Faculty Fellows

Faculty Fellows are individuals with a PhD who are beyond the immediate postdoctoral scholar stage. They usually have full time faculty appointments and are engaged in teaching and research in the cultural sociology field. Most are tenured or on the tenure track. Typically a Faculty Fellow will be one of our own former students or have visited Yale for an extended period, worked with our faculty and students on projects, have their own students, and have a sympathetic orientation towards the Strong Program.

Alphabetical, by last name


Ateş Altinordu
Sabanci University,Istanbul

Ateş Altinordu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sabancı University, Istanbul. His work focuses on religion and politics, secularization and secularism, science and society, and the cultural analysis of contemporary Turkish politics. Altınordu received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2010. His doctoral dissertation, which examined the rise and transformation of religious parties in the German Empire and contemporary Turkey, received the 2011 Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize. His articles have been published in the Annual Review of Sociology, Politics and Society, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpyschologie, and Qualitative Sociology.


Michel Anteby
Boston University

Michel Anteby is a Professor of Management & Organizations and Sociology at Boston University. He received a joint PhD in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and in management from New York University. His research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organizations they belong to. He examines more specifically the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. Studied populations have included airport security officers, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, ghostwriters, puppeteers, subway drivers, and university professors. His work has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Ethnography, Organization Science, Social Forces, and Social Science & Medicine, among others. His monographs include Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautic Plant (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education (University of Chicago Press, 2013)..


Annika Arnold
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung | FES

Annika Arnold is a researcher at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Her research focuses on topics of sustainable development and environmental communication, largely from a cultural perspective. Her book Climate Change and Storytelling was published in the Palgrave Macmillan series “Studies in Environmental Sociology and policy” and looks into the cultural patterns of climate change communication by putting forward a framework for cultural narrative analysis. Currently and most recently she works at several projects on the topic of a sustainable energy and transport transition, with a focus on communication patterns, public perception and civil participation methods.


Melissa Aronczyk
Rutgers University

Melissa Aronczyk is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, with affiliations at Rutgers in Sociology, the Climate Institute, and the Eagleton Institute of Politics. Her research and teaching expertise is grounded in critical perspectives on media and publicity; critical research methods; and the conditions of knowledge and expertise in mediated contexts. Her forthcoming book, A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism (co-authored with Maria Espinoza) is a critical examination of the intertwined history of public relations and environmental cultures in the United States. She is also the author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (New York: Oxford, 2013), and the co-editor, with Devon Powers, of Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture (2010). In 2020, she was Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.


Nelson Arteaga Botello
Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences-Mexico

Nelson Arteaga Botello, is a professor of sociology at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences-Mexico. His fields of research are violence, surveillance, sociological theory, and cultural sociology. In 2005 he won the 5th Ibero-American Social Sciences Award granted by the Institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences since 2011. His publication include Semantics of violence: Revolt and Political Assassination in Mexico (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022), “Strong program cultural sociology and Latin America”, American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9(3) 2021: 419-29 (with Carlo Tognato), “The Populist Transition and the Civil Sphere in Mexico”, in Populism in the Civil Sphere, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Giuseppe Sciortino, and Peter Kivisto (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), “Solidary Cuisine: Las Patronas Facing the Central American Migratory Flow, in The Courage for Civil Repair edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky and Carlo Tognato (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Sociología y ciencia ficción: imaginar el futuro: Philip K. Dick más allá de Orwell y Foucault (FLACSO, 2020),“ ‘It Was the State’: the Trauma of the Enforced Disappearance of Students in Mexico,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society (32) 2019: 337-355, “The Civil Sphere in Mexico: Between Democracy and Authoritarianism,” (with Javier Arzuaga) in The Civil Sphere in Latin America, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato (Cambridge University Press, 2018).


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Natalie Aviles
University of Virginia

Natalie B. Aviles is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She specializes in Sociological Theory, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Cultural Sociology, Science and Innovation Policy, and Sociology of Health Care. Her research deploys historical-archival, qualitative interviewing, and computational methods to explore how federal laboratories in the U.S. National Cancer Institute have guided scientific and public policy innovation from the 1960s to the present day.

Dr. Aviles has authored theoretical work on sociological explanation and empirical work on the material and cultural dimensions of cancer research published in top Sociology and STS journals Sociological Methods & Research, Social Studies of Science, and Science, Technology, & Human Values. Her first book, An Ungovernable Foe: Scientific Innovation and Health Policy at the National Cancer Institute, is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Dr. Aviles received her Ph.D. in Sociology & Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2016. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Virginia, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Colby College and a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.


Christopher Bail
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Christopher Bail is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar at the University of Michigan. He studies the cultural consequences of collective behavior and social policies using mixed-method techniques.His research has been published by American Sociological Review, recognized by awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Society for Study of Social Problems, and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2011.

Dr. Bail is currently completing a book about the evolution of public discourse about Islam since the September 11th attacks; an article about how secrecy shaped discourse about British Domestic Counter-Terrorism Policy; and a new study of how non-profit organizations reach new audiences on the Internet using millions of lines of data collected via a Facebook application.


Nina Bandelj
University of California, Irvine

Nina Bandelj is professor of sociology and associate vice provost for faculty development at the University of California, Irvine. An economic sociologist, Bandelj studies how social relations, culture, power and emotions influence economic and organizational processes, including investment and debt, inequality, globalization, postsocialist transformations, and ideas about economy. Her articles have been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Theory and Society, and Socio-Economic Review, among others. Her books include From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: The Social Foundations of Foreign Direct Investment in Postsocialist Europe (Princeton University Press, 2008), Economy and State: A Sociological Perspective (Polity Press, 2010, with Elizabeth Sowers), Economic Sociology of Work (ed., Emerald Publishing, 2009), The Cultural Wealth of Nations (ed., Stanford University Press, 2011, with Frederick F. Wherry) and Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged: Eastern Europe and China, 1989-2009 (ed., Oxford University Press, 2012, with Dorothy Solinger). Bandelj is past Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the European University Institute. She is an honorary member of the Sociological Research Association, and a recipient of the Distinguished Mid-Career Award for Service and the Dynamic Womxn Award for Academic Achievement. She holds a lifetime appointment as Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Currently, Bandelj serves as one of the editors of Socio-Economic Review, Treasurer of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and Vice-President-Elect of the American Sociological Association. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University.


Dominik Bartmanski
Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany

Dominik Bartmanski is a cultural sociologist, he holds Heisenberg Fellowship of German Research Foundation and is Vertretungsprofessor at the Chair of Cultural Sociology and Social Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is the author of Matters of Revolution (Routledge, 2022) and co-author of Vinyl: The Analog Record in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Labels: Making Independent Music (Bloomsbury, 2020). He co-edited the volume Iconic Power (2012) with Jeffrey Alexander and Bernhard Giesen, and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Urban Studies, European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of Consumer Culture, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Acta Sociologica, etc.


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Elisabeth Becker
Max-Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University

Elisabeth Becker is Assistant Professor and Freigeist Fellow at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology at Heidelberg University. This fellowship provides generous research funding (1.4 million euros) and releases recipients from most academic duties—administration, teaching—to focus on a high-risk, boundary-pushing research project. Her project, “Invisible Architects: Muslims, Jews and the Construction of Europe,” moves Muslims and Jews from the periphery of the European story to its center, arguing that both groups have been overlooked as formative makers in European nation-state projects, and the European imaginary, more broadly. Through interviews with Jewish and Muslim leaders and archival research in France, Germany, and Spain conducted by Elisabeth and a team of researchers, she will write a socio-legal genealogy of Europe that places Muslims and Jews at its core. At the same time, she will curate a museum exhibition in conjunction with a leading museum curator and write for journalistic outlets on the contributions of Jews and Muslims to Europe present and past.

Elisabeth has published in such venues as: the Journal of European Sociology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Social Science & Medicine, the Journal of Islamic Architecture, and the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. She also very much identifies as a public scholar, and has written for leading publications like the Washington Post and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.


Peter Beilharz
Sichuan University (Professor Emeritus, La Trobe University)

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Critical Theory at Sichuan University. For many years he was Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has been affiliated with the Yale Center; Harvard; Leeds; Curtin; and Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study. He has published more than thirty books, many on the work of Zygmunt Bauman and on art historian Bernard Smith; most recently Circling Marx, 2000, The Work of History, with Sian Supski, 2022, The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman, with Janet Wolff, 2023, and Chain’s Towards the Blues, 2023, but he rates his most important work as the project of Thesis Eleven and the textbook with Trevor Hogan, Sociology–Place, Time and Division, 2007, this latter supported by Jeff in his Australian sojourn of 2004.


Seyla Benhabib
Columbia Law School

Seyla Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019.

Benhabib is a distinguished international scholar who is known for her research and teaching on social and political thought, particularly 20th century German thought and Hannah Arendt. Over the past two decades, she has become recognized for her contributions to migration and citizenship studies as well as her work on gender and multiculturalism.


Andy Bennett
Griffith University

Andy Bennett is Professor in Cultural Sociology at Griffith University. Prior to his appointment at Griffith, he held posts at Brock University in Canada and at the Universities of Surrey, Kent, Glasgow, and Durham (where he also gained his PhD in 1997) in the UK. Prior to working on his PhD he spent two years in Frankfurt, Germany working as a music instructor with the Frankfurt Rockmobil project. Andy specializes in the areas of youth culture and popular music. He has published articles in a number of journals, including The British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Sociological Review, Media Culture and Society, Popular Music, and Poetics. He is author of Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place (2000, Macmillan), Cultures of Popular Music (2001, Open University Press), Culture and Everyday Life (2005, Sage), editor of Remembering Woodstock (2004, Ashgate) and co-editor of Guitar Cultures (2001, Berg), After Subculture (Palgrave, 2004), Music Scenes (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) and Music, Space and Place (Ashgate, 2004). Andy is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and a former Chair of the UK and Ireland IASPM branch. He is also a member of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and a co-founder of the BSA Youth Study Group. He is a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, an Associate of PopuLUs, the Centre for the Study of the World’s Popular Musics at Leeds University, and a member of the Board for the European Sociological Association Network for the Sociology of the Arts. Andy is also a member of the Editorial Boards for the journals Cultural Sociology, Perfect Beat, Leisure Studies and Music and Arts in Action, and serves on the Advisory Boards of the journals Sociology and the Journal of Sociology.


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Claudio Benzecry
Northwestern University

Claudio E. Benzecry is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University and a sociologist interested in culture, arts, knowledge and globalization. His book The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012), Honorable mention for the ASA Distinguished Book award (2014) and was named as one of Ten Major Books in Sociological Theory since 2000 by Contemporary Sociology. More recently he received ASA's Junior Theorist Award (2015) for his comparative work on high culture institutionalization in early 20th century Buenos Aires.

He's also the Editor of two books on culture and knowledge, and has published articles on sociological theory, sociology of culture, and the arts in venues such as Sociological Theory, Ethnography, British Journal of Sociology and Theory & Society, among others.

He’s currently conducting research on fashion, creativity and globalization, following how a shoe is imagined, sketched, designed, developed and produced in between the US, Europe and China. The project is under advance book contract with University of Chicago Press.


Mabel Berezin
Cornell University

Berezin’s research asks how shared cultural meanings and practices shape 1) political institutions such as the state; 2) social processes around political movements and ideologies; and 3) agents through the construction of political identities. Her methodology is primarily comparative and historical. Her current work focuses on contemporary sites of social, political and cultural change – places where political arrangements have collapsed and new institutions and identities are in the process of formation. She is currently engaged in three projects: 1) a study of the social and cultural appeal of fringe parties in France and Italy as a response to Europeanization; 2) a comparative historical study of institution building, citizenship and social capital in early 20th century United States and Europe; and 3) the role of emotions in macrosociological systems (i.e., politics, economics).


Josetxo Beriain
State University of Navarra

Born in Spain in 1959, from Navarrese parents. B. A. in Sociology and Philosophy in the Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, 1984. M. A. in Sociology in the New School University, New York, 1986, and PH. D. in Sociology in the Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, 1987. Actually, Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Pública de Navarra in Pamplona, since 1990. His fields of research are sociological theory, sociology of religion and cultural sociology. He has been Research Assistant at the New School University in New York and Visiting Scholar at the Universität Bielefeld (Germany), at the Freie Universität Berlin, at the Center for European Studies of the Harvard University, at the Colegio de México in México D. F., at the Berkley Center of the Georgetown University and at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. He is author of the following books: Collective representations and the Project of Modernity, 1990, Barcelona. The Integration in Modern Societies, 1996, Barcelona. The Conflict of Gods in Modernity, 2000, Barcelona. The Clash of Modernities, 2005, Barcelona. Social Acceleration and the Tyranny of the Present, Barcelona, 2008. The Transgressive (and Transgressed) Subject. Modernity, Religion, Utopia and Terror, 2011, Barcelona. He is director of the series Social Sciences of the publisher Anthropos- Siglo XXI, and member of the Editorial Boards of the journal Sociologica in México D. F., and of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) in Madrid.


Richard Biernacki
University of California, San Diego

Rick Biernacki received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1989. In The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Great Britain, 1640-1914 (University of California, 1995), he compares the influence of culture on the execution of factory manufacture. His interests are classical and contemporary theory, comparative method, and culture. His research focuses on the historical invention of key forms of cultural practice in Europe, including the categories of labor as a commodity, ethnic identity, and property in ideas.


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Amy Binder
University of California, San Diego

Amy Binder is professor and chair of Sociology at the University of California San Diego. She studies culture, politics, organizations, and education. Her first book, Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton 2002), explores two challenges posed to public school systems in the 1990s. The book received the 2003 Best Book Prize of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association, the 2003 Distinguished Scholarship Prize of the Pacific Sociological Association, and the 2004 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Her second book, Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton 2013), examines how right-leaning college students experience life at two universities—one an elite private institution, the other a major public university. The study reveals two distinctive styles that young conservatives embrace, each of them shaped by campus context and the outside organizations in the conservative ecosystem. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript which looks at student activism across the ideological spectrum on four public university campuses. The book is scheduled to be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021.


Werner Binder
Masaryk University

Werner Binder is assistant professor in sociology at the Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). After studies in Mannheim, Potsdam and Berlin, he earned his PhD at the University of Konstanz with a thesis on the Abu Ghraib Scandal. He is author of Abu Ghraib und die Folgen (2013, transcript), coauthor of Ungefähres (2014, Velbrück) and coeditor of Kippfiguren (2013, Velbrück) His fields of interest are: Sociological theory, cultural sociology, textual and visual methods of interpretation.


Mary Blair-Loy
University of California, San Diego

Mary Blair-Loy has a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an M.Div. from Harvard University. She uses multiple methods to study gender, work, and family, with a focus on how human agency is constrained and enabled by social and cultural structures. She studies elite workers in demanding and compelling jobs. Her book, Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives (Harvard University Press), shows how the morally and emotionally salient cultural schemas of work devotion and family devotion help structure the institutions of the capitalist firm and the nuclear family in the U.S. and help shape women’s actions. Competing Devotions won the 2005 William J. Goode Book Award, sponsored by the ASA Section on the Family. Her forthcoming work addresses these issues among male executives. Further, Blair-Loy analyzes the causes and consequences of the institutionalization of contested work-family olicies in a large financial services firm with Amy S. Wharton and studies organizational ideologies with Wharton and Jerry Goodstein.


Nebojša Blanuša
University of Zagreb

Nebojša Blanuša is an Associate Professor of Social and Political Psychology and Theories of Nationalism at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is a member of the FP7 project Social Performance, Cultural Trauma and Reestablishing Solid Sovereignties (SPECTRESS), dealing with the formation of conspiracy theories as collective narratives regarding cultural traumas, provoked by crises and wars. Another project he is involved in is the "Team Populism", the network of international scholars, dealing with various aspects of populism, especially anti-elitist conspiracy theories. He is the author of Conspiracy Theories and Croatian Political Reality 1980-2007 (Plejada, 2011 - in Croatian), co-editor of EU, Europe Unfinished: Mediating Europe and the Balkans in a Time of Crisis (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016) and the editor of the special issue of Croatian Political Science Review titled Faces of Cultural Trauma (2017, Vol. 54: 1-2). (CCS Visiting Fellow, Fall 2015)


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Jacob Boersema
Barnard College, Columbia University


Georgina Born
University of Cambridge

Georgina Born is Reader in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. She trained in Anthropology at University College London and uses ethnography to study cultural production, particularly music, television, IT and Euro-American knowledge systems and intellectual cultures. Her books are Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage 2005), a study of the transformation of the BBC and Britain’s public broadcasting system over the past decade; Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California 1995), a combined critical ethnography and cultural history of post-WW2 musical modernism and of music-science collaborations at IRCAM in Paris; and Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (California 2000, with D. Hesmondhalgh). Current research analyses the nature of interdisciplinary collaborations between the natural sciences and arts or social sciences. Other current research examines the transformation of public broadcasting with digitization, and the changing modes of creativity attendant on music’s digitization. Articles have appeared in the journals Screen, New Formations, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Journal of Material Culture, Modern Law Review, Cultural Values, Javnost/The Public, and Twentieth-Century Music. She is on the editorial advisory boards of the journals Anthropological Theory and New Media and Society, and is involved in media policy research on the BBC and public broadcasting in Europe, as well as advising public arts organisations in the UK. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, operating in dialogue with musicology, art history and science and technology studies, and combining perspectives from anthropology, sociology and the humanities.


Matteo Bortolini
University of Padova

Matteo Bortolini (PhD, University of Bologna, 2000) is associate professor of sociology at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World of the University of Padova, Italy. Matteo's work focuses mainly on the historical sociology of expert knowledge production, the sociology of ideas and intellectuals, the theory of biography, and social theory. His major project so far has been a biography of the late American sociologist, Robert Bellah, published in 2021 under the title A Joyfully Serious Man (Princeton UP). He is now working on a similar book on Clifford Geertz as a way to explore the relationship between celebrity, iconicity, and the institutional and intellectual positioning of academic scholars. Matteo has published in Theory and Society, Minerva, History and Anthropology, European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and other journals, and enjoyed fellowships at Harvard, Berkeley, Boston University, and the University of Erfurt (Germany).


Ruth Braunstein
University of Connecticut

Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. A cultural sociologist interested in the role of religion and morality in American political life, Ruth's award-winning research has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Contexts, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Political Power and Social Theory, Sociology of Religion, Theory and Society, and Qualitative Sociology, among other outlets. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide (University of California Press 2017), and co-editor of Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics (NYU Press 2017). Her current research project, “The Moral Meanings of Taxpaying,” explores how taxpaying and tax resisting are linked to contested understandings of political community, good citizenship and morality in the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University, an M.A. in sociology from New York University, and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, where she studied international culture and politics.


Trygve B. Broch
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Trygve B. Broch is an associate professor at the Department of Public Health at the Inland Norway University. During 2017-2018, he was a Fulbright grantee working to develop cultural sociology perspectives in the sociology of sport. Combining anthropological and sociological theory Broch aims to expose sport as not only reinforcing obedience and subordination, but as a meaning-making practice that allows actors to play with and question subordination. Using ethnography and media texts Broch explores how understandings of cultural dynamics and diversity – in studies of gender, youth, socialization, politics and national identity – can be improved through meaning-centered analyses of sport. Trygve was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology from September 2017 to August 2018.


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Sorcha Brophy
Columbia University

Sorcha A. Brophy is an organizational sociologist and an Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Management at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her research investigates the challenges that organizations face as they attempt to create and enact ethics policies. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the topic and has recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law (JHPPL), and published articles in Health Affairs , the Journal of Professions and Organization , JHPPL , and Sociology of Religion .


Craig Calhoun
Arizona State University

Professor Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He holds joint appointments in the School of Politics and Global Studies, the School of Public Affairs, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the School of Sustainability, and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. Prior to coming to Arizona State University, Calhoun served as director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He was previously president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), dean of the Graduate School and director of the University Center for International Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and founder and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University (NYU). In addition to UNC and NYU, he has been a professor at Columbia University and the University of Oslo and a visiting professor at several international universities.

Throughout his career Professor Calhoun has been involved in projects bringing social science to bear on issues of public concern. These have ranged from consulting on rural education and development in North Carolina, to advising the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea, to helping develop communications infrastructure in Sudan. He co-founded, with Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at LSE, the NYLON programme which brings together graduate students from New York and London for co-operative research programmes.

He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Describing his own approach to academic work, Professor Calhoun says: “We must set high standards for ourselves, but in order to inform the public well, not to isolate ourselves from it.”


Emily Campbell
College of the Holy Cross

Emily B. Campbell is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at College of the Holy Cross. She specializes in political sociology, race and ethnicity, human rights, culture, emotions, social movements, education, drugs and society and social theory. Her current book project, tentatively titled, Grieving Overdose examines the social, political and cultural implications of drug overdose death in the US using the mixed qualitative methodologies of ethnography, interviews and participant observation. Her previous collaborative work includes research on religion in social movements and in the sociology of education. Her writing has appeared in Contexts, Critical Research on Religion, Humanity & Society, Teachers College Review and in journalistic outlets including The Conversation. A globally-oriented scholar, she was a graduate research fellow in Mexico City where she conducted fieldwork on human rights and the drug war and was a predoctoral fellow to the Department of Sociology, Organization, Migration and Participation at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.

Dr. Campbell received her Ph.D. from the Doctoral Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and her B.A. in Sociology from Indiana University, Bloomington.


Elaine Chan
City University of Hong Kong

Elaine Chan was born and raised in Hong Kong. She received her undergraduate training in sociology and psychology at the University of San Diego and her graduate training in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She worked as a demonstrator at the Department of Politics and Public Administration before joining the Department in 1994.


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Jongryul Choi
Keimyung University, Korea

Professor of sociology at Keimyung University (South Korea). He works in the areas of cultural sociology, social/cultural theory, and qualitative methodology. He is the author of Sociology of Performance: How Does Korean Society Reflect on Itself? (2019), Sociology of Bokagwang: The Cries of Korean Local Youth (2018), The Uses of Multiculturalism: A Cultural Sociological Perspective (2016), Strangers of Globalization: Sexuality, Labor, and Deterritorialization (2013), Cultural Turn in Sociology: Classical Sociology, Revitalized from Science to Aesthetics (2009), The Postmodern American Sociology: A Response to Aesthetic Challenge (2004). (CCS Visiting Faculty Fellow, August 31, 2019 - January 31, 2020)


Andrea Cossu
University of Trento

Andrea Cossu (PhD, Trento 2007) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. He has done postdoctoral research at the University of Trento and Yale University, where he was a Visiting Fellow during the 2008-9 Academic Year. His research focuses mostly on political culture in Italy, with a particular focus on memory cultures and conflicts over the past.

He has written on classical and contemporary social theory, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of music and the arts. His first book, It Ain't Me, Babe: Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity, came out in 2012 for Paradigm. His current project (with Matteo Bortolini) is a socio-historical analysis of the rise of the sociological profession in Italy after the end of World War Two: Italian Sociology 1945-2000: An Institutional and Professional Profile (forthcoming, Palgrave-MacMillan).


Jean-François Côté
Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Jean-François Côté is professor in the Departement of Sociology at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He specializes in sociological theory and epistemology, and has developed a special interest in studying cultures and societies in the Americas. His single-authored books include La sociologie culturelle de Jeffrey C. Alexander (Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021 – English translation forthcoming), La Renaissance du théâtre autochtone. Métamorphose des Amériques I (Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2017), George Herbert Mead’s Concept of Society : A Critical Reconstruction (Boulder/New York, Paradigm/Routledge, 2015), and Poe, Stein, Warhol. Figures de la modernité esthétique (Bruxelles, La lettre volée, 2003). He has also published numerous articles and book chapters, together with co-edited books in sociology. He has been editor of the Américana series at Presses de l’Université Laval since 2004.


Simon Cottle
Cardiff University

Simon Cottle is currently Professor of Media and Communications and Director of the Mediatized Conflict Research Group in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He was formerly Inaugural Chair and Director of the Media and Communication Program at the University of Melbourne (2002-2006). He has written extensively on the changing professional practices, cultural forms and rituals of journalism and the mediatization of diverse conflicts including: riots, demonstrations and protests; the environment and “risk society;” “race,” racism and ethnicity; and war and terror post 9/11.

His books include: Mediatized Conflict: New Developments in Media and Conflict Studies (Open University Press 2006), The Racist Murder of Stephen Lawrence: Media Performance and Public Transformation (Praeger 2004), Media Organization and Production (Editor, Sage 2003), News, Public Relations and Power (Editor, Sage 2003), Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries (Editor, Open University Press 2000), Mass Communication Research Methods (Co-author, Palgrave 1998), Television and Ethnic Minorities: Producers’ Perspectives (Avebury 1997) and TV News, Urban Conflict and the Inner City (Leicester University Press 1993). He is currently writing Global Crisis Reporting (2007), and concluding an international research study examining the changing forms and flows of terrestrial and satellite television journalism in the USA, UK, Australia, India, South Africa and Singapore and how television journalism communicates global crises.


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Thomas Crosbie
Royal Danish Defence College

Thomas Crosbie is a political and military sociologist and Assistant Professor of Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defence College in Copenhagen, DK. He was awarded a PhD in Sociology from Yale University (2014) and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on state policy, particularly the agency of military organizations in shaping their social and political environments, and on the military profession. His work has been published in journals including Armed Forces and Society, Comparative Sociology, Media, War & Conflict, the Journal of Sociology, Parameters, Poetics, Politics and Sociology Compass.


Thomas Cushman
Wellesley College

Thomas Cushman is Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College and the founder, former editor in chief, and currently editor-at-large of the Journal of Human Rights. He has written or edited numerous books, including Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia (State University of New York Press, 1995); This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York University Press, 1996); George Orwell: Into the Twenty-first Century (Paradigm, 2004); A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (University of California Press, 2005). His most recent fortcoming books include: Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left (New York University Press, 2008), a compilation of writings of Hitchens and his critics, with an introduction (co-authored by Simon Cottee), which uses the polemical debates between Hitchens and his critics as a case study on sociology of intellectuals and the sociology of factionalism on the left; and The Religious in Response to Mass Atrocity, an interdisciplinary volume which examines the religious narratives, performances, cultural discourses, and institional responses to mass atrocity in history and in the contemporary world (under review, Cambridge University Press, e.d.p. 2008). Cushman is the editor of two book series: "Post-Communist Cultural Studies" and "Essays in Human Rights" - both published by Penn State University Press. He was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow for 2002, a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar Academic Core Session on International Law and Human Rights chaired by Lloyd Cutler and Richard Goldstone, a former visiting scholar at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, Siskind Visiting Professor of Sociology and Internet Studies at Brandeis University, and Visiting Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is currently at work on a manuscript tentatively entitled, "The Social Structure of Suffering" and will be the editor-in-chief of an encyclopedic Handbook of Human Rights, which will be published by Routledge in 2009.


Martina Cvajner
University of Trento


Barbara Czarniawska
Gothenburg Research Institute

Born 2nd December 1948 in Bialystok, Poland, where her family moved from Wilno after the World War II.

Swedish citizen since 26 August, 1988. M.A. in Social and Industrial Psychology, Warsaw University, 1970; Ph.D.in Economic Sciences, Warsaw School of Economics, 1976. Czarniawska is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Royal Engineering Academy, and the Royal Society of Art and Sciences in Gothenburg. She received Lily and Sven Thuréus Technical-Economic Award for internationally renowned research inorganization theory in 2000 and Wihuri International Prize in recognition of creative work that has specially furthered and developed the cultural and economic progress of mankind, 2003.


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Jean-Pascal Daloz
University of Strasbourg, France

Jean-Pascal Daloz is CNRS Senior Research Professor at the new SAGE Centre in Strasbourg. From 2008-2018, he chaired the Research Committee on comparative sociology of the International Sociological Association. After having worked in sub-Saharan Africa (as Head of research centres), he held positions at the Bordeaux Institute of Political studies and then at the Universities of Oslo and Oxford.

He is a comparativist specializing in the study of elites. His research mainly focuses on the comparative analysis of social distinction and on the symbolic dimensions of political representation.

He has published 15 books so far, including Africa Works: Disorder as political instrument (Oxford, 1999), a standard book on African politics; Culture Troubles: Politics and the interpretation of meaning (Chicago, 2006), co-authored; The Sociology of Elite Distinction: From theoretical to comparative perspectives (New York, 2010); Rethinking Social Distinction (New York, 2013); La représentation politique (Paris, 2017). He also co-edited The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites (London, 2017).

He was CCS Visiting Fellow from September 2017 to February 2018. He has since mainly been working on a project entitled: Expressions of High Status - A comparative synthesis with a new book coming out in May (Expressions de supériorité : Petite encyclopédie des distinctions élitistes, Paris, 2021).


Mira Debs
Yale University

Mira Debs is Executive Director of the Yale Education Studies Program and a lecturer in Sociology. She studies urban education, school choice, school integration activists, public policy, and progressive public schools. Research from her book, Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice (Harvard Education Press, 2019) was featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Education Week, and the Christian Science Monitor. Current projects include a study of school integration activists in New York City during Covid-19 with funding from the Spencer Foundation, studies of parent involvement in Singapore and Germany, and Montessori education in India. Other research examines how groups form collective identity through objects, history and their children’s schooling including studies on Italian art, India’s independence struggle and the post-civil rights memory in the American South. Her work has been published in the American Education Research Journal, New York Times, Cultural Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, the Journal of Montessori Research and is forthcoming in Research in Comparative and International Education.


Eduardo de la Fuente
University of Wollongong

Eduardo is a researcher specialising in cultural sociology; social theory; the sociology of spaces and places; architectural sociology; creative and cultural industries research; and place management. He is an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong; and a longstanding Faculty Fellow of the Yale Centre for Cultural Sociology. He is also a Board Member and President Ex-Officio of the International Sociological Association Research Commitee for the Sociology of Arts. He has published in journals such as Sociological Theory, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, Thesis Eleven and Distinktion: The Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. He is currently completing a scholarly monograph for Routledge on twentieth century music and the question of cultural modernity. His research interests are in the following areas: sociology of the arts; classical and contemporary social theory; the history of the social sciences; the aesthetics of everyday life; and the cultural dimensions of modernity.


Thomas DeGloma
Hunter College, City University of NewYork

Thomas DeGloma is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He specializes in the areas of culture, cognition, memory, symbolic interaction, and sociological theory. His research interests also include the sociology of time, knowledge, autobiography, identity, and trauma. Professor DeGloma’s book, Seeing the Light: The Social Logic of Personal Discovery (University of Chicago Press), explores the stories people tell about life-changing discoveries of “truth” and illuminates the ways that individuals and communities use autobiographical stories to weigh in on salient moral and political controversies. He is currently working on his second book, Anonymous: The Performance and Impact of Hidden Identities (under contract with University of Chicago Press) which explores the phenomenon of anonymity and the impact of anonymous actors in various social situations and interactions. Professor DeGloma has also published articles in Social Psychology Quarterly, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociological Forum, and Symbolic Interaction along with several chapters in various edited volumes. In addition, DeGloma is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interaction (With Wayne H. Brekhus and William Ryan Force) and a twelve volume book series titled Interpretive Lenses in Sociology (with Julie B. Wiest, under contract with Bristol University Press). He has served as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (2017-2018) and Secretary of the Eastern Sociological Society (2016-2019).


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Tia DeNora
University of Exeter

My undergraduate degree was in music (flute) and sociology. I completed my Ph.D. in Sociology in 1989 at the University of California San Diego. From then until 1992, I worked at University of Wales Cardiff (where I was a University of Wales Fellow from 1989-91). I moved to Exeter in 1992. Most of my work has focused on musical topics, but I have also worked in the area of the sociology of science and technology. I was Chair of the European Sociological Association Network on Sociology of the Arts from 1999–2001 and am a member of the Board of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Sociology of the Arts I was a board member of the ASA Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology from 1994–7. I co-edit the Manchester University Press series, Music and Society and serve on the editorial board of Qualitative Research and, from October 2003–5, American Journal of Sociology. At Exeter I am Head of Sociology. I also serve on the University’s Research Committee and am Deputy Director of the University Group on Equal Opportunities.


Shai Dromi
Harvard University

Shai Dromi is a comparative-historical sociologist researching the role of religion and cultural beliefs in creating civil society organizations and movements. He has researched and published on civic associations such as international humanitarian organizations, environmental and political movements, and human rights groups. His first book, Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), examines the origins and development of the humanitarian relief NGO field, and draws on archival research at the International Committee of the Red Cross and related repositories. Dromi is currently co-authoring a book on academic controversies, which is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press, and is also conducting comparative-historical research on U.S. student activism on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. He is co-editor of the Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, vol. 2, which is under contact with Springer. Dromi's work has appeared in journals such as Sociological Theory and Theory & Society, and received the Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Outstanding Published Article Award, the Global and Transnational Sociology Best Graduate Student Paper Award and an honorable mention for the Theda Skocpol Best Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association, as well as the Marvin B. Sussman Prize from Yale University. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in the areas of organizations, global and transnational sociology, cultural sociology, and sociological theory.


Anna Durnová
Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna

Anna Durnová holds a PhD in Political Science and in Comparative Philology and the "Habilitation à diriger des recherches" diploma at SciencesPO in Paris. She is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. Anna works currently on the project Crafting liberal democracy through self-determination that is funded by the Austrian Excellence Funding Program Elise Richter. The project conceives of liberal democracy as a political order that posits democratic decision-making processes as value-free, but nevertheless contributes values to public debate by legitimizing some references to emotions as "rational/legitimate" and stigmatizing others as "irrational/illegitimate". Building on critical policy studies and cultural sociology, the project suggests that in order to understand the current affirmation and rejection of the liberal-democratic paradigm, we need a new way of understanding self-determination: as framed, controlled, and challenged by special references to emotions in public debates. The project provides material from two particular controversies – on home birth in France and on mammography screening in Austria.

Anna is also Forum Editor of Critical Policy Studies (CPS). Based most of her career in Vienna, she was a Visiting researcher at Concordia University in 2019, Visiting Professor at the Masaryk University of Brno in 2012 and between 2009 and 2010 she was a Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Lyon. She was a CCS Visiting Fellow in Spring of 2017.


Laura Desfor Edles
California State University, Northridge

Laura Desfor Edles is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy after Franco (Cambridge University Press), Cultural Sociology in Practice (Blackwell Publishers), and a variety of sociological theory textbooks (co-authored with Scott Appelrouth, Sage Publications).


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Nina Eliasoph
University of Southern California

Nina Eliasoph’s research has focused on public speech in the U.S., asking how citizens and policy makers talk about politics and morality in the public arena. Her first book, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1998), is an ethnographic account of suburban activists, volunteers, and recreation club members describes how they talked — or did not talk — about politics, both within their groups and in their encounters with government, media and corporate authorities. Avoiding Politics won awards from the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section, the National Communication Association, and the Association for Humanistic Sociology.

Eliasoph’s current book manuscript, Ambiguous Moral Worlds: The Case of U.S. Youth Programs, investigates a newly prevalent type of setting: after-school youth programs which are sponsored by a mixture of state agencies and large non-governmental agencies. She is also plannig a comparative ethnographic project with researchers in France, on questions of political and moral dialogue in institutionally ambiguous settings. Professor Eliasoph has served on the Sociology of Culture and the Political Sociology Councils of the American Sociological Association.


Mustafa Emirbayer
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mustafa Emirbayer is professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. A past chair of the ASA Theory Section and winner of the Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology, his work includes historical studies of the teaching of morality and citizenship in American public schools from the early nineteenth century to the present; theoretical papers on social networks, culture, agency, collective emotions, the public sphere and civil society, revolutions and social movements, organizations, and democracy; theoretical studies of Durkheim, Weber, Dewey, Garfinkel, Bourdieu, and Alexander; and writings on race in America (coauthored with Matthew Desmond), including a symposium on “Race and Reflexivity” in Ethnic and Racial Studies; a “non-textbook textbook” entitled Race in America (forthcoming in its second edition with Norton); and a scholarly contribution to race theory, entitled The Racial Order (forthcoming with University of Chicago Press).


Henrik Enroth
Linnaeus University

Henrik Enroth is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Linnaeus University. He received his PhD from Stockholm University. He has wide-ranging interests in social, cultural, and political theory. He is the author of Political Science and the Problem of Social Order (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and a contributor to The Nordic Civil Sphere (Polity Press, 2019) and Populism in the Civil Sphere (Polity Press, 2021). He has published articles in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, International Political Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, and American Journal of Cultural Sociology. He is working on a book about aesthetic theory in the study of political life.


Justin Farrell
Yale University

Justin Farrell is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University, School of the Environment. His research tackles questions of environment, human culture, policy, and conflict using a mixture of methods, blending ethnographic fieldwork with large-scale computational techniques from network science and machine learning. His work has been published by Princeton University Press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Climate Change, the American Sociological Review, Environmental Research Letters, Social Problems, among others, and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation. His books and articles have won national scholarly awards, presented to the U.S. Senate and United Nations, and covered by major media outlets such as the New York Times, The Economist, LA Times, NPR, Washington Post, HBO, WIRED, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times. Justin is a proud first-generation college grad and Wyoming native.


Gary Alan Fine
Northwestern University

Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern 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. (Visiting Fellow, Spring 2010)


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Roger O. Friedland
University of California, Santa Barbara

Roger Friedland teaches and researches in the areas of cultural analysis, religion and politics, social theory, and institutions.


Michael Galchinsky
Georgia State University

Michael Galchinsky is Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness, and Professor of English, at Georgia State University (Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley, 1994). He is the author of The Modes of Human Rights Literature: Towards a Culture without Borders (Palgrave, 2016), Jews and Human Rights: Dancing at Three Weddings (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer (Wayne State University Press, 1996). With David Biale and Susannah Heschel, he co-edited Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (University of California Press, 1998). His current project is “Iconic Loss: The Global Civil Sphere and the Destruction of Cultural Property.”


Rui Gao
School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China


David W. Garland
New York University

David Garland teaches law and sociology at New York University. Born and raised in Scotland, he is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and taught there from 1979 to 1997 before moving to the USA. Garland is the author of a series of award-winning books on punishment and criminal justice, including Punishment and Modern Society (1990); The Culture of Control (2001) and Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010) and the editor of Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (2001). His most recent book is The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, March 2016).


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J. William Gibson
California State University, Long Beach

J. William Gibson attended the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. 1973) as an undergraduate, went to graduate school in sociology at Yale (Ph.D. 1985) and studied as a visiting graduate student at Brandeis University. Gibson was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities (1990–91). He is the author of The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986 and 2000), and Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994). His articles, editorials, and book reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, The Nation, and The Washington Post. Gibson is currently working on a new manuscript for Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt tentatively entitled Call of the Wild: the Cultural Re-Enchantment of Nature. It is a study in cultural sociology about how the environmental and animal rights movements of the past 35 years have revived and developed a romantic concept of nature, namely that the land and its creatures are in some sense sacred or enchanted. In this culture, landscapes, trees, coral reefs, and all kinds of animals are seen as having intrinsic value and integrity and participate in a larger spirit or mystery of nature. This new culture of enchantment breaks from what classical sociologists saw as fundamental processes of modernization, rationalization and secularization.


Sandy Gill
Gettysburg College


Andreas Glaeser
University of Chicago

Andreas Glaeser has begun work on a new monograph with the provisional title The Power of Recognition: Making Beliefs in the Secret Police and the Opposition of the former GDR. The central question this book pursues is why particular people believe in the veracity of a particular understanding of the world. The effort of Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, to control the civil rights movement in Berlin during the 1980s, is used here as a fruitful arena to develop new theoretical departures for a sociology of knowledge which focuses on epistemic practices and ideologies within social networks and bureaucratic organizations. He tries to show also that the reality construction frame offers a much better understanding of the peculiar interactions between opposition movements and security agencies in the late GDR which in turn can be used to unravel some of the mysteries about the cultural reasons why socialism has failed. Since this project has made wide use of archival materials to inform intensive interviews focusing on organizational lives, it also provides new methodological impulses for a historical ethnographic practice which employs organizations as 'elevator' between various levels of social organizations and as a “burning glasses” for diverse kinds of social processes which begin to interact within the organization. Andreas is also working on the role of emotions in cultural change and continues to pursue his interest in the configuration of architectural spaces as physical anchors of memories, identities and cultural codes.


Diane Grams
Loyola University Chicago

Diane Grams conducts research on urban art production. Her second book, Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago, (University of Chicago Press 2010), is an investigation of art producers in Chicago's Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park communities. In 2011, she was named a Faculty Fellow for the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, an honor that places her in the company of some of the nation's top cultural sociologists. She is currently working on a number of articles on New Orleanian parading cultures and on third book comparing New Orleans to Chicago. A paper, "Freedom and Cultural Consciousness:Black Working Class Parades in Post-Katrina New Orleans," was recently named "Best Conference Paper of the Year-2011" by the Urban Affairs Association. The paper will appear in the Journal of Urban Affairs in the coming year (2012-2013). Video clips and photographs from this ethnographic research of public parades, Mardi Gras Indians and Sunday Second Line Parades can be seen on youtube and facebook.


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Fiona Greenland
University of Virginia

Fiona Greenland is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Assistant Professor of Anthropology (by courtesy) at the University of Virginia. She studies material culture and the politics of cultural heritage. Her book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. It situates the emergence of national symbols and icons in Italy’s longer historical entanglements of cultural elites, state officials, and tombaroli, or tomb robbers. Her new project examines the relationship between cultural heritage destruction and civilian deaths in the Syrian war. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the project uses georeferenced cultural data to assess the role of historically and aesthetically significant materials in conflict and in postwar rebuilding. Greenland’s work has been published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Sociological Theory, and Theory and Society, among other outlets. She is the founder and co-director of the CURIA Lab (Cultural Resilience Informatics and Analysis).


Erik Hannerz
Lund University

Erik Hannerz is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. Erik received his Ph.D. at Uppsala University in 2014. His main research interest is subcultural groups, and particularly the cultural sociological refinement of the concepts of subculture and mainstream, he has also published on urban sociology and ethnography. Erik’s most recent book on how punks in Sweden and Indonesia define and live out punk—Performing Punk—was published in Palgrave MacMillan’s Cultural Sociology series in 2015. He is currently working on a four year project funded by the Swedish foundation for humanities and social sciences on how graffiti writers perceive and make use of urban space.


Akiko Hashimoto
Portland State University

Akiko Hashimoto grew up in Tokyo, London, and Hamburg. She received her B.Sc. from the London School of Economics and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. After working at the United Nations University in Tokyo, she taught Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh for 25 years, and is now Visiting Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Portland State University.

She is author and editor of volumes on cultural sociology and comparative sociology, focused on social constructions of reality in varied cultural settings. Her special interests are cultural trauma, war memory, national identity, culture and power, popular culture and media, family and aging. Her latest volume is The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2015) which won the 2016 Scholarly Achievement Award of the North Central Sociological Association. The book is now available in Japanese (Nihon no Nagai Sengo, Misuzu Shobo Publishers, 2017) and Chinese (Beijing Imaginist, 2019). She is also author of The Gift of Generations: Japanese and American Perspectives on Aging and the Social Contract (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and co-editor of Imagined Families, Lived Families (SUNY Press, 2008) and Family Support for the Elderly: The international Experience (Oxford University Press, 1992).


Volker Heins
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen, Germany

Volker Heins is Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen, Germany, and a professor of political science at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Before returning to Germany, he has taught and researched at various other places, including the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and at McGill University, Montreal. He is co-founder of the Academy in Exile in Germany. For more on his research interests and publications, see: https://kulturwissenschaften.de/en/person/prof-dr-volker-heins. Professor Heins was a CCS Visiting Fellow in the Spring of 2009.


Andreas Hess
University College Dublin

Andreas Hess is professor in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland and a Research Fellow at CCS. His main interests are in historical sociology, intellectual history, the sociology of ideas, and Basque Studies. As of January 2021 he is editor-in-chief of the journal Society (jointly with Daniel Gordon). Recent publications: (as editor) Judith Shklar: On Political Obligation (Yale UP, 2019), Between Utopia and Realism. The Political Thought of Judith N. Shklar (Penn Press, 2019); and (as sole author) The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar. Exile from Exile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Tocqueville and Beaumont: Aristocratic Liberalism in Democratic Times (Palgrave Pivot 2018). Andreas was a CCS Visiting Fellow in the Fall of 2009 but has since paid a number of visits to Yale.


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Till Hilmar
Vienna University

Till received his PhD in sociology from Yale University in 2019 and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Vienna University. Before coming to Vienna, was as a postdoctoral researcher at Bremen University’s SOCIUM – Reserach Center on Inequality and Social Policy. He is a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and an assistant editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
His research interests include qualitative approaches to inequality, cultural and political sociology, social memory, post-1989 transformations, and text-as-data. He is interested in popular ideas about economic inequality and is developing methodological approaches to understand cultural narratives about economic change. Starting March 2024, he is a PI in the Horizon Project CIDAPE on inequality, climate change and the force of political emotions.
His book Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published with Columbia University Press in 2023, examines popular experiences of the East German and the Czech post-1989 transformations in a comparative perspective.


Mervyn Horgan
University of Guelph

Mervyn Horgan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Affiliated Faculty with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, both at the University of Guelph, Canada. His core theoretical and empirical concern is the making and breaking of solidarity. This interest animates his current research on convivial and uncivil encounters between strangers in everyday urban public spaces (supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), and is threaded through his current research on the civil sphere in Canada, housing studies, sociological interventions in the recognition debates in political philosophy, cultural nationalism, blind spots in social science history, and processes of de/stigmatization. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Visual Studies, Pragmatics, Canadian Journal of Sociology, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Urban Planning, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, among others, as well as in numerous edited collections. (CCS Visiting Fellow, 2018-19)


Dick Houtman
University of Leuven, Belgium

Dick Houtman is Full Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and was a visiting fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) during the academic year 2012-2013. His principal research interest is how cultural changes since the 1960s have transformed various societal realms in the West, ranging from politics to consumption and from religion to popular culture.

Most of his publications address either the emergence and electoral consequences of a new political culture, organized around cultural identity issues rather than distributive class issues, or the shift from church-based religion to institutionally unaffiliated spiritualities of life of the ‘New Age’ variety. He has published about changes in political culture in journals like Politics and Society, Urban Affairs Review, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of European Social Policy, Social Forces and Public Opinion Quarterly (often with Peter Achterberg) and about the spiritual turn in the religious realm in, among others, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Information, Communication and Society, Social Compass, Journal of Contemporary Religion and Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (often with Stef Aupers). Recent international books are Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (2012, co-edited with Birgit Meyer), Paradoxes of Individualization: Social Control and Social Conflict in Contemporary Modernity (2011, co-authored with Stef Aupers and Willem de Koster), Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (2010, co-edited with Stef Aupers), and Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (2008, co-authored with Peter Achterberg and Anton Derks).


Nicolas Howe
Williams College

Nicolas Howe is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College with affiliations in Anthropology/Sociology and American Studies. Trained as a cultural geographer, he studies the role of place, space, and landscape in social life. His research focuses on the intersection of religious and environmental politics in modern America, and he has strong interests in sociolegal studies, environmental history, and visual culture studies. He is co-author of Climate Change as Social Drama (Cambridge 2015) with CCS co-director Philip Smith. His book Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.


David Inglis
University of Helsinki, Finland

David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He holds degrees in sociology from the Universities of Cambridge and York. He is founding editor of the journal Cultural Sociology. He writes in, and blends together, the areas of cultural sociology, historical sociology, and social theory. He has written and edited multiple books in these areas. He is particularly interested in comparing pre-modern civilizations and modern societies. He is currently chair of the Finnish Sociological Association, the Westermarck Seura. Current writing concerns include globalization and cosmopolitization, the nature of Brexit, masks and masking, the historical sociology of plagues, the sociology of translation, the concept of ‘Eurasia’, critique of post-colonial sociology, fashion in pre-modern contexts, and the long-term analysis of wine-related phenomena.


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Ronald Jacobs
State University of New York, Albany

Ron Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society (Cambridge University Press), and the co-author of Cultural Sociology (Blackwell), The Space of Opinion (Oxford University Press), and Living Sociologically (Oxford University Press), as well as the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Together with Jeff Alexander and Phil Smith, Ron is co-founder and co-editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.


Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky
Masaryk University

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is a professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia. Recent books include The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration (with Carlo Tognato and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., Palgrave, 2020) and Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (with Victoria Shmidt, Routledge 2021), and A Critical Cultural Sociological Exploration of Attitudes toward Migration in Czechia: What Lies Beneath the Fear of the Thirteenth Migrant (with Radka Klvaňová, Ivana Rapoš Božič, Alica Rétiová, and Jan Kotýnek Krotký, Lexington Books, 2023). Her current research focuses on in-depth cultural sociological analysis and reconstruction of public issues such as perceptions of migration, and the “reverse sociology” of migrant responses to racialization and Othering. Her recent work has been published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Migration Studies, Visual Studies, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics


Isabel Jijón
Purchase College, State University of New York

Isabel Jijón is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Purchase College, from the State University of New York. She is also a Research Associate of the Dignity and Debt Network at Princeton University and a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Her work examines culture, globalization, and the intersection of morality and markets. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The Dignity of Working Children? Morality, Globalization, and the Children Who Defend Child Labor, which asks why working children in the global South defend certain forms of child labor and oppose international norms and standards. She has also written about the globalization of collective memory, the globalization of sport, and theories of translation.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles Forthcoming. “The Priceless Child Talks Back: How Working Children Respond to Global Norms Against Child Labor.” Childhood 2019. “Toward a Hermeneutic Model of Cultural Globalization: Four Lessons from Translation Studies.” Sociological Theory 37.2:142-161. 2018. “The Universal King? Memory, Globalization, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Sociological Inquiry 88.1: 79-105. 2015. “The Moral Glocalization of Sport: Local Meanings of Football in Chota Valley, Ecuador.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 52.1: 82-96. 2013. “The Glocalization of Time and Space: Soccer and Meaning in Chota Valley, Ecuador.” International Sociology 28.4: 373-390.

Book Chapters 2018. “Is Civil Society Dangerous for Democracy? New Directions for Civil Sphere Theory in Latin America.” Pp. 231-239 in The Civil Sphere in Latin America. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Lars E. F. Johannessen
Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway

Lars E.F. Johannessen is an Associate Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University. His main areas of research are cultural sociology, medical sociology, digital culture and science and technology studies. He received his PhD from Oslo Metropolitan University in 2018 and has published articles in journals such as Sociology of Health & Illness, Symbolic Interaction, Social Science & Medicine, and European Societies.


Kay Junge
Bielefeld University, Germany


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Danny Kaplan
Bar Ilan University, Israel

Prof. Danny Kaplan directs the men studies track in the Gender Studies Program and teaches at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar Ilan University, Israel.

Kaplan is interested in questions of civic and national solidarity, pursuing the age-old Durkheimian question, “how do societies cohere?” In addressing these matters Kaplan adopts the cultural trope of friendship as his main conceptual apparatus, exploring how social ties are practiced and made sense of by local actors in ways that straddle the line between personal and collective experience. Kaplan applied these questions to various fields of study, among them masculinity and military culture, media and popular culture, and civic associations and conducted extensive field research in related institutions within Israeli society. His work has been published in American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Journal of Communication, American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Poetics, Political Psychology, Men and Masculinities, Nations and Nationalism, and Symbolic Interaction. He received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award by the Midwest Sociological Society for article published in Sociological Quarterly .

Kaplan’s recent book The Nation and the Promise of Friendship: Building Solidarity through Sociability was published as part of the Cultural Sociology Series in Palgrave MacMillan. He is also the author of Brothers and Others in Arms: The Making of Love and War in Israeli Combat Units (Haworth Press 2003) and The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture (Berghahn Books 2006).

Kaplan is also involved in ongoing research on non-traditional masculinity ideologies based on survey work conducted in Israel, the US, and the UK. Kaplan developed a measure of “new masculinity” ideology that resonates with the growing spread of therapeutic discourse and taps on themes of authenticity and holistic self-awareness. A related research project examines how endorsement of new masculinity ideology is associated with fathers’ involvement in childcare and how it shapes fathers’ work-family conflict and enrichment. This project is funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (in collaboration with Shira Offer).


Thomas Kern
University of Bamberg

Thomas Kern is Professor of Sociology at Technische Universität Chemnitz (Chemnitz University of Science and Technology) in Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Bamberg (1996) and completed his habilitation thesis at the University of Hagen (2005). From 2000 to 2003 he spent three years as postdoctoral researcher at the Yonsei University in Seoul (South Korea). From 2003 to 2008 he worked at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. In 2008 and 2009, he was a fellow of the Max-Weber-Kolleg for Advanced Studies in Erfurt. From 2009 to 2013 he held a Professorship of Sociology at the University of Heidelberg. He conducted research projects in South Korea, the United States, and Germany. His major research interests are related to the fields of political sociology, sociology of religion, and economic sociology. Professor Kern's current projects include one study about the growth of Megachurches in the United States. Another study deals with the causes of high-risk activism in the former German Democratic Republic before the collapse of the authoritarian regime in 1989/90.


Farhad Khosrokhavar
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Cadis

Farhad Khosrokhavar is a professor at Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. He has been a Rockefeller fellow (1990), has given conferences in different European and American universities (Saint Antony’s college in Oxford Britain, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Texas University at Austin…), was a Yale Visiting Scholar in 2008 and a Harvard Visiting Scholar in 2009. His most recent books include Jihadism in Europe, Oxford University Press (forthcoming June 2021); Le Nouveau Jihad en Occident, Robert Laffont Publishers, Paris, 2018; Juifs et Musulmans (co-author Michel Wieviorka), Robert Laffont Publishers, 2017; Le Jihadisme des femmes (with Fethi Benslama), Seuil, 2017, (Italian translation in 2019); Prisons de France, Robert Laffont Publishers, Paris, 2016; Le Jihadisme, comment le comprendre pour mieux le combattre (avec David Bénichou et Philippe Migaux), Editions Plon, 2015; Radicalisation, Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris, 2014 (English, German and Japanese translations); The New Arab Revolutions that Shook the World (Paradigm Publishers, 2012); Jihadist Ideology, The Anthropological Perspective (CIR, Aarhus University, Danemark, 2011).


Anthony King
University of Warwick, UK


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Peter Kivisto
Augustana College

Peter Kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana College and International Reader at the University of Helsinki’s Center for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN). He was until 2017 the Co-Director of the Research Laboratory on Transnationalism and Migration Processes at St. Petersburg State University. The Academy of Finland appointed him Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Turku from 2008 to 2012, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university in 2013. His research focuses on immigration, social integration, and civil society. Recent books include The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016 (Emerald, 2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory, 2 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Populism in the Civil Sphere (Polity Press, 2021, with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Giuseppe Sciortino). He has served on the Council of the American Sociological Association and as President of the Midwest Sociological Society, as well as serving as Editor of The Sociological Quarterly. He is currently the Series Editor of Anthem Press’s Key Issues in Modern Sociology.


Joseph Klett
University of California, Santa Cruz

Joseph Klett is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his PhD in sociology from Yale University. His research concerns sonic interactions between people, places, and things. Specifically, he studies the routine uses of technology in the making of auditory perception. His contribution to cultural sociology includes a theoretical application of sound studies research which operationalizes sound as a fluid yet meaningful cultural object. He has conducted ethnographies of an audio engineering firm and music education classrooms in public schools. His research has been published in Sociological Theory and Cultural Sociology. He is now working on his first book, Organizing Sound.


Agnes Ku
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Agnes Ku is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (1995), and was Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (1993–2000). She researches in the areas of cultural sociology, civil society and the public sphere, Hong Kong culture and politics, and gender issues. Professor Ku’s current projects include two separate Hong Kong-based studies, one in civil society and citizenship rights in Hong Kong, and the other on rights discourse.


Krishan Kumar
University of Virginia

Krishan Kumar is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He was previously Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge and his postgraduate education at the London School of Economics. Mr. Kumar has at various times been a Talks Producer at the BBC, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, and has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Central European University, Prague, the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Among his publications are Prophecy and Progress: The Sociology of Industrial and Post-Industrial Society, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, The Rise of Modern Society, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals, and The Making of English National Identity. Mr. Kumar’s current interests focus on nationalism and national identity. Related research involves work on European identity in the context of transnational migration and challeges to the Nation-state. He is also preparing a study of current approaches to historical sociology.


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Dmitry Kurakin
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Dmitry Kurakin is the Director of the HSE Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology and a Leading Research Fellow at the Centre for Fundamental Sociology, both at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). He works in the fields of sociological theory generally, and Durkheimian cultural sociology specifically, focusing on theories of the sacred, the emotional dimension of culture, culture and cognition, cultural sociology of inequality, the sociology of education, and other related issues. Being a CCS faculty fellow since 2010, Professor Kurakin was also a CCS visiting fellow in 2015, is an associate editor of American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and is editor of the ISA newsletter Theory (term 2018-2022).


Fuyuki Kurasawa
York University

Fuyuki Kurasawa was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University and a CCS Visiting Fellow at Yale University in 2003–2004. Professor Kurasawa has also been a Commonwealth Fellow and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow, and was named a “Young Canadian Leader” by The Globe and Mail in 2000. He is currently writing two books, To Do Onto Others: Theorizing Practices of Global Justice, and Intersections and Interventions: Canadian Essays in Cultural Materialism, as well as acting as a consulting editor for the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory.


Michèle Lamont
Harvard University

Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016-2017 and she chaired the Council for European Studies from 2006-2009. She is also the recipient of a 1996 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2014 Gutenberg research award, and the 2017 Erasmus prize (for her contributions to the social sciences in Europe and the rest of the world). She is also the recipient of honorary doctorates from five countries (Canada, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK). A cultural and comparative sociologist, Lamont is the author or coauthor of a dozen books and edited volumes and over one hundred articles and chapters on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods. Her most recent publications include the coauthored book Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel (Princeton University Press 2016); the 2017 ASA Presidential Address “Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality” (American Sociological Review 2018); and a special issue of Daedalus on “Inequality as a Multidimensional Process” (coedited with Paul Pierson; summer 2019). Lamont is Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2019-2021, she spent 2019-2020 on sabbatical at the Russell Sage Foundation. She is working on a book on social change and repertoires of hope, to be published by Simon and Schuster (US) and Penguin (UK).


Scott Lash
Goldsmiths, University of London


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Håkon Larsen
Oslo Metropolitan University

Håkon Larsen is a Professor at the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Sciences, Oslo Metropolitan University. His main areas of research are cultural organizations, legitimacy, cultural policy, and the public sphere. In 2016 he published the book Performing Legitimacy: Studies in High Culture and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan).


Günter Leypoldt
University of Heidelberg, Germany

Günter Leypoldt (BA. Cape Town, 1994; PhD Tübingen, 2000) is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Previously he taught American Studies at the universities of Tübingen (2001-7), Maryland, College Park (2003), and Mainz (2007-2009). He is the author of Casual Silences: The Poetics of Minimal Realism (Trier, 2001) and Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh UP, 2009), and editor (with Bernd Engler) of American Cultural Icons: The Production of Representative Lives (Würzburg, 2010). His recent research interests include cultural and literary theory; cultural sociology and aesthetics; transatlantic romanticism and modernism, American pragmatism, the sociology of knowledge formation, nineteenth-century literary culture and philosophy, and contemporary fiction. He is presently working on a study of cultural charisma. (CCS Visiting Fellow, August 2013 – February 2014)


Haoyue Cecilia Li
Zhejiang University, China

Haoyue Cecilia Li is a cultural and environmental sociologist who specializes in environmental journalism, activism, and politics in China. She received her bachelor's degrees in Sociology and Economics from Peking University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research on news media coverage of China’s smog and food scandals has appeared in journals such as Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Rural Studies and other journals. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Crisis, Legitimation and Contention: China’s Environmental Health Crises in Global Public Spheres, which explores how global media report the public health crisis related to environmental pollution in China, and how environmental journalists in China circumvent press censorship to write critical-oriented news stories. She is also leading a research project on the Chinese social media and the COVID-19 pandemic using big data analysis tools.

Haoyue Cecilia Li is now an Associate Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University, China. (Sept. 2020)


Muyang Li
York University, Canada

Muyang Li is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University. She is interested in digital media, cultural sociology, political sociology, and gender issues. With an interdisciplinary background in sociology, computational social science, and communication, she has been trained in a variety of methodological approaches. Her research is organized around a key question: how does media interact with democracy and social life? One of her recent studies adopts mixed methods to explore the negotiation between the authoritarian state and the public in defining democracy through social media. The findings reveal how the authoritarian regime uses hegemonic strategies to survive the ideological crisis in the digital era. She is also working on projects about social media platform’s content moderation, and algorithm’s impact on political discourse. Her research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.


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Paul Lichterman
University of Southern California

Paul Lichterman is Professor of Sociology and Religion at University of Southern California. Paul received the Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1992 and was previously Assistant and Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin—Madison. Paul’s work explores civic and political engagement in social movements, religious volunteer groups and nonprofit organizations, addressing sociological and broader public debates about individualism, social solidarity, civic engagement and the public roles of religion. While investigating the patterned quality of symbolic forms, his studies have highlighted the patterned, group practices and emotional sensibilities that make those forms meaningful in everyday life. He is author of The Search for Political Community, and Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions. The newly published (2021) How Civic Action Works: Fighting for Housing in Los Angeles offers a new conceptual framework for studying collective action. Paul has published in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, Theory and Society and other journals, won a variety of book and article awards, and enjoyed fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg, Germany.


Zikun Liu
Wuhan University, China

Zikun Liu is a cultural sociologist with a focus on disaster narratives and cultural trauma. She earned her PhD from Tsinghua University in China and is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Wuhan University. Her research interests encompass the Chinese media’s narrative and cultural responses to disasters, as well as the complex interplay between gender, health, and culture. Her scholarly contributions have been published or are forthcoming in several leading journals, including Chinese Journal of Sociology, Health Communication, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and Information Development. Committed to fostering dialogue between Chinese and American sociological perspectives, her recent interviews with Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith have been accepted by the Tsinghua Sociological Review and Tsinghua Journal of Social Sciences.


Orvar Löfgren
University of Lund

Over the last years my research has centered around the study of national identities and transnational movements in an everyday perspective, as well as on tourism, travel and the cultural analysis of consumption. Earlier research interests have included studies of class and culture building, but also Scandinavian peasant life and family organization, as well as studies of maritime communities.


María Luengo
Carlos III University of Madrid

María Luengo is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain). Her work focuses on journalism and the civil sphere. Recent book publications include The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future (co-edited with Alexander and Breese, Cambridge University Press, 2016) and News Media Innovation Reconsidered (co-edited with Susana Herrera Damas, Wiley, forthcoming). Her research has appeared in European Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Journalism, and Journalism Studies, among others.


Anna Lund
Stockholm University, Sweden

Anna Lund is a professor of sociology and deputy head of the Department of Sociology, Stockholm University. Cultural sociological perspectives and ethnographic methods characterize her research, as well as a theoretical concern with social change and cultural transformation under conditions of adversity. Her current research interest is connected to how modes of incorporation is performed in school settings among and for migrant students as well as in Swedish children’s theater. She employs civil sphere theory at the microlevel by investigating interactional and organizational processes in school and theater contexts. In 2019 she published The Nordic Civil Sphere with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Andrea Voyer.


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Gordon Lynch
University of Kent

Gordon Lynch is Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent. His research focuses primarily on the nature and uses of moral meaning in modern societies, both within religious organisations and wider cultural forms of the 'sacred' and 'profane'. His recent work has focused particularly on the moral framing of welfare initiatives which separated children from birth families or home communities (particularly the UK child migration schemes) and the inter-section of moral meanings and abuse in religious organisations. He has undertaken extensive expert witness work for two national child abuse Inquiries in the United Kingdom, undertaking research which contributed to the creation of a national compensation scheme for former British child migrants, and has also undertaken public engagement work with think-tanks, the museum sector and others working in the creative arts. His previous books include The Sacred in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2012), On the Sacred (Routledge, 2012) and Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity (Bloomsbury, 2015).


Todd Madigan
Coastal Carolina University

Todd Madigan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of sociology at Coastal Carolina University and a faculty fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology. His research explores the ways in which social narratives can alternately shape and shatter collective identity. Focussing specifically on racial, ethnic, and national identity, he has analyzed Vietnamese-American cultural trauma, where the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States has engaged in the contentious process of re-narrating its self-understanding in light of both its war-time experience in Vietnam and subsequent resettlement in America. He is currently co-editing Interpreting Trauma (Bristol University Press, forthcoming), an interdisciplinary volume that integrates psychological, aesthetic, and social approaches to the analysis of trauma. He holds a PhD in sociology from Yale University.


Timothy Malacarne
Nevada State College


Eric Malczewski
Center for Public Administration and Policy at the School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Eric Malczewski is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Public Administration and Policy at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. He is a sociologist specializing in sociological theory, comparative historical sociology, culture, material culture, and social and political theory. He is currently working on a book providing a theoretical and historical account of transformations of conceptions of nature in American culture and their role in the emergence of a new domain of experience. The study is intended as a contribution to sociological theory and the understanding of the role played by nature and the environment in American modernity. His published research focuses on the organizing principles of social science and epistemological issues in sociological theory. Other core interests include conceptions of nature and the environment, classical sociological theory (with a special emphasis on the thought of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber), sociology of knowledge, modern culture, philosophy of the human sciences, and culture.


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Sven-Axel Mansson
Malmö University

Professor in social work, PhD. Research area: Gender, sexuality and social work.


Radim Marada
Masaryk University

Radim Marada gained his PhD in Sociology from the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research, in 1995. Currently he chairs the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Studies of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He also leads a research team “Ethnization, Migration, Identity” in the Masaryk University’s Institute for the Study on Social Reproduction and Integration. He is the editor in chief of the academic journal Social Studies.

His major areas of interest are sociological theory and history of social thought, cultural sociology, generations and generational conflict, civil society. Among his recent publications, there are Culture of Protest: Politicization of Everyday Life (2003) and Ethnic Diversity and Civic Unity (2006, editor).


Manussos Marangudakis
University of the Aegean


Jason Mast
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, University of Trento and Yale University

Jason L Mast is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow at the University of Trento and Yale University. His current research investigates how populism, ethno-nationalism, and isolationism have rippled through recent elections in Western democracies, and unsettled the multicultural, globalist, and neoliberal trajectories many had assumed were durable and determined. His writings on the American case can be found in the edited volumes, Populism in the Civil Sphere (2021, Polity), and Politics of Meaning /Meaning of Politics: Cultural Sociology of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (2019, Palgrave Macmillan). Mast also examines how recent developments in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience have challenged how the social sciences and humanities theorize the intersections between mind, culture, and society, such as in his article, “Representationalism and Cultural Cognitivism” (2020, American Journal of Cultural Sociology).

Mast earned his PhD in sociology from UCLA. He has been a Research Mitarbeiter at Zeppelin University, in Germany, a Global Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, in England, a research fellow at the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster at Goethe-University Frankfurt, in Germany, and from 2021 to 2024, he will be a Marie Curie Global Fellow affiliated with the University of Trento and Yale University.


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Lisa McCormick
University of Edinburgh

Lisa McCormick is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2008 and taught at Haverford College before moving to Scotland in 2015. Her areas of specialization are cultural sociology, the sociology of the arts, and sociological theory, and her research on music draws on her background as a conservatory-trained cellist. She is the author of Performing Civility (Cambridge University Press 2015), the first study analysing the social aspects of international classical music competitions. She is also co-editor (with Ron Eyerman) of Myth, Meaning and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts (Paradigm Press 2006). Her articles have been published in Cultural Sociology, The Chopin Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Contemporary Social Science, and Sociologia & Anthropologia. Recently, she guest edited a special issue on the cultural sociology of art and music for American Journal of Cultural Sociology, which was then expanded into an edited collection that was published by Palgrave Macmillan. From 2016-2020, she was co-editor of Cultural Sociology, an official journal of the British Sociological Association.


Brian McKernan
Pace University

Brian McKernan is Assistant Professor in communication and media studies at Pace University and an expert in human-centered design, complex human reasoning, and conspiracies and misinformation. He has served as key personnel on two research contracts with IARPA focused on developing tools to strengthen reasoning and mitigate cognitive biases. As a member of the Illuminating Project, Brian helped develop an online dashboard to monitor strategic communication by the US 2020 presidential candidates on Facebook and Instagram. In both designing and studying innovative applications, Brian draws from works in cultural sociology to remain sensitive to how cultural meanings help shape the ways that people interact with different technologies. Brian’s work has been published in Computers in Human Behavior, Technology, Knowledge, & Learning, Games and Culture, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology..


Marcus Morgan
University of Bristol, UK

Marcus Morgan is a sociologist at the University of Bristol. He previously worked at the University of Cambridge and the University of London. His work spans social theory, cultural sociology, and the sociology of social movements. He has an emerging interest in political sociology and has published on humanism, the sociology of intellectuals, and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. He is the author of Pragmatic Humanism: On the Nature & Value of Sociological Knowledge (Routledge, 2016), and co-author of Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (Palgrave, 2015). His most recent article is ‘From Status to Strategy: Intellectuals Engaging the Grassroots’, The Sociological Review (forthcoming). He is the co-Editor of the BSA/SAGE journal Cultural Sociology.


Kate Nash
Goldsmiths, University of London

Kate is interested in how culture and politics are entangled. In The Political Sociology of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2015) she considered how human rights are constructed and contested in structures and organisations scaled from the local through the national and international to the global. In The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK (Cambridge University Press 2009), she focused on the cultural construction of human rights in the judiciary, government, NGOs and the media in the context of state transformation through networks of global governance. Kate is currently researching human rights films: ‘Film that brings human rights to life’ was published out in Public Culture in 2018.


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Samuel Nelson
McGill University


Matthew Norton
University of Oregon

Professor Norton received his BA in Philosophy from Villanova University in 1998, his MA in Conflict Resolution from the University of Bradford in 2002, and his PhD in Sociology from Yale University in 2012. He joined the faculty of the sociology department at the University of Oregon in 2012. Professor Norton's research has focused on the role of culture in creating and influencing state power, including papers on politicized media, the narrative structure of human rights claims, and classification problems as an inducement to state formation. He is currently writing a book on piracy and state institutional development in the early modern English/British empire.


Sherry B. Ortner
University of California, Los Angeles

Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has done extensive fieldwork with the Sherpas of Nepal, and her final book on the Sherpas, called Life and Death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering, was awarded the J.I. Staley Prize for the best book in Anthropology of 2004. More recently she turned to research in the United States. Her latest book is called Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream.


Stephen Ostertag
Tulane University

Stephen F. Ostertag (Ph.D. University of Connecticut), is an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University. His interests are in culture, citizen news, social media, disaster/crises recovery, race, and local civil and political societies. Among other outlets, he’s published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, Cultural Sociology and the International Journal of Communication. For the past several years he’s been involved in a project on citizen news and social media use over the extended period of post-hurricane Katrina recovery and rebuilding in New Orleans. He’s in the process of completing a book manuscript titled Connecting After Chaos: Social Media and Creating Order in the Aftermath of Disaster that uses the prolonged instability to long-term disaster recovery (settling) to build a theory of cultural power and causality (cultural work).


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Sunwoong Park
Korea National University of Education

Sunwoong Park (Ph.D., Sociology, UCLA) is an associate professor of the Department of Social Studies, the Korea National University of Education in South Korea. He has researched on youth subculture, consumption and class identity, media discourse, and social movements. He has just finished an article on the ritualization of social movements (in Korean) and is now working on the politics of representation on educational crisis, drawing upon Alexander's model of civil discourses. He translated one of Alexander's books, The Meanings of Social Life into Korean. Professor Park was a CCS Visiting Fellow for the 2007-2008 academic year.


Javier Pérez-Jara
University of Seville

Javier Pérez-Jara is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and East Asian Studies at the University of Seville. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Seville, he conducted postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Sociology. He later taught Philosophy and Sociology at Beijing Foreign Studies University for eight years. Among his publications, he is the author of Techno-Utopia and Techno-Apocalypse in Global Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024), and La Filosofía de Bertrand Russell (Pentalfa, 2014), co-author of Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology (Lexington Books, 2022), co-editor of Overcoming the Nature Versus Nurture Debate (Springer’s Synthese Library, forthcoming 2023), and Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology (Springer’s Synthese Library, 2022). Along with Isabel Jijón and Nicolás Rudas, Pérez-Jara is currently working on a book project on dramatic intellectuals. He has held visiting positions across the world, including Stanford University, Yale University, the University of Cambridge, Kyoto University, Sangyo University of Kyoto, Tohoku University, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Taiwanese Fu Jen Catholic University, and Minzu University of China. (Visiting Faculty Fellow, Fall 2021)


Pavel Pospech
Masaryk University, Czechia

Pavel Pospěch is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology of the Masaryk University, Czech Republic. His work lies at the intersections of urban sociology, rural sociology and social theory. He studies problems of order and incivility in urban space, the representations of rurality and of the rural-urban divide, and the various ways people make sense of social change. He has published his work in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of Rural Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Space and Culture and other outlets. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sociální studia / Social Studies and editor of the book Politics and Policies of Rural Authenticity (Routlege 2021). Pavel was a CCS Visiting Fulbright Fellow in the Spring of 2017.


Valentin Rauer
German-Turkish University, Istanbul, Turkey

Valentin Rauer received his doctorate (Dr. rer. soc.) in sociology from Konstanz University in 2006 and works as senior research fellow at Goethe-University Frankfurt/M. He is interested in social and cultural processes that transform, transmit and translate the past (collective memories and identities), and the future (security cultures and risks). His work in cultural sociology, migration studies, and collective memory studies traces how contingent events, narratives, visuals, materials and performances transform and translate the collective space of experiences and the horizon of expectations. In his empirical research, he focuses on the transformation of transnational integration discourses in Germany, transnational rituals of reconciliation, WWII, the visual translation of risks, and material cultures of security. Furthermore, he teaches and publishes on qualitative and quantitative research methods. His articles have been published in Sociologia Internationalis, Berliner Journal of Soziologie and Security and Peace (among others). He is co-editor of Die Einhegung des Anderen [The Containment of the Other], VS-Verlag, 2004, Konjunkturen der Integration [Cycles of Integration], Special Issue of Sociologia Internationalis, 2011 and Sicherheitskultur [Security Culture], Campus 2012.


Isaac Reed
University of Virginia

Isaac Ariail Reed works in social theory, historical sociology, and cultural sociology. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University in 2007, and his B.A. in Mathematics and Sociology & Anthropology from Swarthmore College in 2000. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences. A fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies in 2014-2015, he received the Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in 2015. His current research examines sovereignty troubles at the edge of empire and how power works during crisis.


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Matthias Revers
University of Leeds, UK

Matthias Revers (PhD SUNY-Albany) is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Before going to Leeds he was a Postdoc at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Frankfurt.  His most recent research deals with professional cultures of journalism and their role in increasingly networked public spheres, for which he conducted ethnographic research on political reporters in the US and Germany over a period of 3.5 years. His areas of interest are cultural sociology, media sociology, comparative media research, journalism studies, political communication, sociology of science, qualitative methodology and social theory. His work has been published in Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, The American Sociologist.


Alexander Riley
Bucknell University

Alexander Riley received his Ph. D from the University of California, San Diego in 2000. He is the author of Godless Intellectuals?: The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented and Impure Play: Sacredness, Transgression, and the Tragic in Popular Culture. He is currently working on a study of the memorialization of the site of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania that explores American cultural narratives on heroism and violent death.


Magnus Ring
Lund University

Magnus Ring received his PhD in sociology and is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. His research background and interests include theories of social movements, welfare in a global and comparative perspectives, and cultural sociology with a special focus on the effects and memorialization of cultural trauma.


Erik Ringmar
Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey

Erik Ringmar is professor in the Dept of Political Science and International Relations at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey. He graduated from Yale University in 1993 with a PhD In political science. He taught comparative politics at the London School of Economics for 12 years. Between 2007 and 2013 he lived and worked in China. He is the author of 6 books and some 50 academic articles. His next book will deal with dance and international politics.


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Lina Rincón
Framingham State University

Lina Rincón received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University at Albany, SUNY. She is an assistant professor of Sociology at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. Lina's research adopts a cultural sociology framework to examine the meanings professional migrants attribute to notions of citizenship, nationhood and identity as a result of their migration and incorporation process. In her research, Lina explores the ways in which professional migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean reproduce and/or contest cultural narratives such as those of cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, assimilation and multiculturalism to make sense of their migration and incorporation experience in the U.S.


Jonathan Roberge
Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre | INRS

Jonathan Roberge is an Associate Professor at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montreal, Canada. He funded the Nenic Lab as part of the Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture he has held since 2012. Among his most recent edited volumes are Algorithmic Cultures (2016) and The Cultural Life of Machine Learning (2020).


Victor Roudometof
University of Cyprus

Victor Roudometof has held positions with Princeton University, the American College of Thessaloniki, Washington and Lee University, Miami University and the University of Cyprus. His main research interests are in the areas of cultural sociology, globalization studies and sociology of religion. His publications include 10+ books (monographs and edited volumes) and over 160 articles, chapters and other items. His latest monographs are Glocalization: a critical introduction (London: Routledge, 2016, paperback) & Globalization and Orthodox Christianity: the transformations of a religious tradition (London: Routledge, 2014, hardcover; 2017, paperback). Currently, he is editing the Handbook of Culture and Glocalization (Edward Elgar, Forthcoming). Full profile available on line at www.roudometof.com


Maria Rovisco
University of Leeds


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Michael Schudson
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Michael Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and at the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2005 on, he split his teaching between UCSD and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, becoming a full-time member of the Columbia faculty in 2009.

He is the author of nine books and editor of four others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate, cultural memory, and the emergence of government transparency practices. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow. In 2004, he received the Murray Edelman distinguished career award from the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association.

Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.


Giuseppe Sciortino
University of Trento

Giuseppe Sciortino is a professor of sociology at the Università di Trento, Italy. His research interests include Social Theory, International Migration, and Cultural Sociology. He has recently edited The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization. Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination (with Ron Eyerman, Palgrave, 2019) and Populism in the Civil Sphere (with J.C. Alexander and Peter Kivisto, Polity, 2021). He is currently working, with Martina Cvajner, on a cultural history of the sexual revolution.


Ian Sheinheit
Lehman College, City University of New York


Rachel Sherman
The New School For Social Research

Rachel Sherman is Professor of Sociology. She is broadly interested in how and why unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, and in how these processes are embedded in cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and entitlement. Empirically, she uses ethnography and in-depth interviewing to investigate service work, consumption, and increasing economic inequality in the contemporary U.S. context. She is the author of Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (California, 2007) and Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton, 2017). She is currently writing a book on radical and progressive wealthy people working to change the systems that have enabled their wealth. She was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2018-20.


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Hizky Shoham
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Prof. Hizky Shoham of Bar-Ilan University, Israel is on the faculty of its Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He also holds a research fellowship at the Kogod Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His work focuses on the anthropological history and cultural sociology of Zionism, the Yishuv, and Israel, as well as cultural theory, with an emphasis on amalgamations of religion, nationalism, family rituals, and consumer culture. He analyzes, on both the theoretical and empirical levels, social and cultural processes that develop from below, with little or no involvement of political and social institutions. His publications include Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014), and Israel Celebrates: Festivals and Civic Culture in Israel (Brill, 2017). His article “The Israeli BBQ as National Ritual: Performing Unofficial Nationalism, or Finding Meaning in Triviality” is forthcoming in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.


Ilana Silber
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Ilana F. Silber is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her major fields of interest are sociological theory and the sociology of gift-giving and philanthropy, to which she also brings a cross cutting engagement with comparative historical and interpretative cultural analysis. Current research projects explore various aspects of elite philanthropy, receiving as a facet of gift-relationships, and the theoretical interface between cultural sociology and French pragmatic sociology, with implications for the sociology of morality.

Her publications include: “Boltanski and the Gift: Beyond Love, Beyond Suspicion...?” in Simon Susen and Bryan Turner ed. The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays in the "Pragmatic Sociology of Critique." (London, New York: Anthem Press, 2014); “Neither Mauss nor Veyne? Peter Brown’s Interpretative Path to the Gift.” In Michael Satlow ed. The Gift in Antiquity. Studies in the Ancient World: Comparative Histories.(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). pp. 202-220;"Emotions as Regime of Justification? The Case of Philanthropic Civic Anger," European Journal of Social Theory 14, 3 (2011): 301-320; "Mauss, Weber et les trajectoires historiques du don," Revue du M.A.U.S.S. 36 (2010); "Bourdieu’s Gift to Gift Theory: An Unacknowledged Trajectory," Sociological Theory 27, 2 (2009); “Pragmatic Sociology as Cultural Sociology: Beyond Repertoire Theory?” European Journal of Social Theory 6 (2003); “Modern Philanthropy: Reassessing the Viability of a Maussian Perspective,” in Nick Allen and Wendy James, eds. Marcel Mauss Today (Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 1998); Religious Virtuosity, Charisma and Social Order: A Comparative Sociological Study of Monasticism in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism. Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, rep. 2005.


Amy Singer
Franklin & Marshall College

Amy Singer is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Having spent the past decade studying the production of symbolically and economically valuable cultural goods within the transnational specialty food industry, her current project builds on these interests by exploring the symbolic construction and strategic distribution of human breast milk. Her work has been published in journals such as Poetics, Cultural Sociology, Food Culture & Society, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. At Franklin & Marshall, she teaches courses on cultural sociology, intimate markets, the sociology of food, and classical sociological theory.


Julia Sonnevend
The New School For Social Research

Julia Sonnevend is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communication at The New School for Social Research. She has held fellowships at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in New Haven. Her interdisciplinary work argues that much of everyday life rests on the unexpected, not on the planned. Regardless of the extensive rationalization and disenchantment of contemporary social life, people remain deeply influenced by stories, events, mythologies, totemic objects, and magnetic personalities. Research thus has to pay closer attention to the performative and emotional dimensions of social interaction and confront elements of the human condition that cannot be pinned down by definitions or numbers, covered by theories, or even captured by words. Professor Sonnevend is the author of Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016) and is currently working on a new book about the role of “charm” in business, politics, artificial intelligence, and everyday social life. Her teaching includes classes on contemporary social theory, cultural sociology and visual media.

Julia Sonnevend received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.


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Ivana Spasic
University of Belgrade, Institute for Sociological Research

Ivana Spasić, a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at CCS in Spring 2009, is Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Belgrade, Serbia, teaching social theory, sociology of everyday life and theories of culture. She is interested in the place of culture, discourse and collective memory in periods of social transformation, especially in the postsocialist context. Her current projects concern social and symbolic boundaries, the cultural production of nationhood, urban identities, and discursive underpinnings of individual and collective agency in the Southeast European region understood as “semiperiphery.” Ivana Spasić has authored or coauthored several books in Serbian, including Politics of Everyday Life: Serbia 1999-2002 (2003), Sociologies of Everyday Life (2004), Culture at Work: The Social Transformation of Serbia in a Bourdieusian Perspective (2013), and Cities in Search of Identity (2017). Her English language publications include “The trauma of Kosovo in Serbian national narratives”, in R. Eyerman, J.C. Alexander, and E.B. Breese eds., Narrating Trauma (2013),“The universality of banal nationalism, or, Can the flag hang unobtrusively outside a Serbian post office?,” in M. Skey and M. Antonsich eds., Everyday Nationhood (2017), “Beyond East and West: Solidarity Politics and the Absent/Present State in the Balkans” Slavic Review 76 (2), 2017 (with Jessica Greenberg), and “Urban Identity of Belgrade: Perfect Chaos, Imperfect Balance”, Sociologija 62 (4) 2020 (with Vera Backović).


George Steinmetz
University of Michigan

George Steinmetz is professor of sociology and German studies at the University of Michigan and Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton University Press, 1993), editor of The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others (Duke University Press, 2005) and State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Cornell University Press, 1999), and co-director with Michael Chanan of the film “Detroit; Ruin of a City” (Bristol Docs/Intellect Books, 2006). Together with Julia Adams he edits the book series “Politics, History, and Culture” at Duke University Press. He is currently working on a book on the entanglements of German, French, British, and American sociology with imperialism and a new film with Michael Chanan on the economic crisis of 2008 and the crisis of the economics discipline. He is also a member of the scientific coouncil of the département de sciences sociales at the Ecole normale supérieure and a Corresponding Member of the Centre de Sociologie européenne.


Florian Stoll
Leipzig University/Bayreuth University

Dr. Florian Stoll is a cultural sociologist who works on the Global South (fieldwork in Kenya, Ghana & Brazil) and Global North (mainly Germany & UK). One of Florian´s main intentions is to make research on the Global South part of (Cultural) Sociology´s everyday business. His research interests are Cultural Sociology, Social Stratification/social milieus & new “middle-classes”, Globalization Theories, Urban Sociology and Sociology of Space.

Florian studies at University of Leipzig reasons for job turnover and absenteeism in the project “Fluctuation of labor in Ghana” with Prof. Marian Burchardt. Currently Florian is working on a book proposal that combines the research on social milieus in Nairobi´s and Mombasa´s “middle-class” with a Cultural Sociological framework. In the project “Bayreuth, Wagner and the negotiation of the sacred meaning” he examines with Prof. Philip Smith (Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University) how the world´s most renowned festival for classical music is torn between high culture and the management of a tainted past through Wagner´s antisemitism and the involvement of the Festspiele in the Nazi-regime.

From 2013 to 2018 Florian has been examining ways of life in the middle-income stratum of urban Kenya for the project “Middle Classes on the Rise“ at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. In 2016/17 he spent one year as a visiting fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology/ Yale University. From 2011-2013 Florian has been studying local influences on economic practices by the example of hairdressers in four European cities. In his doctoral thesis (2011) at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Florian conducted research on social milieus and their use of time in the Brazilian city Recife.


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Daniel Suber
University of Würzburg


Edward A. Tiryakian
Duke University

Edward Tiryakian is Professor of Sociology at Duke University where he has served as departmental Chair and as Director of International Studies (1989–91). He recently served as Distinguished Leader of the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program, 2002–2003. The focus of the program was for a multidisciplinary team of 30 scholars, two-thirds from overseas, to study comparatively severe ethnic conflicts and peace processes. He has served as President of the American Society for the Study of Religion (1981–84) and of the International Association of French-Speaking Sociologists (1988–1992). Tiryakian has also chaired the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association and served as Chair of the ASA History of Sociology section in 2005–06. He has had visiting appointments at Laval University (Quebec), the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris), and the Free University of Berlin. In recent years he has given seminars on European Unity, History of Social Thought, Sociology of Religion, Modern Nationalist Movements and cultural and political aspects of Globalization. As a scholar he has visited France, Italy, Lebanon, Israel, Korea, Australia and China.


Carlo Tognato
University of Minnesota

Carlo Tognato is currently Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota. He was for two years Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy (SCIP) of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and before permanently relocating back to the US after spending 15 years in Colombia, he was for over a decade Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, and for four years Director of the Center for Social Studies at the same university. After working for over a decade on cultural economic sociology, since 2014 his research has almost exclusively focused on civil reconstruction and civil degradation. He has published a book on the influence of culture in central banking (Central Bank Independence: Cultural Codes and Symbolic Performance, Palgrave-Macmillan, New York, 2012). He has edited another on the influence of culture in urban policy (Cultural Agency Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus, The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2017). He has coedited with Jeffrey Alexander a third one on the cultural foundations of democratic life in Latin America (The Civil Sphere in Latin America, Cambridge University Press, 2018), a fourth one with Nelson Arteaga on cultural sociology in Latin America (Sociedad, cultura y esfera civil: Una agenda de sociología cultural, FLACSO Mexico, 2019), and a fifth one on civil courage (The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration, Palgrave-Macmillan, New York, with Nadya Jaworsky and Jeffrey Alexander, 2020).


Eleanor Townsley
Mount Holyoke College

Eleanor Townsley is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. She is a sociologist whose research examines the possibilities of intellectual life in contemporary societies. Townsley’s early work focused on social science professionalization in the United States during the 1960s and the role of the intelligentsia in transitions from socialism in Central Europe. More recent research examines the nature and influence of media intellectuals and media formats in the space of opinion, with projects that explore questions of expertise in digital contexts, scale in digital public spheres, and the legacy of design intellectuals in social theory and intellectual life.

Townsley's research has been published in the American Sociologist, the European Journal of Social Theory, Theory & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, Gender and Society, Thesis Eleven, and New Left Review. She is co-author of Making Capitalism without Capitalists (Verso, 2001), The Space of Opinion (2011) and Living Sociologically (2019).


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Bryan S. Turner
Australian Catholic University

Professor Turner is also Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Graduate center CUNY; Professorial Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Australia; Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University; Research Associate at the French National Centre for Scientific Research; Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; and Distinguished Honorary Fellow of The Edward Cadbury Centre for Public Understanding of Religion, University of Birmingham, England.

He was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge (1998–2005) and Research Team Leader for the Religion Cluster at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2005–2008). He has held university appointments in England, Scotland, Australia, Germany, Holland, Singapore and the United States.

Recognising his contributions to Sociology, he has received several honorary degrees, most recently Doctor of Letters from the University of Cambridge. He recently received the Max Planck Research Award at Potsdam University and is a Visiting Professor at the same University.


Frédéric Vandenberghe
Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Frédéric Vandenberghe is research professor in sociology at the Institute of Social and Political Studies, which is part of the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Hailing originally from Flanders in Belgium, he has worked at many universities in Europe (University of Manchester, University of Humanist Studies in Utrecht, Brunel University in London, European University Institute in Florence), the United States (UCLA and Yale) and Brazil (Federal University of Brasília, Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, State University of Rio de Janeiro). Having lived in suitcases for almost twenty years, he has now finally settled in Brazil.

He did his PhD at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris on theories of reification. Working at the intersection of philosophy and sociology, his main research interests are related to German social philosophy, Anglo-Saxon social theory and French sociological theory. He has published many articles as well as various books in French, English and Portuguese. A Philosophical History of German sociology (2009, Routledge), What’s Critical about Critical Realism? (2014) and with Alain Caillé For A New Classic Sociology (2021) are available in English from Routledge.


Diane Vaughan
Columbia University

Diane Vaughan is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Her interests are organization theory, cultural sociology, historical ethnography, historical sociology, organizations, work, and technology, and science, knowledge, and technology. Her books are Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior, Uncoupling, The Challenger Launch Decision, and Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk (fall, 2021). Over time, she has developed the method of analogical theorizing, looking for similarities and differences across cases. In sequential cross-case comparison across the four books, the Challenger and Dead Reckoning cases provided data across three levels of analysis, making it possible to identify system effects: the relation between institutions, organizations, culture and cognition. Both cases are historical ethnographies of the workplace within complex socio-technical systems, and both show changes across time and space and how the past materializes in the present. However, the dynamics and outcomes are very different. Challenger shows a top-down model in which actions and changes in the institutional environment, changed the organizational system, affecting the workplace, work and decision making, perpetuating a complex culture that disempowered workers, resulting in a harmful outcome, Although the air traffic control system is subject to the same external influences and effects, the analysis shows agency and change initiated from the bottom up. The two in combination add to the literature on institutional persistence and change, boundaries and boundary work, and culture and cognition.


Celso Villegas
Kenyon College

Celso M. Villegas is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. A specialist in comparative-historical analysis and democratization, his book project is on the relationship between the middle class and the civil sphere in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador. (CCS Visiting Fellow, Spring 2017)


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Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Vered’s academic interest focused in the last decade on the notions of collective memory and commemorations at the macro social level. More specifically, she is curious about the ways in which societies cope with their difficult pasts, embarrassing moments, shameful events and the like. Within that framework, she is working on the ingredients from which the sociology of commemoration is made (time, space, discourse and agency) and on commemoration as a lens through which one can study various social groups more generally. In addition, she is interested in the city as a text, in autobiographical occasions, in the sociology of courtrooms, in the notions of silence and forgetting and in the ways in which death is announced and managed. Her research agendas spin themselves out between the emotional turbulence of the high school reunion in the United States (see under After Pomp and Circumstance, University of Chicago Press, 1998) the commemoration of an assassinated Prime Minister in the context of the fractured collective identity of society in Israel (see under, Yitzhak Rabin Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, State University of New York Press, 2009); between the knock on the door which announces the worst news of all and the everyday drama of the courtroom. In each instance, an autobiographical occasion of crisis at the individual, the organizational or the national level occupies center stage, as do questions of memory and identity, the management of emotion and the quest for meaning within the constraints and opportunities afforded by culture and social structures. She is editor of (together with Jeffrey K. Olick and Daniel Levy) The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011). Recent papers include "On Cloud Nine: Positive Memories in American Presidential Speeches" (with Tracy Adams) in Memory Studies (2019), and "A Living Place: On the Sociology of Atmosphere in Home Museums" (with Irit Dekel) in the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology (2017). Currently, Vered is the academic head of the Truan Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a board member of the Israeli Institute for Democracy. She was Visiting Professor at New York University in Fall 2018, and was the Ginor Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Spring 2019. (CCS Visiting Fellow, August 2009 – August 2010)


Andrea Voyer
Stockholm University, Sweden

Voyer is a an associate professor at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on the cultural processes of social inclusion and exclusion on the basis of immigration, race, and class. Her first book, Strangers and Neighbors: Multiculturalism, Conflict, and Community in America, is an ethnography of Somali immigrant inclusion in a town in Maine. She has also published studies of immigrant inclusion, and racial and ethnic inequality in Sweden. Voyer is currently writing a book based on an ethnographic study of inter-class interactions in three community settings in New York City – a neighborhood council, a church, and a PTA. She also uses computational social science methods of text analysis to study social norms, social boundaries and inequality. This research, supported by the United States National Science Foundation, analyzes all 19 editions of Emily Post’s Etiquette for information that social norms provide about symbolic boundaries and social inequality.


Robin Wagner-Pacifici
The New School For Social Research

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is interested in the analysis of interstitial moments in social and political contexts (including standoffs and surrenders), with a methodological approach that includes discourse analysis, semiotic analysis of visual material, hermeneutics.


Klaus Weber
Northwestern University

My research lies at the intersection of cultural sociology with the study of markets and formal organizations. I apply cultural and institutional analysis to understand the environmental movement’s impact on economic practices, economic globalization and ideas of corporate responsibility and sustainable development. I enjoy working with qualitative, quantitative and semiotic methodologies. My research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies and the Academy of Management Journal, and has won best paper awards at the American Sociological Association’s Section on Culture and Administrative Science Quarterly. I co-edited a 2011 special issue in Organization Science on the Cultural Construction of Organizational Life (Vol.22(2)). I teach graduate courses on sustainability, power in organizations, cultural theory, text analysis and research methods.


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Brad West
University of South Australia

My research focuses on the changing dynamics of national collective memory. This involves examination of the way history is remembered, in particular through the commemoration of significant national events, and accounting for the power of these pasts in shaping social action, meaning and contestation in contemporary social life. Current research projects include analysis of the narratives and memorialisation surrounding the 2002 Bali Bombing; the rise of ‘dark tourism’ at war sites in Vietnam and pilgrimage like activity at the WWI Gallipoli battlefields in Turkey. I have also written widely on the state of cultural theory and contours of the sub-discipline cultural sociology.


Frederick Wherry
Princeton University

Frederick Wherry is an economic and cultural sociologist who toggles between domestic and global investigations of money, value, and social life. Since 2008, he has published five books and a four volume encyclopedia. (Two more books are under contract, including the new Oxford Handbook of Consumption, edited with Ian Woodward.) He serves as vice-president of the Social Science History Association and will serve as president starting in November 2017. He is also chair-elect of the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and past-chair of the Consumers and Consumption Section. He serves on the Policy Board of the Journal of Consumer Research and on the Advisory Board of Race in the Marketplace. While at Yale University he was co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. His work has explored how people use narratives, social ties, and dynamic performances to understand, contest, and transform the value of places and things. His work is now focused on financial inclusion and budgeting practices for low- and moderate-income consumers in the US and abroad. He is the co-editor (with Jennifer Lena and Greta Hsu) of the new book series at Stanford University Press: Culture and Economic Life.


Nickie Michaud Wild
Upper Iowa University

Nickie Michaud Wild (Ph.D., University at Albany, State University of New York) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Upper Iowa University. Her publications include analyses of the influence of political humor in the post-9/11 era, and the interaction of political humor with the journalistic public sphere. She has published articles in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Communication, Culture and Critique, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and a book, Dubious Pundits: Presidential Politics, Late-Night Comedy, and the Public Sphere. Her research interests include media, popular culture, politics, and moral panics.


Eric Woods
University of Plymouth

Eric is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Plymouth; a member of the editorial team of the journal Nations and Nationalism; and a Faculty Advisor to the LSE-based Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. Eric’s current interests are in the symbolic politics of nationalism, empire, conflict, and redress. He recently completed a book project on the collective acknowledgement of injustice, and is now at the outset of a comparative study of imperial identities.


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Ian Woodward
University of Southern Denmark

Ian Woodward is Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management, University of Southern Denmark, working in the ‘Consumption, culture and commerce’ research group. He has research interests in the cultural sociology of consumption and material culture, and in the cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan spaces, cultural openness and boundary work. His critical survey of the field of material culture studies, Understanding Material Culture, was published by Sage in 2007. With Gavin Kendall and Zlatko Skrbis, he is co-author of The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave, 2009) and with Zlatko Skrbis he published Cosmopolitanism, Uses of the Idea (Sage/TCS, 2013). His research on consumption, materiality and cosmopolitanism has appeared in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society, The British Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Material Culture, Poetics, and The Sociological Review, as well as in numerous handbook collections. Most recently he published the co-authored book Vinyl, The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2015, with Dominik Bartmanski) and co-edited a book titled The Festivalization of Culture with Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor (Ashgate, 2014). He holds a faculty adjunct position at Griffith University, Australia.


Jingsi Christina Wu
Hofstra University

Dr. Wu received her PhD from the joint program of Sociology and Communication at SUNY Albany, and her research focuses on popular culture and politics, new media and civic engagement. Her dissertation — "Entertainment and the Public Sphere: The Convergence of Popular Culture and Politics in China’s Public Sphere and Cyberspace" — won the University Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in any field in the College of Arts and Science at UAlbany. She uses a variety of perspectives and research approaches from media studies, cultural sociology, and political communication to study the convergence of popular culture and politics, how entertainment experiences contribute to civic engagement, how people behave in new media environments, such as massively multi-player online games, and how citizens use the social media to connect with others and organize their civic voices. Interested in both the U.S. media and the mass media in China, where Dr. Wu was from, she is also delving into cross-cultural comparisons.

Dr. Wu has shared her diverse research interests through many conference presentations, peer-reviewed journal publications and book chapters, but also through her classroom teaching. She teaches a series of courses in Media Studies, including media literacy, media technologies and public policy, and mass media in contemporary society.


Ying Xiao
Shanghai University

Ying Xiao is professor of the Department of Sociology, Shanghai University, China. He also is the executive-editor-in-chief of Chinese Journal of Sociology (CJS). He got his PHD in Sociology from Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (GSCASS).

Ying Xiao’s main research interest is social theory. His published papers and works are on the following topics: reflexivity, risk society, social identity, civil society, and meta-theory of sociology. He combed the multi meanings and confused usages of the term reflexivity and constructed a category “self-reflection and self-refutation” as an analytical tool to study the meta-theory of sociology and explain the theoretical logic of risk society of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. On civil society, he traced back to the different origins — political orientation and economic orientation — of civil society thoughts in Europe and discussed the internal tension in modern civil society.

Ying Xiao is studying the cultural foundation of individualism in China. In this research, he tries to explore (1) the history, cultural and social consequences, and modern transformation of “chaxugeju”(????), (2) the complicated relations among collectivism, individualism, and selfishness in the context of “chaxugeju”. (CCS Visiting Fellow, December 2012- November 2013)


Chunwen Xiong
China Agricultural University, Beijing

Chunwen Xiong is professor and head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, China Agricultural University. He received his B. A. of Education (1999) from Southwest Normal University, Chongqing; M. A. of Sociology of Education (2002) from Beijing Normal University and Ph.D. of Sociology (2005) from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. He has been a Visiting Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (Feb 1, 2015 - Jan 31, 2016).

Chunwen Xiong’s main interest focuses on social theory, education and agriculture. He published Modern Transformation of China Educational Spirit: A Study on Educational Democracy Thought during the early years of the Republic of China from the view of sociology of knowledge. China Renmin University Press (2012). He also authored more than forty papers in top Chinese journals in the fields of social theory, educational sociology and agricultural sociology from the perspective of cultural sociology. He also translated some books into Chinese such as Jeff Alexander's The Dark Side of Modernity, Max Weber's Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law and The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations.

Recently, under the inspiration of cultural sociology, Chunwen Xiong’s main work is to explore the cultural code of Chinese people's social life through empirical and theoretical research on their agricultural production and food consumption practice.


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Bing Xu
Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Bing Xu is Associate Professor in the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2006-) and Visiting Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (August 1, 2009 - July 31, 2010). He received his B. A. of Psychology (1989) from Beijing Normal University, M. A. of Social Psychology (1996) and Ph.D. of Sociology (2003) from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has been on the editorial board of the Chinese journals Social Theory and Chinese Social Psychological Review.

He is interested in cultural psychology and cultural sociology, which overlap each other from the hermeneutical approach he advocates. He has authored more than twenty papers in top Chinese journals in the fields of sociology, social psychology and social theory on the theoretical subjects of the self-aware Chinese psychology and sociology, the hermeneutical approach in social sciences, the Chinese traditional concept of the self, the qingli (the emotional reason) in Chinese traditional social context and the empirical subjects of the values of contemporary Chinese college students, the needs of the Chinese internet users, the inner motive and social pattern of contemporary Chinese people’s lying, etc.. His collection The Hermeneutical Approach between Psychology and Sociology has been sent into the process of the application and examination of the Press of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He recently edited and wrote a long introduction for the fifth volume of Chinese Social Psychological Review, which focuses on cultural psychology and will be published within 2010. He is currently working on framework for his empirical study—A “deep description” of the identity crisis of the contemporary Chinese.


Dicky Yangzom
New York University


Michael Yarbrough
City University of New York, John Jay College 

Michael W. Yarbrough is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where his teaching focuses on the Law & Society major. His research examines how law shapes the ways we understand interpersonal relationships, most especially the relationship of marriage. He is currently writing a book on South Africa, the only country in the world that has recently expanded marriage laws for two forms of marriage: same-sex marriages, and marriages under indigenous systems of African law. This project has received multiple awards, including the 2019 Law & Society Association Article Prize. Yarbrough also recently published the After Marriage Equality series, three co-edited volumes that examine how queer families, activism, and political priorities are changing after same-sex marriage. Yarbrough places a high priority on working with undergraduates, and he has received awards from John Jay for both teaching and service to students. With his Law & Society faculty colleagues, he helps facilitate the Legal Disruption Project, in which Law & Society students at John Jay are researching how law disrupts people's lives throughout the NYC region. In 2019, Yarbrough was recognized by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences as one of CUNY’s outstanding Assistant Professors. He holds a BA in sociology from the University of Chicago and a JD and a PhD in sociology from Yale. For more about Prof. Yarbrough’s work, please visit his website at michaelyarbrough.net.


Viviana Zelizer
Princeton University

Viviana Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She specializes in historical analysis, economic processes, interpersonal relations, and childhood. Her books include The Social Meaning of Money (1994), The Purchase of Intimacy (2005) and Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (2010).


Eviatar Zerubavel
Rutgers University

Professor Zerubavel is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology. His main areas of interest are cognitive sociology and the sociology of time. His publications include Patterns of Time in Hospital Life: A Sociological Perspective (University of Chicago Press, 1979); Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (University of Chicago Press, 1981. Paperback – University of California Press, 1985. Japanese – 1984. Italian – 1985); The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (Free Press, 1985. Paperback – University of Chicago Press, 1989. Listed among Choice's Outstanding Academic Books – 1985); The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Free Press, 1991. Paperback – University of Chicago Press, 1993); Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (Rutgers University Press, 1992. Transaction – 2003); Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Harvard University Press, 1997. Paperback – 1999. Norwegian – 2000. Persian – 2021); The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (Harvard University Press, 1999. Marathi – 2012); Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (University of Chicago Press, 2003. Paperback – 2004. Italian – 2005); The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2006. Paperback – 2007. Chinese – 2008); Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community (Oxford University Press, 2011. Paperback – 2013. Awarded Honorable mention in the 2012 PROSE Award ["Sociology and Social Work" category] by the Association of American Publishers); Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (Oxford University Press, 2015); Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (Princeton University Press, 2018. Italian – 2019. Awarded the Charles Horton Cooley Award for Best Book by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction as well as the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form by the Media Ecology Association – 2019); and Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-Driven Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a book on impersonality in social life. Professor Zerubavel served from 1992 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2009 as the director of the Rutgers sociology graduate program. In 2000-01 he served as Chair of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2003 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016 he received the Rutgers University Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award, and in 2017 he received the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction’s Helena Lopata Mentor Excellence Award. He teaches graduate courses in cognitive sociology, time and memory, and sociological theory.

Yi Zhou
Fudan University

Yi Zhou is Professor of Sociology at Fudan University’s School of Social Development and Public Policy and co-director of the Yale–Fudan Center for Cultural Sociology. She also serves at the Chinese Sociological Association as Executive Council member and head of the Special Committee for Cultural Sociology. Prof. Zhou has engaged in long-term research and teaching in the areas of cultural sociology, social stratification and mobility, the study of grassroots society in China, and qualitative methods. Her published works include “Bricolage and Homology: Studies on the Subculture of the Early Elderly Square Dancing Groups in Shanghai” (Journal of Chinese Sociology, 2018), “State-society Interdependence Model in Market Transition: A Case Study of the ‘Farmers’ City’ in Wenzhou the Early Reform Era” (Journal of Contemporary China, 2013), The First Village of China: Post-Collectivism in a Transitional Economy (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Deciphering Society: From the Perspectives of Structure and Culture (Beijing: Social Sciences Literature Press, 2004). She has been principal investigator of two Key Projects of the National Social Science Foundation of China: “Trust Patterns and Mechanisms in Contemporary Society” (2011) and “Value Systems and Behaviors of the New Generation from the Perspective of Intergenerational Sociology” (2019). A large number of her works have received national-level and provincial-level Outstanding Achievement Awards.


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