Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Northwestern University. As of August, 2025 he is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Emory University.
He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Department of Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard University, and has taught at the University of Minnesota and University of Georgia. For near fifty years he has studied the sociology of culture, primarily through historical case studies of the construction of reputations, ethnographic field investigations of small group culture, and social theory within the Goffmanian and interactionist tradition. Over this period, he has conducted ten ethnographies on sites including restaurant kitchens, Little League baseball, mushroom collectors, professional meteorology, competitive chess, senior citizen activism, and currently Civil War history enthusiasts. His recent book, The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitment, is an attempt to provide a meso-level analysis of civic engagement by developing a “local sociology.” From 2006-2010, Fine served as the editor of Social Psychology Quarterly.