Emeritus Faculty
- Karen A. Cerulo
- Professor Emeritus
- Ph.D. Princeton, 1985
- Email: cerulo@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Professor Cerulo has authored several books and articles in the areas of culture and cognition, symbol systems and meaning, media and technology, social change, decision making, identity construction, and measurement techniques.
Professor Cerulo's research addresses a variety of themes within the sociology of culture and cognition. Some of her 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. Her prizewinning article entitled “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution” (American Sociological Review) uses focus group data to understand the role played by neural, physical, and sociocultural elements when we process and racialize the messages contained in commercial perfume scents.
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. Her work pays special attention to the links between cultural sociology and cognitive neuroscience. She has edited and contributed both to special issues and special sections on this topic published in Poetics (2010) and Sociological Forum (2014; 2021). She also co-authored a review piece, “Rethinking Culture and Cognition” published in the Annual Review of Sociology (2021).
One prominent theme in Professor Cerulo's work on conceptualization concerns new communication technologies. Specifically, she explores how 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.
Some of Professor Cerulo's work explores the conceptualization of the best and worst of people, places, objects and events. Her book Never Saw It Coming builds 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.
Spurred by some of the issues raised in Never Saw It Coming, the prizewinning book, Dreams of a Lifetime: How Culture Shapes Our Future Imaginings (with Janet M. Ruane), argues that dreams are thought to be matters of an individual's heart and mind. But in this book, the authors explore the sociocultural dimensions that organize and structure what Americans do (or do not) dream about, the ways in which they dream, variations in dreams according to one's social location, and when, if ever, people stop dreaming.
Professor Cerulo's articles appear in a wide variety of journals including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, 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 Cultural Sociology, the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, the Handbook of Social Theory, Research in Political Sociology, and the 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 Dreams of a Lifetime: How Culture Shapes Our Future Imaginings (Princeton University Press, 2022), Second Thoughts: Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Sage, 2015), and edited a collection entitled Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition (Routledge, 2002).
Professor Cerulo served as the Sociology Department Chair from July 2009 to August 2012. She has also served as the Chair of the ASA's Culture section (2009 through 2010), where she also functions as the section's network coordinator, and the director of the Culture and Cognition Network. She is a former Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society and the current editor of Sociological Forum, the flagship journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. In 2013, she was named the Robin M. Williams Jr. Lecturer by the Eastern Sociological Society and she also won that organization's 2013 Merit Award. In 2012, she received the Rutgers University Scholar-Teacher Award, recognizing both her pedagogy and research in sociology. She was also elected to the Sociological Research Association.
Professor Cerulo’s work has been widely covered in the media, including venues such as the Chicago Tribune, CNN Travel, The Conversation, DAME magazine, Le Monde, Mycentraljersey.com, The New York Daily News, The New Republic, The New York Times, North Jersey.com, Playboy, Psychology Today, The Post Courier, The Scientific American, Slate Magazine, The Times of India, and USA Today. She has also been interviewed on 1010 Wins news radio, The Brian Lehrer radio program (WNYC), the Freakonomics podcast/radio program, Jeff Schechtman's Talk Cocktail podcast, Mancow Morning Radio Show (WLUP FM), Matthew Crawford’s The Curious Man podcast, and Thinking Aloud on BBC radio.
- In the Public Eye:
- Work on dreams of the futures has been featured in The Conversation, The Chicago Tribune, and Psychology Today, as well as several podcasts.
- Research on the social meaning of commercial scents was featured in the Science section of LeMonde and on the BBC radio show Thinking Aloud.
- Work on our inability to anticipate worst case scenarios was featured in Slate Magazine and Sociology Lens.
- Featured on the radio show Freakonomics and in Dame Magazine regarding her research on public apologies.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Apologies of the Rich and Famous: Cultural, Cognitive and Social Explanations of Why We Care and Why We Forgive
- Enduring Relationships: Social Aspects of Perceived Interactions with the Dead
- Rethinking Culture and Cognition
- Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution
- Apologies of the Rich and Famous: Cultural, Cognitive and Social Explanations of Why We Care and Why We Forgive
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition
- Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong
- Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future
- Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of A Nation (The Arnold and Caroline Rose Book Series of the American Sociological Association)
- Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst
- Second Thoughts: Sociology Challenges Conventional Wisdom
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
- Lee Clarke
- Ph.D. State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1985
- Email: lclarke@rci.rutgers.edu
- Personal Website
- Curriculum Vitae
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.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Possibilistic Thinking: A New Conceptual Tool for Thinking about Extreme Events
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Acceptable Risk? Making Decisions in a Toxic Environment
- Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster
- Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination
- Judith J. Friedman
- Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1970
- Email: judithjf@rutgers.edu
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
- Ph.D. Cornell, 1979
- Email: gerson@rutgers.edu
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.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Gender Theory, Intersectionality, and New Understandings of Jewishness
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas
- Stephen Hansell
- Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1978
- Email: shansell@rutgers.edu
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
- Ph.D. Yale University, 1975
- Email: ahorwitz@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
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 J. Krivo
- Ph.D. University of Texas, 1984
- Email: lkrivo@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
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:
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide
- The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America
- David Mechanic
- Ph.D. Stanford, 1959
- Email: dmechanic@ifh.rutgers.edu
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).
- Martin Oppenheimer
- Email: martyopp@aol.com
- Patricia A. Roos
- Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 1981
- Email: pat@patroos.com
- Personal Website
- Curriculum Vitae
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.
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Gender & Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies
- Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations
- Sarah Rosenfield
- Ph.D. University of Texas, 1978
- Email: slrosen@rutgers.edu
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.
- Thomas Rudel
- Ph.D. Yale University, 1977
- Email: rudel@sebs.rutgers.edu
- Personal Website
- Curriculum Vitae
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.
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Shocks, States, and Sustainability: The Origins of Radical Environmental Reforms
- D. Randall Smith
- Ph.D. The John Hopkins University, 1978
- Email: drasmith@rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
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
- Ph.D., The New School for Social Research
- Email: chaim.waxman@rutgers.edu
- Personal Website
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.
Alternate email:
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- Helene Raskin White
- Ph.D. Rutgers University, 1976
- Email: hewhite@smithers.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
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
- Ph.D. State University of New York at Binghamton, 1981
- Email: rich.williams@rutgers.edu
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.
- Eviatar Zerubavel
- Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1976
- Email: zerubave@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
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) , and Don't Take It Personally: Personalness and Impersonality in Social Life (Oxford University Press, 2024).
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.
- In the Public Eye:
- On “Thinking Allowed” (BBC Radio 4) about Taken for Granted
- On “The Tel Aviv Review” about Taken for Granted
- On “The Diane Rehm Show” about The Elephant in the Room
- Faculty Article(s):
- Generally Speaking: The Logic and Mechanics of Social Pattern Analysis
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community
- Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-Driven Sociology
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance
- Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life
- Patterns of Time in Hospital life: A sociological Perspective
- Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology
- Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable
- Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America
- The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books
- The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life
- The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life
- The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week
- Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition