Our mission is to help students who are already endowed with a sociological imagination develop the insights and skills necessary to become creative and competent working sociologists. We are a broad and diverse department that can support a wide range of student interests. The department has four core areas of specialization for which links are supplied below for further exploration. The culture and cognition area focuses on the complex ways in which thought, culturally received symbols and values, and social interaction affect one another. The political and economic sociology area focuses on large scale patterns of social organization. The gender, difference, inequality area focuses on issues of difference and inequality attached to gender, race, ethnic, and class positions. The health, population, and life course area focuses on social factors that affect health and illness, the system of medical care, and the effects of aging (through all phases of the life course) on health, values, and social behavior.

Society often does not fit into academic specialty areas, and the sociological enterprise requires broad intellectual sensibilities. Our first commitment is to help students develop those sensibilities. We accomplish these goals through our regularly-scheduled seminars and a curriculum that emphasizes writing. Aside from taking a required writing seminar, all our students write two or three article-length papers before they begin to work on their doctoral dissertation (some of the papers often become the seeds of dissertations). Many of those papers are presented at national conferences as well as published in leading sociology journals. Our students have also won eight "best paper" awards from the American Sociological Association.