. ..FACULTY      GRADUATE      UNDERGRADUATE        EVENTS     DIRECTORY      *PRESS BOX*   

Chair: Karen A. Cerulo

Director of Graduate Program: Ann Mische

Director of Undergraduate Program: Stephen Hansell

József Böröcz, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in economic sociology, global structures, classical sociological theory, and comparative-historical methods. His scholarly interests include the sociology of large-scale structural change, the European Union as a global actor, and intersections of political economy, geopolitics and representational power.

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Ethel Brooks, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology, teaches courses in comparative and historical sociology, globalization and postcolonial social formations.  Her research interests include the sociology of gender and labor, critical political economy, globalization, social movements, feminist theory, gender and development, consumption, comparative sociology, Central American studies, South Asian studies, nationalism, post-coloniality and critical race theory.  She is currently finishing a book on transnational organizing in the garment industry with a focus on Dhaka , San Salvador and New York City .

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Sharon Bzostek, Assistant Professor, currently teaches courses on social demography and advanced research methods. Her research interests focus on recent changes in family demography and their consequences for child and family well-being, as well as social disparities in health and health care.

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Deborah Carr, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in social psychology, sociology of the life course, social structure and personality, social demography, and advanced research methods. Her research interests are in the areas of aging and the life course, gender, and psychological and physical health. She is currently involved in projects exploring: widowhood and end-of-life issues; interpersonal and social consequences of obesity; and the psychological consequences of family and work roles and transitions.

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Patrick Carr, writes about urban crime and policing, youth and informal social control, and the transition to adulthood. His most recent books are Coming of Age in America: the Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century (University of California  Press, 2011)  and  Hollowing Out the Middle: the Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America (Beacon, 2009) and his current research focuses on youth experiences with crime, danger and the police, and on the experiences of law enforcement with the so-called Stop Snitching phenomenon.

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Karen A. Cerulo, Professor of Sociology teaches courses in culture, media, social interaction, social deviance, and statistics.  Her research interests are in the areas of culture and cognition (with a special emphasis on conceptualization), media and technology, social change, decision making, symbol systems, community, identity construction, and measurement techniques.  She is the author of several book and articles in these fields.  Currently, she is at work on several projects that re-examine definitions of a social actor, a study of public apologies, and a book entitled American Dreams: The Sociocultural Dimensions of Personal Aspirations.   

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Lee Clarke, Professor of Sociology, writes about 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.”   

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Ira Cohen, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches Sociology in the Graduate Program and teaches his undergraduate courses on the faculty in Sociology at Rutgers in Newark . His Graduate Program courses include classical and contemporary social theory. His research interests include the sociology of everyday life, contemporary and classical social theory, the sociology of modernity, and the history of social thought. He currently is writing a book (under contract with Polity Press) with the working title: On the Sociology of Solitary Action.

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Jeanette Covington teaches courses on crime and drugs.  Her current research examines how crime figures in the construction of race.  In the past few years, she has had several articles published on how criminologists assign meaning to the construct of blackness in their analyses of race differences in crime. She also examines these issues in greater detail in her book titled Crime and Racial Constructions. Not only does the book take a look at how criminologists create racial images, it also considers how many of these same images of criminal blacks are disseminated in popular culture by Hollywood and other media.

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Phaedra Daipha, Assistant Professor of Sociology, works and teaches in the areas of science, knowledge, and technology; cultural sociology; social theory; and qualitative methods. She is currently writing a book that draws on fieldwork with National Weather Service forecasters to examine the process of complexity distillation in diagnosis and prognosis.

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Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Assistant Professor in Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Sociology, teaches courses on urbanism, Caribbean societies and development, race and ethnicity, and research methods. Her research interests are in the areas of urbanism, space and place, the built environment, race and ethnicity, social inequality, mixed-method research, criminal justice, Latin America and Caribbean Studies, and African Diaspora. She is currently working on a book that examines the social impacts of gates in public and private housing in Puerto Rico.

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Judith J. Friedman, Associate Professor,teaches courses in urban sociology and research methods. Recent research focuses on suburbanization, race, and visual sociology.

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Judith Gerson, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in the sociology of gender and feminist theories. Her primary areas of interest include the sociology of gender, work, identities, and contemporary social theory. Stemming in part from her interests in feminist theories of identity, recently she has initiated an interdisciplinary study of German Jewish immigrant identities, which focuses on identity practices among German Jews who settled in New York City between 1933 and 1945.

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Stephen Hansell, Associate Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program, teaches courses on the sociology of medicine and health care, research methods, and statistics.  He is interested in medical sociology, social networks, globalization, and the sociology of science.  His current research is about the effects of managed care on adolescent mental and physical health.

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Paul Hirschfield, Associate Professor of Sociology and faculty affiliate of the Criminal Justice Program, teaches criminology, punishment and social control, and juvenile justice. His theoretical and empirical work focuses on the social control of youth in the contexts of schools and the justice system, which includes research on the consequences of social intervention. His current research centers on the reintegration of youth from correctional facilities into schools and on the social and behavioral impact of the criminalization of urban youth.

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Allan V. Horwitz, Board of Governors Professor of Sociology and Dean for the Social and Behavioral Sciences teaches courses in mental health and illness and the sociology of deviance. His research interests are in the areas of social definitions of mental illness, medicalization, and the impact of social roles on mental health. He is currently working on a book that examines the distinctions between disordered and natural forms of anxiety.

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Joanna Kempner, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is currently teaching
courses on social problems and sociology of the body.  Her research
interests include the sociology of science, medicine, culture, gender and
the body. She is writing a book that examines the failure of headache disorders to be taken seriously as a social problem and a series of articles that explore
the circumstances under which knowledge is not produced.

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Lauren J. Krivo, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in crime and community, race and ethnicity, and statistics. Her research focuses on race-ethnic differences in neighborhood crime, patterns and consequences of race-ethnic and economic segregation, and urban and housing inequality. Her book with Ruth D. Peterson Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide was published by the Russell Sage Foundation in summer 2010. She is the co-organizer of The Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network which seeks to broaden participation and perspectives in crime and justice research.

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Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in  
race and ethnicity, gender, politics, and science and medicine. Her research areas include race and ethnicity, gender, immigration, law and society, and health policy. She is currently finishing a book on family reunification in immigration policy from the mid-nineteenth century to today and examining the construction of race and ethnicity in biomedical research and health policy.

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Norah MacKendrick, Assistant Professor of Sociology, works and teaches in the areas of environmental sociology, gender, and political sociology. She studies the shift toward green consumption in response to growing public awareness of chemical ‘body burdens.’

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Paul McLean, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in political sociology, economic sociology, network analysis, sociological theory, and the sociology of culture. His primary research explores the connections between multiple kinds of social networks—marriages, commerce, and political clientage chiefly—and documents the cultural practices actors adopt to achieve mobility in and across those networks. His book, The Art of the Network (Duke University Press, 2007), treats these topics by examining political patronage and letter-writing in Renaissance Florence.  In addition, he has ongoing research interests in various notions of chance and honor, the persistence of patrimonialism in the modern world, politics in 18th century Poland, the development of the modern self, the social theory of Adam Smith, and the culture of videogaming.

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David Mechanic is the René Dubos University Professor of Behavioral Sciences and 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.

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Ann Mische, Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program, teaches courses in political sociology, social movements, contemporary sociological theory, and temporality in social science research.  Her research interests include political culture, civic and political associations, social movements, and complex social networks, with a substantive focus on Brazilian youth politics.  She is starting a new project on the role of future projections in social action.

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Julie Phillips, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in criminology, statistics, research methods, and population studies. Her research interests, in the areas of violent crime, marital disruption, migration, and health-related outcomes, focus on the causes and consequences of various forms of social inequality in the United States.

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Robyn Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Sociology is researches and teaches in the following areas: globalization/political economy of the world system; political sociology; international migration; race, ethnicity and nationalism; gender; ethnographic methods. She is a faculty affiliate of the Department of Women and Gender Studies and has been part of faculty-student initiatives to increase the visibility Asian American scholarship at Rutgers.
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Patricia A. Roos, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in the sociology of work; inequalities; work, family, and politics; sociological writing; research methods; and graduate advanced methods/statistics. Three research projects currently occupy her time: gender equity in higher education; race, class, and gender differences in work/family behavior and attitudes; and a collaborative book project with Rutgers colleagues on how to move toward real gender equality among women and men.

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Sarah Rosenfield, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in the self, gender, mental health, and in writing. In her own research, she is particularly interested in the role of self in mental health and how race/ethnicity, class, and gender shape the self and mental health problems. She is also involved in research on services, stigma, and quality of life of people with chronic mentally illness.

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Thomas Rudel, Professor of Sociology and Human Ecology, teaches 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 recently published the book, Tropical Forests: Regional Paths of Destruction and Regeneration in the Late Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press).

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Zakia Salime, Assistant Professor in Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies, teaches courses in comparative feminism(s), gender, globalization, social movements, international inequalities and postcoloniality. Her research interests include, race, empire, the political economy of the "war on terror", development policies, Islamic societies and movements, Middle East and US relations. Salime’s book: Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota, 2011) illustrates this interplay of global regimes of rights and local alternatives, by looking at the interactions among the feminist and the Islamist women’s movements.

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D. Randall Smith, Associate Professor, has taught a variety of statistics courses and sociology of sport at the graduate level.  Over the years his research interests have also included labor markets, social networks, criminal careers and criminal sentencing, and bias and inequality in performance evaluations.  He is currently involved in a number of projects on the sociology of sport and intercollegiate athletics.

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Kristen W. Springer, Associate Professor of Sociology, conducts research on gender, health, families, and aging. She is currently engaged in three broad research projects: 1) the gendered health effect of marital income across the life course, 2) the influence of masculinity ideals on men’s healthcare seeking behaviors, and 3) the interactive influence of biology and social environment for understanding gendered health. Professor Springer teaches advanced research methods, sociology of the family, and classes on incorporating biology and the social environment.

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Arlene Stein, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses on the individual and society, sexuality, culture, and religion. She has written extensively about sexual politics, the cultural construction of identities, and social movements, and is very interested in bridging academic and popular writing.

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Helene Raskin White, Professor in the Sociology Department and the Center of Alcohol Studies, teaches a course on alcohol problems.  Her research focuses on the comorbidity of substance use, crime, violence, and mental health problems in community and high-risk samples. Currently, she is also developing and evaluating drug prevention interventions for college students.

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Richard Williams, Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in the sociology of identity and race and the sociology of symbolic boundaries. One area of interest for Dr. Williams is the development of "racial" and "national" identities within the context of macro and mid-range social structures. Another area of interest is around contemporary cultural forms of social system legitimation. He is currently at work on, "Scanning the Horizon: Local TV News in the Reproduction of Social Inequality," a book which argues that local TV news serves a significant role in the legitimation of existing social inequality.

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Benjamin Zablocki, Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in social psychology, classical theory, and religion. His research interests include the sociology of new religious movements, the social psychology of influence and charisma, and the sociology of the life course. His books include: The Joyful Community, Alienation and Charisma, and Misunderstanding Cults . He is principal investigator of the Urban Communes Project, which has been funded at various times over a 25 year period by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Templeton Foundation.

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Eviatar Zerubavel, Board of Governors Professor of Sociology,teaches courses in cognitive sociology, sociology of time, social memory, and sociological theory. His latest three books explored the sociomental shape of the past, the social organization of silence and denial, and the social construction of genealogical relatedness. He is currently writing a book on the social organization of relevance and irrelevance and the social construction of invisibility

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Retired Faculty