Emeritus Faculty

Lee Clarke is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology.  His research centers around organizations, failure, disaster, risk communication, and the boundaries between politics and science. His last work, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. Clarke is currently writing a book about how science and politics meet, and don’t meet, regarding the loss of America’s wetlands and the idea of “coastal restoration." 

Please see Dr. Clarke's website for information about his research.

Judith Friedman, Professor Emerita, conducted research on changes in a small Ohio city through the 20th century, using diverse records to document residential patterns and interviews with people who have known the city at different times. Visuals were important in this work. Other projects focused on suburbanization, in which she examined visual artists' perceptions of suburbia and patterns of suburbanization in New Jersey.

Judith Gerson, Professor Emerita, held a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, and was an affiliate faculty in Jewish Studies. She taught courses in gender theory; interdisciplinary research methods; narrative analysis; and diaspora, trauma, and collective memory. She also taught in the Gender Studies Program at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway. In 2012, she received an award from the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers for her distinguished contributions to undergraduate education.

She is presently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled, By Thanksgiving We Were Americans: German Jewish Refugees and Holocaust Memory. Focused on the forced emigration and resettlement of German Jews in the U.S. during World War II, the project relies on memoirs, interviews, and correspondence to examine how this group of refugees recalled, evaded, and forgot their past. She compares these personal testimonies to one another, the historiographic record, and to refugee aid organization documents to discern narrative patterns. She is the co-editor with Diane Wolf of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2007) and more recently has published on practices of masculinity among German Jewish immigrants, and on the relevance of gender theory in Jewish studies. A former research fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Study at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in 2017 -2018, she was the Ina Levine Senior Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Study at the USHMM. In 2019, she co-taught the Silberman faculty seminar on Displacement, Migration, and the Holocaust at the USHMM. She regularly gives public lectures on collective memory and forgetting to various public gatherings of survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants.

Stephen Hansell, Professor Emeritus, taught courses in the sociology of medicine and health care, research methods, and statistics. He served as undergraduate director for the Sociology department for a number of years. His research interests were in the areas of medical sociology, social networks, globalization, and the sociology of science. 

Allan V. Horwitz, Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor Emeritus, earned a doctoral degree in Sociology from Yale University where he was trained in psychiatric epidemiology and in deviance and social control. He came to Rutgers in 1975 as an assistant professor and retired as Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus. Professor Horwitz studied a variety of aspects of mental health and illness, including the social response to mental illness, family caretaking for dependent populations, the impact of social roles and statuses on mental health, and the social construction of mental disorders. He published over 100 articles in the main journals in his field. In addition, he has published twelve books including The Social Control of Mental Illness (Academic Press 1982; new edition Percheron Press 2002); The Logic of Social Control (Plenum Press 1990); Creating Mental Illness (University of Chicago Press 2002); The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press 2007); Conundrums of Modern American Medicine (Rutgers University Press 2010); All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Normal Anxieties into Mental Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2012); Anxiety: A Short History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); What’s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016). PTSD: A Short History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Ancient Greece to the Era of Neuroscience. Oxford University Press. 2020; DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021; Personality and Its Disorders. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022 forthcoming. Between 1980 and 2015 he was the co-director (with David Mechanic) of the NIMH funded Rutgers Postdoctoral Program in Mental Health. He has also served as Chair of the Sociology Department for nine years (1985-1991; 1996-1999), Dean for Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences (2006 – 2011), and Acting Director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research (2013 – 2016). Professor Horwitz has also been elected Chair of the Mental Health and Medical Sociology Sections of the American Sociological Association and of the Psychiatric Sociology Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He has received the Leonard Pearlin Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the Sociology of Mental Health and the Leo C. Reeder Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Medical Sociology from the American Sociological Association and the James Greenley Award for Lifetime Achievements in the Sociology of Mental Health from the Psychiatric Sociology Section of the Society for Social Problems. During the 2007-08 academic year he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and in the 2012-13 year a Fellow-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University.

Lauren Krivo is Emerita Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research provided fundamental insights regarding the interconnections among societal racialized structures, changing social structural conditions, and inequality in crime, violence and other outcomes across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Her book with Ruth D. Peterson, Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide(Russell Sage 2010) shows that inequalities in crime across neighborhoods of distinct colors are rooted in the extraordinary differentials in community conditions that are core components of segregation within U.S. urban areas.

The second wave of the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS2) that she collected with María B. Vélez and Christopher J. Lyons provides the only national panel data on crime in neighborhoods across the United States. Articles from this project show (1) a larger relative crime gap between African American and other ethno-racial neighborhoods than in 2000; (2) unanticipated increases in violent and property crime that are largely limited to a subset of Black neighborhoods; and (3) substantial disparities in neighborhood crime change that reproduce the ethno-racial crime divide in the United States. These patterns are the products of racialized differences in neighborhood economic and housing instability and dynamic racial structural changes leading up to and following the Great Recession.

She has published widely on the role of segregation in city and neighborhood crime as well as contributing to broader academic dialogue on race, ethnicity, crime, and justice through her co-edited volumes:  The Many Colors of Crime:  Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America (with Ruth D. Peterson and John Hagan, NYU Press 2006), “Race, Crime, and Justice: Contexts and Complexities”  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2009 (with Ruth D. Peterson), and “Color Matters: Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice in Uncertain Times”, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Spring 2018 (with Ruth D. Peterson and Kathryn Russell-Brown). 

Krivo is the co-founder of the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN) with Ruth D. Peterson. The RDCJN is a national network of scholars that seeks to broaden scholarship at the intersection of race, crime, and justice, and promotes the success of junior scholars of color through its Summer Research Institute. The RDCJN is currently headed by Rod Brunson (Northeastern University) and Jody Miller (Rutgers University-Newark).

Krivo was the Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation funded project “EAGER: Developing an Application for Assessing Respondent Experiences of Their Surroundings in Real Time” (SES-1520778) with co-PIs Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Janne Lindqvist, and Hana Shepherd. The software code developed in the project for an in-person tablet-based survey and an application for use on mobile devices (app) to collect GPS location data, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys, and implicit association test (IAT) results is available at the following location:

NSF1520778, EAGER: Developing an Application for Assessing Respondent Experiences of Their Surroundings in Real Time 

David Mechanic,  the René Dubos University Professor of Behavioral Sciences, is the founding director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His research and writing deal with social aspects of health and health care.

David Mechanic received his Ph.D. from Stanford and joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1960, where he was chair of the Department of Sociology (1968-1970), the John Bascom Professor of Sociology (1973-1979) and Director of the Center for Medical Sociology and Health Services Research (1972-1979). He moved to Rutgers University in 1979, was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (1980-1984), and established the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research (1985) which he directs. He directs the NIMH Center at Rutgers for Research on the Organization and Financing of Care for the Severely Mentally Ill and serves as the Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's National Health Policy Investigator's Program.

Dr. Mechanic is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. He has served on numerous panels of The National Academy of Sciences, federal agencies and non-profit organizations.

David Mechanic has received many awards including the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Career Award, Health Services Research Prize from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration and the Baxter Allegiance Foundation, the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Association for Health Services Research, the First Carl Taube Award for Distinguished Contributions to Mental Health Services Research from the American Public Health Association, and the Distinguished Medical Sociologist Award and Lifetime Contributions Award in Mental Health from the American Sociological Association. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in The Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

He has written or edited 24 books and approximately 400 research articles, chapters and other publications in medical sociology, health policy, health services research, and the social and behavioral sciences. Among his books are Inescapable Decisions: The Imperatives of Health Reform (1994); Painful Choices: Research and Essays on Heath Care (1989); From Advocacy to Allocation: The Evolving American Health Care System (1986); Mental Health and Social Policy: The Emergence of Managed Care (4th Edition, 1998); and Future Issues in Health Care: Social Policy and the Rationing of Medical Services (1979).

Patricia Roos, Professor Emerita, retired effective July 1, 2020. Professor Roos's research interests included work; inequalities; gender and work; stratification; work/family; and addiction. In 1985, she published Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies, and in 1990 she coauthored with Barbara Reskin Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads Into Male Occupations. She authored sole or collaborative articles on a number of topics, among them "Shifting Gender Boundaries: Women's Inroads into Academic Sociology" (with Katharine Jones); "Staffing Personnel: Feminization and Change in Human Resource Management" (with Joan Manley); "Occupational Feminization, Occupational Decline? Sociology's Changing Sex Composition;" "The Gender Gap in Earnings: Trends, Explanations, Prospects" (with Mary Gatta); “Rethinking Occupational Integration” (with Mary Gatta); “Changing Families/Changing Communities: Work, Family, and Community in Transition” (with Mary Trigg and Mary Hartman); “Gender (In)Equity in the Academy: Subtle Mechanisms and the Production of Inequality” (with Mary Gatta); "Interconnecting Work and Family: Race and Class Differences in Women's Work Status and Attitudes;" "Not So Separate Spheres;" and "Integrating Occupations: Changing Occupational Sex Segregation in the U.S. from 2000 to 2014" (with Lindsay Stevens). Prof. Roos is writing a book about grief and resilience in the midst of the opioid epidemic.

Prof. Roos taught courses in work; inequalities; sociological writing; undergraduate and graduate methods; and addiction.

Reflecting her research interests in gender in higher education, from 1999 to 2001 Prof. Roos led the effort within the FAS Deans Office to produce the FAS Gender Equity Report (October, 2001). From 2008 through 2011, she served as Co-PI on the NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant: “RU-FAIR:-Rutgers University for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Re-Imagination.” She also served as Chair of the Sociology Department (1991-1997) and Area Dean for the Social & Behavioral Sciences (1997-2000).

In AY 2018-19, Prof. Roos was a fellow at the Institute for Research on Women's seminar Public Catastrophes, Private Losses, working on a project entitled Public Catastrophe, Private Loss: Grief and Resilience in the Midst of the Opioid Epidemic.

Sarah Rosenfield, Professor Emerita, taught courses in the self, gender, mental health, and in writing. Her research focused on the role of self in mental health and how race/ethnicity, class, and gender shape the self and mental health problems. She also engaged in research on services, stigma, and quality of life of people with chronic mentally illness.

Tom Rudel, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Human Ecology, taught courses in the sociology of economic development, and human ecology. Dr. Rudel's major research interests are in the fields of environmental sociology and economic sociology, especially in Latin America. He has published articles on land use planning, housing and energy use and books on land use planning in the United States and tropical deforestation in Latin America.

D. Randall Smith, Professor Emeritus, spent his entire 43-year career at Rutgers, New Brunswick. His research and teaching were considerably more varied. 

His early research focused on labor market mobility (with Andrew Abbott) and the latent structure of aging and religious participation (with Stephen Ainley). This was followed by a series of articles and federal grants that investigated delinquent careers, adult recidivism, sentencing, risk assessment, and school crime (with William Smith, Robert N. Parker and Elliot Noma). His methodological articles developed Centroid Scaling methods on sociometric data and arrest records (with Elliot Noma and William Smith). He also published papers on the structural factors leading to bias and inequality in performance evaluations (with Nancy DiTomaso and Corinne Post). 

Dr. Smith’s later publications were in the Sociology of Sport subfield including racism in college sports (with multiple coauthors) and several papers on the Home Advantage in college and professional sport (one with three undergraduate students). More recently, Professor Smith studied the indirect effects of big-time sports on colleges and universities, including the outcomes of student quality, tuition rates, NCAA sanctions, and enrollment yield. 

At the graduate level, Dr. Smith taught multivariate statistics and various courses in advanced quantitative methods. His undergraduate courses included research methods, introductory statistics, social psychology, sociology of sport (41 times!), education and society, and senior seminars in both the sociology of higher education and the sociology of intercollegiate athletics. He advised multiple undergraduate honors students and was an advisor to many participants in the University’s undergraduate research assistant program. In 2019 Dr. Smith received the School of Arts and Sciences award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education.

Chaim I. Waxman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, served as a member of the Department of Sociology from 1975 to 2006.  He has written and edited more than 18 books and more than 100 articles.

After retiring from Rutgers, he moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where he continued to be active professionally and served as a senior fellow in several scholarly institutes.  In 2013, he was recruited by Jerusalem’s Hadassah Academic College to write a proposal for an undergraduate program in behavioral sciences.  When the proposal was approved by Israel’s Council for Higher Education, he was asked to head the new department which opened in the fall of 2016, where he continues to serve as Chair.

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Helene White, Distinguished Professor Emerita, was affiliated with the Sociology Department and the Center of Alcohol Studies.  Her research focused on the comorbidity of substance use, crime, violence, and mental health problems in community and high-risk samples. She also evaluated drug prevention interventions for college students. Her research was sponsored by federal and foundation grants for over 40 years, and she published one co-authored book, co-edited three books, and published more than 200 articles and chapters. She served as a consultant for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Substance Abuse Prevention. Dr. White organized the founding of the Section on Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco of the American Sociological Association and was chair of that section twice.

Richard Williams, Professor Emeritus, taught courses in the sociology of identity and race and the sociology of symbolic boundaries. His research focused on the development of "racial" and "national" identities within the context of macro and mid-range social structures. His book Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Social Construction of Black and Irish Identities in the U.S. (Cambridge University Press, 1990) is a reflection of his thinking about those issues. Another area of interest centered around contemporary cultural forms of social system legitimization.

Professor Zerubavel is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Emeritus. His main areas of interest are cognitive sociology and the sociology of time. His latest six books explored the sociomental shape of the past, the social organization of silence and denial, the social construction of genealogical relatedness, the sociology of inattention, the phenomenology and semiotics of taken-for-grantedness, and the notion of a concept-driven sociology.

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. In 2022 he was awarded the Society for the Study of Social Interaction’s George Herbert Mead Lifetime Achievement Award.