News

Congratulations to Prof. Karen A. Cerulo and grad program alumna Janet M. Ruane. Their book, Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future, won the ASA Culture Section’s Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in Cultural Sociology, 2023. 

Our colleague, Karen Cerulo published “Enduring Relationships: Social Aspects of Perceived Interactions with the Dead” in Socius, an ASA publication.  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231231203658   Socius is an open access journal; the article can be read free of charge.

Norah MacKendrick and Hannah Troxel's paper in Social Science & Medicine was featured in a news piece in Time Magazine.

Congratulations to Anthony Landers, who is a recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship!  You can learn more about this exceptional honor and Anthony's project on the program's webpage.

Congratulations to Jeff Dowd, who is a recipient of the SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education!

Congratulations to Ali Chaudhary on his well-deserved promotion to Associate Professor with tenure!

Arlene Stein's "Moral Panics Never Go Out of Style: On the Corrosive Effects of the Culture Wars" was featured in LitHub. The essay is from the new edition of her book "The Stranger Next Door, Or How the Right Divides Us," published by Beacon Press. 

Norah MacKendrick was interviewed about her work on the regulation of toxic consumer products on the podcast "Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness." You can access the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Arlene Stein wrote an essay about why the US rightwing is attacking schools and teachers--and what we can do about it. https://onlysky.media/astein/knowledge-is-power-thats-why-the-right-is-attacking-schools/

PhD Candidate Marilyn Baffoe-Bonnie just published "Lived experience with sickle cell disease: Predictors of altruistic participation in clinical research" in Social Science & Medicine. The article examines what aspects of the sickle cell disease lived experience are associated with reporting altruistic motivations for participating in clinical research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115353

Our faculty colleague Karen A. Cerulo and Graduate Program Alumna Janet M. Ruane were interviewed on their new book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future on Larry Rifkin’s, “American Trends” and Cara Santa Maria’s “Talk Nerdy” podcast and Michael Asford’s, The Follow Up Question.

Professor Karen A. Cerulo and graduate alumna Janet M. Ruane were interviewed on their new book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future on Paul Samuel Dolman’s What Matter Most, Andrea Minghelli’s Harvesting Happiness, and Badri Rao’s YouTube broadcast “Ideas and Insights." Their book was also featured by Guiliano Aluffi in La Republica.

Paul Hirschfield has published an article in Annual Review of Criminology entitled "Exceptionally Lethal: American Police Killings in a Comparative Perspective." This article relies on systematic comparisons across 18 countries to derive explanations of both high and low rates of deadly force. The article is currently available for free here: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-030421-040247

Melissa Aronczyk and Maria Espinoza are the recipients of this year's National Communication Association (NCA) award in the Public Relations division for Outstanding Book/Monograph for their book A Strategic Nature: Public relations and the politics of American environmentalism.

In every issue, the Culture Section Newsletter focuses on a cultural sociologist that has influenced the field in important ways.  Our faculty colleague, Karen Cerulo, was the subject of the latest article on this topic. Read “Four questions for Karen A. Cerulo.”

Our faculty colleague Karen A. Cerulo and Graduate Program Alumna Janet M. Ruane have done several media appearances for their new book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future, including Dan Skinner’s “Conversations” on KCUR and David Hopper’s “The Academic Minute” on WAMC, Northeast Public Radio. An excerpt of the book was published in The Big Think on August 23, 2022.

Our faculty colleague Karen A. Cerulo was interviewed by Kris Boyd on Think, Texas NPR regarding her new book, Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future, coauthored with Graduate Program Alumna Janet M. Ruane.  Karen and Janet were interviewed on Dan Skinner’s Conversations on KCUR, Kansas Public Radio. 

Paul Hirschfield wrote an article for Foreign Affairs which explains why rates of public mass shooting shootings are much higher in the United States than elsewhere in the world, especially Latin America. You can read the article for free via this link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/y_RerroJ-GU.

Our faculty colleague Arlene Stein published an essay (coauthored with Phil Zuckerman) on the dangerous implications of two recent Supreme Court cases concerning religion: https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-united-states-is-not-a-christian-nation-and-should-not-be-remade-into-one/