Professor Cerulo's research addresses a variety of themes within the sociology of culture and cognition.  Her earliest works explore the social foundations of symbol systems -- music, scent, verbal scripts, and visual images.  Her research examines the ways in which social actors use such symbols to construct personal identity, collective identity, and the identity of eras, events, and places.  Her work also charts the ways in which social factors -- i.e. the nature of social ties, the stability of social environments, power structures, economic systems of exchange, and technological innovations – help to shape the content, form, meaning, and effectiveness of symbols.

 Professor Cerulo’s writings are often noted for their contributions to the literature on measurement. She has developed a number of indicators designed to systematically capture verbal and non-verbal symbol structure.  These measures render aural, olfactory, literary, and visual objects extremely accessible sources of social science data, amenable to all of the rigorous methods that are central to the social science tradition.

 In recent years, Professor Cerulo has turned her attentions to the social and cultural foundations of cognitive concepts and schema.  One prominent theme in this body of work concerns new communication technologies.  Specifically, she explores the ways in which emerging communication media can change the ways in which individuals perceive social actors and social groups, experience social connectedness, and define forums of social action.

 Her most recent work explores the conceptualization of “the worst” of people, places, objects and events.  Building on theories and ideas forwarded by both cultural and cognitive sociologists, Professor Cerulo argues that the inability to envision and specify the worst is a sociocultural phenomenon. Indeed, in a broad array of social situations, she discovers that conceptions of the worst represent a gap in many cultures’ shared frames of reference. The worst is a “blind spot” created by a variety of normative and patterned sociocultural practices – practices that, despite any single individual’s intentions, keep the worst veiled and difficult to define.  In her work, Professor Cerulo itemizes and unpacks these practices. She explores as well the ways in which certain elements of social structure may encourage this biased perspective.  Finally, she considers the social consequences and pitfalls that masking the worst can exact.  In so doing, she questions whether a more symmetrical view of quality is an achievable … or a desirable social goal.

 Professor Cerulo's articles appear in a wide variety of journals including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Focus, Communication Research, Contemporary Sociology, Poetics, Social Science Research, Law and Policy, Science As Culture, and annuals and collections such as the Annual Review of Sociology, the Encyclopedia of Nationalism, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, the Handbook of Social Theory, Research in Political Sociology, andthe World Book Encyclopedia. She is the author of Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Order of Right and Wrong (Routledge: 1998), and Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation – winner of these Culture Section’s "Best Book Award, 1996" (The Rose Book series of the ASA, Rutgers University Press: 1995).  She also co-authored Second Thoughts: Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Pine Forge Press, 3rd edition, 2004), and edited a collection entitled Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition (Routledge, 2002).

Prof. Cerulo was an officer of the ASA's Culture section from 1993-2003. She remains the sections network coordinator, and directs both the Identity Network and the Culture and Cognition Network.