected as the new President of the Leibniz Association, one of Germany's biggest research organizations. He will start his 4-year term on July 1 in 2010. The Leibniz Association plays a unique role in Germany’s research landscape, complementing the universities and the other research organizations. It comprises 90 research facilities with a total annual budget of more than 1.1 billion Euro. The 90 extramural research sites of the Leibniz Association conduct research ranging from astrophysics, plasma physics and marine biology to nutrition and diabetes, but also include institutes on contemporary history, economic research and the social sciences as well as major research museums. They also provide infrastructure and services for science and research like the German Primates Center and research-based services for the public, policy makers, academia and business. More than 14,000 people are currently employed at Leibniz research sites.
October 27th, 2010 Visiting CIQLE Fellow Hiroshi Ishida delivered the 12th annual John W. Hall Lecture on Japanese Studies at Yale University, courtesy of the MacMillan Center's Council of East Asian Studies. His topic was "Social Inequality among Japanese Youth: Education, Work, and Marriage in Contemporary Japan." Ishida is Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Tokyo.
October 23, 2010 Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Sociology has recently returned from an October 12-17th visit to Bolivia. Professor Wallerstein was there at the invitation of Vice-President and Sociologist Alvaro Garcia Linera’s office and the Ministry of Economics and Finance to give a public seminar. His seminar consisted of three lectures in Spanish on the "Causes and Consequences of the Present World Economic Crisis." During Professor Wallerstein’s visit, the Universidad Mayor San Andrès, Bolivia's leading university, awarded him a Doctor H.C. This is his 15th honorary degree.
October 7th, 2010 Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, in a lecture at the Library of Congress, will offer a new way of looking at the Democratic struggle for political power, discussing what happened and why during Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.
Alexander will discuss his book "The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power" at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 14, in Room 119 on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington D.C.
Alexander, a former distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center, argues that images, emotion and performance are the central features of the battle for power. Demography, strategy, money and issues matter, but power goes to the candidate with the most persuasive performances, whose carefully constructed heroic image resonates best with the audience of citizens.
Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. and director of the Center for Cultural Sociology, also at Yale.
Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are needed. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/. News Release: http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-204.html
April 22nd, 2010 Ivan Szelenyi, William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology, Professor of Political Science and former Chair of the Department, accepted an offer to become the Foundation Dean of Social Sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi. Professor Szelenyi will take up his new position at NYU Abu Dhabi on July 1, 2010. NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and science campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university.
March 27th, 2010 Richard Breen gave the 38th annual Geary lecture at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland on March 11th 2010. The Geary lecture series, http://www.esri.ie/publications/geary_lecture_series/, commemorates Roy Geary, the foremost Irish statistician of the 20th century. Previous Geary lecturers include Nobel laureates Gary Becker and Amartya Sen and sociologists Alvin Gouldner, Robert Merton and John Goldthorpe. The title of Breen’s talk was ‘Social Mobility and Equality of Opportunity’.
December 26, 2009 Congratulations to Sociology Major Anna Jo Bodurtha Smith '10 for a Marshall scholarship! The Marshall Scholarships were established in 1953 as a British gesture of thanks to the people of the United States for the assistance received after the Second World War under the Marshall Plan. Financed by the British government, the scholarships provide an opportunity for American students who have demonstrated academic excellence and leadership to continue their studies for two to three years at the British university of their choice. Anna will pursue a master's degree in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a second master's degree in public policy and management from the London School of Economics.
December 15, 2009 Julia Adams’ presidency of the Social Science History Association came to a close November 12-15, 2009, with the association's annual conference. This year's gathering, dedicated to the theme of "Agency and Action," was held on the Queen Mary, docked in Long Beach, California. For more on the conference, click here... Adams' presidential address, "1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? Agency in Social Science History," available, with images, in audio format, is forthcoming in extended form in the journal Social Science History. Next year's SSHA conference will be held November 18-21 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago.
November 10, 2009 Jeffrey Alexander will give a lecture titled “Barack Obama Becomes a Hero: Performing the Democratic Struggle for Power in 2008,” at the Graduate School’s In the Company of Scholars Lecture series. The event will take place on Tuesday, November 17, at 4 p.m. in room 119 of the Hall of Graduate Studies. A reception will follow in the McDougal Center Common Room. Hosted by Jon Butler, Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Poster.
October 30, 2009 Burton R. (Bob) Clark died yesterday after five months of illness. Bob Clark served as a Professor of Sociology at Yale for 14 years, beginning in 1966. While here, he was Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Department. He left in 1980 to become the Allan M. Cartter Professor of Higher Education at UCLA, where he had received one of the first Ph.D.s ever awarded by the UCLA Department of Sociology. Bob wrote many books about higher education and in 2008 the Johns Hopkins Press brought out a collection of his selected writings from 1956 through 2006. Bob was a dear friend to his former colleagues and will be missed. Adele Clark, his wife of many years, survives him. Burton Clark Bio.
August 18, 2009 Ates Altinordu has won the 2009 Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of ASA for his paper ‘The Politicization of Religion: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparison.’ Sebastian Schnettler has won a Returning Scholars Fellowship (Rückkehrstipendium) from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
August 10, 2009 The American Sociological Association featured research by Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brückner in a press release announcing their paper, Opting out of the family? Social Change in Racial Inequality in Family Formation Patterns and Marriage Outcomes among Highly Educated Women. The paper was presented at the annual meeting of the ASA in San Francisco, CA, August 8th 2009.
May 26, 2009 Congratulations to Mikkel Kruger Krenchel '09, majoring in Sociology and International Studies, who received the 2009 Mildred Priest Frank Prize. The Mildred Priest Frank Memorial Prize was established by Adam R. Rose, '81, in honor of his maternal grandmother. It is awarded each year to the graduating senior whose work in the Department of Sociology reflects the standards of excellence and love of people that characterize Mildred Priest Frank. Mikkel is also this year's winner of the WREXHAM-HEINZ PRIZE which is awarded for the best senior essay or other substantial piece of writing in the field of the social sciences. In his senior essay “Unthreatened Nation: Swedish Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Comparative Perspective” Mikkel shows that Sweden is an outlier in the Western hemisphere with respect to the extraordinary tolerance towards immigrants among ordinary Swedes. The essay aims at explaining this instance of “Swedish exceptionalism”. Mikkel devised an analytic strategy, in the tradition of the best case-comparative work, of examining Sweden in the context of countries which show less tolerance but are otherwise maximally similar, namely, Norway and Denmark. Quantitative analysis with survey data is used to isolate the factors that are most likely to explain differences in tolerance. These factors are in turn evaluated with a qualitative approach that locates the explanation in a unique configuration of historical circumstances that lead to the development of an inclusive national identity in Sweden.
May 18, 2009 Jeffrey C. Alexander has been awarded The Foundation Mattei Dogan Prize in Sociology by the International Sociological Association. The prize is awarded every four years in recognition of a “lifetime accomplishments” to “a scholar of very high standing in the profession and of outstanding international reputation.” Previous recipients of the award were Neil Smelser (2002) and Alain Touraine (2006). The $5000 prize will be presented at the World Congress of Sociology in Gothenberg, Sweden, in July 2010, where “the laureate will present a prize lecture at the special presidential prize-giving session.” Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University.
May 18, 2009 Professor Scott Boorman is the 2009 recipient of the Graduate School's “Graduate Mentor Award.” The Graduate Mentor Award recognizes teachers and advisors who have been exceptional in their support of the professional, scholarly, and personal development of their students. Congratulations to the recipients, and thank you to all of the graduate students who submitted nomination letters. The recipients will be honored at the Graduate School Convocation on Sunday, May 24, at 2:00 PM in the Hall of Graduate Studies courtyard.
May 5, 2009 The 2009 Sociology Senior Essay Conference wil take place on Wednesday, May 6th, 10:30-3:30p at 107 Williams Hall. Lunch will be served. Major program topics are Social Class at Yale, Politics and Policy in National and International Contexts, and Exploring Community in New Haven and Beyond. Speakers are Amy Jones, Matthew O. Brimer, Matthew Evans, Mikkel Krenchel, Alice Lin, Kayty Himmelstein, Lauren Frohlich, Sylvia Bingham, and Margaret Plouffe. Download full PDF program.
April 3, 2009 This spring marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of All Our Kin, Carol Stack's path-breaking ethnography of the survival strategies of African-American women living in poverty in urban America. A conference honoring the legacy of Stack's work will be held at Yale University May 1-2, 2009. The conference celebrates more than three decades of Stack's contribution to ethnography as a method of critical inquiry into the social conditions and public policies that shape people's everyday lives.
Before the registration site is opened to the general public, organizers are offering advance opportunity to Yale students to register to participate in one of three roundtables held during the conference on Friday, May 1st. Seating is limited to 15 participants per roundtable. To ensure a seat you MUST register within the next few days. Lunch will be served. You may register for the conference and roundtables at https://apps.business.yale.edu/dc/aok/new.do. For information about speakers and conference registration, please visit the American Studies website http://www.yale.edu/amstud/aok/index.html. Download PDF Announcement
March 25, 2009 Jonathan Wyrtzen will join the Department of Sociology in July, 2009, as an Assistant Professor. He has conducted historical sociology in Morocco and France, where his work focuses on the history of Moroccan nationalism. His dissertation, “Constructing Morocco: The Colonial Struggle to Define the Nation” (1912-1956), concerns the relationships between French imperial expansion, colonial policies of modernization and state formation, and the rise of “Arab” nationalism in the mid-20th century. His study is the first to explore how three marginal groups – Berbers, Jews, and women – played central roles in the mobilization of anti-colonial nationalism in North Africa. The project is based on two years of fieldwork in the Arabic, Berber and French archives in Morocco and France. His next book will focus on a comparison of tribal insurgency movements during the French colonial period in Morocco, Lebanon, and Syria. Currently a Lecturer at Georgetown University, Mr. Wyrtzen has published a book chapter and two encyclopedia entries, and has presented several papers on Islamic social movements.
February 26, 2009 In the Yale Daily News, an article titled "Cyber Yale" reports on the online forum and blog launched by Professor Hannah Brückner to augment her spring seminar, Sociology 221, Sex and Romance in Adolescence. Because the issues her seminar addresses can be difficult to talk about openly, Professor Brückner wanted to create a blog that would allow for anonymous discussion outside of class. She contacted Yale’s Instructional Technology group to help her create the blog with the aim of fostering open discussion of sensitive and controversial issues. More than one hundred posts have been made since the blog started. To access the blog, click here and log in with your secure NetID.
February 22, 2009 The National Institute of Justice has just published a conclusive report (The Code of the Street and African-American Adolescent Violence, NIJ, February 2009) exploring Professor Elijah Anderson's "code of the street” theory. The “code of the street” (Norton, 1999) theory presents an explanation for high rates of violence among African-American adolescents.
The NIJ summary:
"This Research in Brief presents research exploring Yale professor Elijah Anderson’s “code of the street” theory. Researchers looked for developmental relationships between neighborhood and family characteristics, reported experiences with racial discrimination, expressed street code values and self-reported violent behavior in young people. The results generally support Anderson’s original observations: the stress of living in a poor and violent environment can cause young people to adopt the code of the street as a lifestyle guide. This, in turn, is a powerful predictor of violent conduct, amplified by the effects of negative neighborhood characteristics. The research discussed in this report emphasizes the need to consider this theory in future studies within African-American households, neighborhoods and communities."
The National Institute of Justice is the research, development, and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. NIJ’s mission is to advance scientific research, development, and evaluation to enhance the administration of justice and public safety. To read more on the report, visit the NIJ website, or click here to download the PDF directly.
February 14, 2009 Not sure what to major in? Tired of looking over the same old parts of the Blue Book? Thinking about a career in education, law, public health, business, consulting or public service? Meet with professors and current majors to learn about why Sociology might be a good choice for you at the Undergraduate Sociology Study Break in the Hall of Graduate Studies, Room 119, on February 27th, 5:00pm - 7:00pm. Free and Tasty Thai Food!
February 13, 2009 Master's tea at Davenport College, Feb 16th, 4 pm, with Margaret Talbot, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of "Red Sex, Blue Sex" - an event organized in the context of Socy 221: Sex and Romance in Adolescence, and sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship.
January 30, 2009 Kudos to Amy Jones '09, double major in sociology and cognitive science, one of three seniors to receive the 2009 Emerging Trailblazer Award from the Union of Black Men at Yale!
January 28, 2009 The Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE) is currently accepting applications for a postdoctoral fellowship for one or more years, to start in Fall 2009. Candidates should be interested and have experience in empirical research with longitudinal data on the processes that generate inequalities of social class, race/ethnicity, generation, and gender across the life course. Click here to learn more about this job opportunity and how to submit an application.
January 22, 2009 The International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee On Social Stratification (RC28) will be hosted by the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE) this summer at Yale University. The theme of the conference is Mobility and Inequality: Intergenerational and Life Course Perspectives. The RC28 was founded in 1950 under the sponsorship of the International Sociological Association with mission objectives to promote high quality cross-national research on social stratification and social mobility, and the international exchange of scientific information in this field. The summer meeting will be held from August 3- 6. For details, registration, and call for papers, please visit the RC28 website.
January 13, 2009 Graduate student work is the focus of a one-day conference organized by the Center for Comparative Research (CCR) on Saturday, January 24, 2009. The conference aims to bring CCR Fellows and prospective Fellows together to learn more about each others' major projects and to give all interested grads more practice in and feedback on styles of professional presentation. Several panels of student presentations are planned followed by faculty discussants and collective Q & A. To submit a paper, attend the conference, or make other inquiries, please contact Ben Herzog (ben.herzog@yale.edu) or visit the CCR website, or the Conference website.
December 24, 2008 “Agency & Action” is the theme of Julia Adams’ presidential year at the Social Science History Association, culminating at the November 12-15 2009 SSHA conference on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. The SSHA is the preeminent American organization for interdisciplinary social science history and the historical social sciences. For more information on the conference or paper submission, please visit the “Agency and Action” conference website.
October 16, 2008 Dean Joseph W. Gordon announced today that Alondra Nelson has been selected as one of three winners this year of a significant honor in Yale College, the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching. The award recognizes her teaching in such courses as Genealogy and the Politics of Family; Health Social Movements; and Technology, Identity, and Culture – courses that differ significantly from one another, but share the quality of drawing upon (and interrogating) the methods of the social sciences, biological sciences, technology, history, and literature. Congratulations to Alondra!
September 26, 2008 Congratulations to Karl Ulrich Mayer, who has been appointed Stanley B. Resor Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Dr Mayer conducts research in the areas of social stratification and mobility, the sociology of aging and the life course, social demography, occupational structures and labor processes, and methods of survey research. At Yale, he chairs the Department of Sociology and is co-director of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), of which he was the founding director 2003 through 2007. He is also a professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Read more from the Office of Public Affairs...
August 12, 2008 In November 2004, the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed on a busy street in Amsterdam. A twenty-six-year-old Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent shot van Gogh, slit his throat, and pinned a five-page indictment of Western society to his body. The murder set off a series of reactions, including arson against Muslim schools and mosques. In The Assassination of Theo van Gogh, Ron Eyerman explores the multiple meanings of the murder and the different reactions it elicited: among the Amsterdam-based artistic and intellectual subculture, the wider Dutch public, the local and international Muslim communities, the radical Islamic movement, and the broader international community. After meticulously analyzing the actions and reputations of van Gogh and others in his milieu, the motives of the murderer, and the details of the assassination itself, Eyerman considers the various narrative frames the mass media used to characterize the killing. For more details, or to order, visit the publisher link: Duke University Press.
July 17, 2008 Rene Almeling has won the ASA Medical Sociology Section’s Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award. The award will be presented on Monday afternoon, August 4th, at the ASA Annual Meeting in Boston. Congratulations to Rene!
July 7, 2008 Congratulations to Scott Boorman who receieved The Distinguished Career Award of the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. The award recognizes a lifetime of contributions to the field of Mathematical Sociology. Scott will be honored at this year's ASA Annual Meeting in Boston this August.
May 21, 2008 The Department of Sociology at Yale intends to make two tenure track Assistant Professor appointments beginning July 1, 2009. The Department has a preference for applications in urban, race, ethnic and migration studies, social networks, development and transnational processes, but will consider applications in all areas of the discipline. The Ph.D. is expected. Yale is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. Yale values diversity among its faculty, staff, and students and especially encourages applications from women and underrepresented minorities. Letters of application with a current vitae, summary of thesis, one page summary of current research interests, a brief sample of writings, and letters from three referees should be sent to the Chair of the Search Committee, Professor Richard Breen, Department of Sociology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208265, New Haven, CT 06520-8265. Review of applications will begin September 15, 2008.
May 19, 2008 From the chain gang to the electric chair, the problem of how to deal with criminals has long been debated. What explains this concern with getting punishment right? And why do attitudes toward particular punishments change radically over time? Punishment and Culture traces three centuries of the history of punishment, looking in detail at issues ranging from public executions and the development of the prison to Jeremy Bentham’s notorious panopticon and the invention of the guillotine. Moving from Andy Warhol to eighteenth-century highwaymen to Orwell’s 1984, Smith puts forward a dazzling account of the cultural landscape of punishment. His findings will fascinate students of sociology, history, criminology, law, and cultural studies. Visit the publisher link: University of Chicago Press.
May 9, 2008 The Mary Douglas Best Book Prize Committee has chosen The Civil Sphere as the co-winner of the 2008 ASA Culture Section book award. In a most competitive year, the committee received nearly 40 submissions. Congratulations to Jeff!
May 8, 2008 This interdisciplinary conference, organized by Julia Adams (Yale) and Mounira Maya Charrad (University of Texas-Austin) under the auspices of the Center for Comparative Research, explores the intersections between states and family/household/kin networks across the globe. Participating scholars hail from the fields of sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and global studies. The countries and regions examined include South Korea, Taiwan, Western Europe, Malaysia, Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, and the United States. Area-specific inquiries complement others that are oriented toward general theory and/or consider agendas for future research. Visit the conference website: Lineages of Partimonial Politics, Then and Now, Center for Comparative Research, Yale University.
April 28, 2008 Iván Szelényi turned 70 on April 17. I would to make a few very sketchy notes on Ivan’s scholarly work. Sketchy because it would take a symposium of several days to do justice to it and also because he has himself written beautiful and much too self-critical reviews of his major works.
I have titled this section “Irony and Testimony” or “How to be an Intellectual as a Sociologist?”. What is striking about Ivan’s amazing oeuvre spanning almost 40 fertile years is at first glance its scope and breadth in both topics and methodological styles. Among else, he has written about... (Read Uli's entire laudatio here: Screen Viewing | Download for Print)
See the Yale Sociology front page for the latest Department news. Current and past news items and announcements are archived below.
April 16, 2008 As part of the 2008 Yale Urban Ethnography Conference, the Saturday afternoon sessions will focus on the cultural manifestations of urban inequality—and the challenge to clarify, understand, and represent these pressing issues ethnographically. Please join us for these open discussions and be a part of the ideas that can shape the future. For the full schedule, please visit the Urban Poverty, Ethnography, and the City web site. OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Download Poster.
April 2008 The Ethnography Workshop is aimed at developing a community of participant observers who are working in the traditions of DuBois, Park, Thomas, Blumer, Hughes, Drake and Cayton, Gans, Goffman, and Becker, among others. The two day workshop is designed to provide a forum that will bring fieldworkers of different generations together to share thoughts about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. April 24-26. View the program and schedule on the 2008 Urban Ethnography Conference web site. REGISTRATION CLOSED FOR THIS EVENT. Download Poster.
April 3, 2008 Sarah Ireland (Class of 2007) won the First Prize in the undergraduate paper competition of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) with her thesis on "Intergenerational Class Mobility by Race: Can the Black Middle Class Reproduce Itself?" Her prize-winning paper used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to demonstrate that black middle class families show higher levels of class persistence than middle class whites, and that the black middle class is actually growing over time, in marked contrast to the shrinking of the white middle class.
March 11, 2008 Against the Wall is a wide-ranging series of essays, edited by Elijah Anderson, that look at the plight and prospects of young black urban men. The essays describe how the anonymous young black male has come to be publicly identified with crime and violence because of skin color alone. Featuring a foreword by Cornel West and sixteen original essays by contributors including William Julius Wilson, Gerald D. Jaynes, Douglas S. Massey, and Peter Edelman, Against the Wall illustrates how social distance increases as alienation and marginalization within the black male underclass persists, thereby deepening the country's racial divide. For more details, visit the publisher link: Penn Press.
March 7, 2008 Skill Formation: Interdisciplinary and Cross-National Perspectives is the first book of its kind to provide an up-to-date review of theories and research on skill formation in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology. It addresses issues of skill learning and measurement, institutional and policy differences among countries, and the issue of skill formation across the life course and disparities among socioeconomic groups. For excerpts, table of contents and more details, visit the publisher link: Cambridge University Press.
March 5, 2008 Rene Almeling has accepted our offer to join the Sociology Faculty as assistant professor. Rene Almeling received her B.A. in the Study of Women/Gender and Religious Studies at Rice University and is currently finishing her Ph.D. thesis at UCLA on the topic of “Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Agencies, Sperm Banks and the Medical Market in Genetic Material.” She published early results of her study in the American Sociological Review (2007). Dr. Almeling will start her appointment in January 2010 after a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship in Health Policy which she will spend at UC Berkeley. With this appointment, the Department will strengthen its programs in gender, economic sociology, ethnographic methods as well as in the sociology of health and medicine.
February 28, 2008 The Sussman dissertation prize is awarded annually to the most outstanding dissertation completed in the sociology department at Yale. Isaac will give a talk on May 2nd at 4:00 PM in Room 107, Williams Hall. We will post the title of his talk as soon as it is available. Please reserve the date and check back to the Department News page soon.
February 13, 2008 Jargon-free, A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: reflects the idioms and interests of contemporary American life and global social issues. It invites students to come to terms with their lives within the current world transition—a combustible leap from modern to postmodern life. For more details, visit the publisher link: Paradigm Press . The New Social Theory Reader provides students and academics with access to the writers and perspectives that are shaping some of the most exciting social thinking today, with the editors placing key figures in lively debate with each other. This carefully selected collection of articles has been fine tuned to ensure readers have the right selection in the best structure to get to grips with the recent dramatic shift in the nature of social theory. For table of contents and further description, visit the publisher link: Routledge.
December 14, 2007 Jeffrey Alexander will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia on December 17, 2007. He will present a lecture on “My Universities.” On Tuesday, December 18, he will present the La Trobe Inaugural Agnes Heller Lecture, Sociology Program, “Feeling Consciousness and the Materiality of Meaning.” Jeffrey has a long association with La Trobe Sociology, with Thesis Eleven Journal and the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology.
