Current Graduate Students
Dana Asbury
Research interests: Ethnography, life in the city, communities, community organizing, activist lifestyles, consensus building and collective decision making, theories of deviance and difference, and the sociology of knowledge.
Education: B.A. Sociology, magna cum laude (The University of Pennsylvania)
Sara Bastomski
Research interests: Sara Bastomski earned her B.A. in Sociology at UCLA, and her M.A. in Sociology at Columbia University. She has received grants for graduate study from the Burnand-Partridge Foundation for two consecutive years. Sara has done ethnographic research on the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles and New York City. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Sara worked at a social service agency, developing culturally-competent program evaluation methods appropriate for programs that serve at-risk urban Native American youth. Inspired by the dynamic street life of New York City, her current research project examines the spatial distribution and characteristics of “street contact,” i.e. incidents in which women experience unwelcome greetings and verbal harassment by male strangers in public places throughout NYC and New Haven, Connecticut. Sara's research interests include crime and deviance, urban sociology, public space, race and ethnicity, gender, and neighborhood inequality.
Education: B.A. Sociology, Magna cum Laude with Honors in Sociology (UCLA, 2008); M.A., Sociology (Columbia University, 2011)
Elisabeth Becker
Elizabeth Breese
Research interests: Elizabeth Breese's research interests include cultural sociology, media and journalism, popular culture, and trauma theory.
Education: B.A. Sociology, cum laude with Honors in Sociology (Wellesley College)
Sorcha Brophy-Warren
Research interests: Cultural sociology, ethnography, religious and ethnic identity, postcolonialism. Her previous work explored the way that communities and institutions articulate and evaluate religious identities through adherence to moral boundaries.
Education: A.B. The Comparative Study of Religion, with high honors (Harvard University)
Iris Chan
Seongsoo Choi
최성수/崔成秀
Research interests: Seongsoo Choi’s primary interests include changes in life courses under radical social changes and their impacts on social inequality, social mobility, political attitudes, and social norms. He is also interested in analytical sociology and social mechanisms.
Education: M. A. Sociology (Yonsei University)
Thomas Crosbie
Education:
Mira Debs
Research interests: Culture, trauma and memory including the role of art in Italy, post-colonial memory in India, post-civil rights memory in the American South, and the sociology of education.
Education: B.A. Humanities with honors, (University of Chicago), MPhil European Politics and PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education), Oxford University.
Tabitha Decker
Research interests: Tabitha Decker's interests include urban sociology, comparative and historical sociology, and social/spatial theory. A former Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Tabitha examined the gendering of work through a study of women taxi drivers in South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Malaysia. Tabitha is currently developing a dissertation focused on Dubai's urban development, which seeks to understand relations between the built environment and social, economic, and cultural processes.
Education: B.A. International Relations, Honors (Wellesley College)
Shai Dromi
Shai Dromi completed his B.A. in sociology, cultural anthropology and communication and his M.A. in sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His Master’s thesis focused on the relation between moral evaluation, emotions and the media. He has worked at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute as part of a research group, Israeli Hearts: Culture and Emotional Praxis in Contemporary Israel. He was a Fulbright doctoral fellow in the years 2009-2011. Currently Shai is a doctoral student at the Department of Sociology, and his research interests include cultural sociology, sociology of morality, and sociology of emotions.
Education: B.A. Sociology, Cultural Anthropology and Communication (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006); M.A. Sociology (Magna cum Laude, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009); M.A. Sociology (Yale University, 2010).
Jesse Einhorn
Education: B.A. Sociology (Haverford College)
Alison Gerber
Research interests: Alison Gerber is a third-year PhD student in the department of sociology and a junior fellow of the Center for Comparative Research and the Center for Cultural Sociology. Her research focuses on work, culture, and public life.
Education:
Stephanie Greenlea
Research interests: Stephanie is in the combined doctoral program with African American Studies. Her interests include theories of race and racism, intersectionality, social movements and technology. She is currently investigating articulations of and challenges to anti-Black racism in the information age. Her approach pursues interdisciplinary through sociological engagement.
Education: B.A. in Sociology from Emory University
Jeffrey Guhin
I’m a doctoral candidate in Sociology with an M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale and a BA from Loyola University New Orleans. Before graduate school, I lived in New York City for four years, where I worked as a caseworker in the South Bronx and as a high-school teacher in downtown Brooklyn.
Research Interests: I basically wear four sociological hats:
(1) The sociology of religion, especially Sunni Islam, Evangelical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. I am interested in secularism studies, religion and politics, and debates about tradition and democracy in a postcolonial context.
(2) The sociology of education. I look at how schools form moral subjects and the language of justification used about and within this formation. I work within a tradition of qualitative, organizational studies of schooling, and one of my ongoing goals is to help bring back a sociological focus on education at the level of the school rather than the level of the student.
(3) Science and technology studies. Unlike other sociologists in STS, I am more interested in how science and technology work in real life than in “laboratory life”. I’m particularly interested in the relationships between science and religion and between technology and morality, both of which are dichotomies I’d like to challenge in my work.
(4) Sociological theory and methodology. I’m with Durkheim that sociology is just a way to work out if philosophy works. And good methods are the only way to do it.
All of these interests intersect in my dissertation, which is a four-part comparative ethnography of Christian and Muslim high schools in Amman, Jordan and New York City. I’m looking at how science and technology interact with religious life, and I’m using surveys, interviews, and participant-observation in each of these four schools to answer four questions: (1) How do these communities explain the relationship and occasional disconnect between scripture and science education? (2) How do these communities maintain virtual network and how might these connections—through text messaging, Facebook, etc.—affect their religious identities? (3) How does the massive amount of information and identity-exploration provided by the internet strengthen or challenge these communities? (4) How might the use of technology and science to accomplish religious tasks allow for a reexamination of how prayer and scripture themselves can be “moral technologies”, that is, human-constructed tools that help their users accomplish tasks? All of these questions will help me to understand how these communities are able be “in the world but not of it”. I expect to find that Muslims and Christians in the United States have more in common with each other than they do with fellow Muslims and Christians in Jordan, disproving the idea that religious identity will determine everything else. In fact, these schools’ stories reveal selves with many identities—certainly Muslim and Christian—but also Jordanian and American, technological and scientific, religious and secular—the diffuse identities, in other words, that mark any members of modern life.
John Hartley
Research interests: Faith & Globalization, Iranian Studies, Culture, Religion & Economy, Culture, Religion & Politics, Urban Sociology.
Education: B.A., International Relations with Honors (UC Davis), M.A., Iranian History with Distinction (University of Isfahan, Iran)
Craig Holloway
Research interests: Ethnographic methods, education, and the nexus of race and identity in the social life experiences and outcomes of African-American males.
Education: B.A. Psychology (Tuskegee University); M.Ed. Human Development and
Psychology (Harvard University)
Isabel Jijon
Jin Su Joo
Andrew Junker
Research interests: Andrew Junker’s research interests concern political sociology and religion, with regional foci on China and Chinese diaspora. His work cuts across several sociological subfields, including social movements, politics, comparative religion, transnational sociology, culture, theory, and comparative historical sociology. Andrew’s dissertation investigates a historical case comparison of two post-1978 transnational Chinese protest movements, the Chinese democracy movement and the religious sectarian movement called Falun Gong. Contrasting the historical trajectories of these two diaspora-based opposition movements reveals differences in the ways that Chinese sub-cultural traditions have facilitated or obstructed the diffusion of the democratic social movement form of collective action among Chinese transnational activists. The findings have implications for understanding the intersection of religion and popular protest in Chinese cultural contexts and for better specifying how religion and migration can influence the diffusion of protest repertoires. Andy’s dissertation employs several methodologies, including field research, interviews, textual analysis and interpretation, and a hybrid quantitative/qualitative method called quantitative narrative analysis (QNA). He is the recipient of a dissertation improvement grant from the Methodology, Measurement and Statistics Program of the National Science Foundation. Andy uses Chinese and Japanese in his research, and has studied, researched, or worked in Japan, China, Thailand, India, and Nepal. For more information, see http://yale.academia.edu/AndrewJunker.
Education: B.A. East Asian Studies (Wesleyan University); M.A. Religious Studies (Indiana University)
Esther Chihye Kim
Research Interests: Ethnographic methods, immigration, and undocumented labor. Currently studying undocumented restaurant workers using naturalistic ethnographic methods.
Education: B.A. Sociology and Education (UCLA); M.A. Education, culture and society (University of Pennsylvania)
Joseph Klett
Research Interests: Subjectivity and objectivity in sound, the cultural dimensions of technology, and the place of perception in the social environment.
Education: B.A. Sociology, (University of California, San Diego)
Matthew Lawrence
Education: B.A. American Studies and English (2001) with university distinction and department honors, (Stanford University), and MEd Education Policy and Management (2007), (Harvard University)
Eric Lum
Research interests: Eric Lum works in economic sociology, law and society, theory and historical sociology. He has recently presented papers on the sociology of private property rights.See personal webpage for more information.
Education: B.A. Sociology (2003), summa cum laude, and J.D (2006). (Cornell University)
Wei Luo
Research interests: Historical sociology, social change, state and revolution, social theory. Wei is currently researching on the production and diffusion of ideas in revolutions with a historical comparative perspective.
Education: B.A./B.S. German Literature, Psychology (Peking University); M.A. Social Sciences (University of Chicago)
Carolyn Ly
Research interests: Cultural sociology, racial and ethnic studies, work and identity, and urban ethnography. Carolyn's dissertation utilizes historical, interview, and ethnographic methods to examine the institutionalization of work in regards to the fire service in Elm City. Her project also examines the cultural meanings and identity of firefighting work within the urban context. Carolyn has conducted research on cultural images of Asian Americans in popular media; she has also ethnographically documented the varying roles of a local library in an impoverished urban neighborhood. Carolyn is a Doctoral Candidate and Junior Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology and the Center for Comparative Research at Yale
Education: B.A. Sociology, summa cum laude (Hunter College, City University of New York); Phi Beta Kappa; M.A. Sociology, Yale University; M.Phil. Sociology, Yale University.
Timothy Malacarne
Research interests: Tim is interested in cultural reasons for continued social inequality. He is currently looking at the meaning systems and cultural frameworks which pattern behavior enabling upper class stability. He also focuses on the way in which quantitative methods can enhance cultural sociology. Other substantive interests include rural and small town identity and the influence of entertainment and other non-overtly political spectacle on the formation of social groups and their ideologies.
Education: B.S.F.S. Culture and Politics (Georgetown University)
Patricia Maloney
Research interests: Patricia Maloney is a graduate student currently interested in social stratification and educational inequality. She has recently concluded her two-year commitment to Teach For America, a national organization designed to erase the achievement gap in American public schools. At the present time, her research focuses on the pro-anorexia internet movement and the effects of school and society on adolescent sexuality.
Education: B.A. Sociology and Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa; M.A. Education, University of Pennsylvania; M.A. Sociology, Yale University
William McMillan
Shoham Melamed
Dissertation topic: “Maternal Politics, Fertility Levels and Reproductive Regimes: The Case of Jewish Women’s Activism in America and Palestine.”
Education: B.A. Sociology & Anthropology, and Film & Television Studies, magna cum laude (Tel Aviv University); M.A. Sociology & Anthropology, magna cum laude (Tel Aviv University)
Sam Nelson
Sam is interested in religion, politics and historical sociology. His dissertation research is on early modern transnational religion: the political and institutional conditions of early protestant missionary movements and the relationship between state formation and religious organization.
Education: B.A. Sociology, honors (University of Chicago)
Natalie Nitsche
Research interests: Gender, Work and Family; Social Demography; Fertility Transitions; Welfare States and Social Policy; Race and Inequality.
Education: B.A. and M.A. (Diploma) Political Science (Free University Berlin), M.A. Sociology (Yale University)
Candas Pinar
Kristin Plys
Research interests: Macro-historical sociology, political economy, development, crisis, labor and labor movements.
Education: B.A. Sociology, with Honors, Certificate in Cross-National Sociology and International Development (The Johns Hopkins University)
Elizabeth Roberto
Education: B.A. Human Services, cum laude, special honors (George Washington University); M.P.A. Public Administration, Education & Social Policy (George Washington University)
Jensen Sass
Education: B.A. History and Geography (Monash University)
Inge Schmidt
Research interests: Inge Schmidt is interested in Political Sociology and Cultural Sociology. Currently, her research is on voting and elections in the United states with a focus on culture and meaning.
Education: B.A. Sociology and Politics, cum laude with High Honors (Mount Holyoke College)
Christine Slaughter
Research interests: Christine Slaughter studies social movements, culture, and the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. Her dissertation project studies the efforts of activists in African-American and LGBTQ movements to shift cultural representations of their groups in the public sphere. Her previous work has examined gender and American political discourse using Nancy Pelosi as a case study, and the social meaning of humor and its connection to ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality in the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival.
Education: B.A. Ethics, Politics & Economics, cum laude with distinction in Ethics, Politics, & Economics (Yale University)
Samuel Southgate
Research interests: Samuel's research is situated at the intersection of historical sociology, politics and social theory. His interests include colonial histories, nationalism, social movements, protest, riots and revolution, with a particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He also works on qualitative methodology, theories of causation and the philosophy of social science.
Education: B.A. Philosophy, honors (University of York, 2004); M.A. Middle Eastern Studies with distinction (School of Oriental and African Studies, 2009)
Samuel Stabler
Yasushi Tanaka-Gutiez
Education:
Gulay Turkmen
Research interests: Gulay's research interests include sociology of religion, comparative-historical sociology, nations/nationalism and cultural trauma and collective memory in the context of national identity formation. She is specifically interested in the ways religious and nationalist identities intersect, intertwine and compete with each other, especially in the Middle East. Currently she's doing research on religion as a supra-national identity.
Education: B.A. Western Languages and Literatures (Bogazici University, 2003); M.A. Sociology (University of Virginia, 2009); M.A. Sociology (Yale University, 2011)
Luke Wagner
Yingyao Wang
Research Interests: State and Economy, Historical Institutionalism, sociology of professions, China. She is currently researching for her dissertation on Chinese economic technocrats and their role in re-engineering “the state of economics” and pushing for paradigmatic shift in economic policies from the Mao period to the present.
Education: M.A. Communication (Beijing University); B.A. Journalism (Fudan University)
Christina Wells
Research interests: As a doctoral student pursuing the combined program with African American studies, Christina enters the program with interest in the intersection of race, class and gender as it relates to violence and the body. .
Education: B.A. African and African American Studies with a Secondary in Sociology (Harvard University)
Lucas Wiesendanger
Education: B.A. Sociology with honors (University of Chicago)
Marianne Wilson
Education: B.A. Sociology, cum laude with Honors in Sociology (Wake Forest University)
Pianpian Carolyn Xu
Research interests: Pianpian Carolyn Xu's research interests include:comparative social stratification and inequality, education, gender, life course, economic sociology, and demography.
Education: B.A. Japanese (Sun Yat-sen University); M.Phil.Social Science (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Xiaohong Xu
Research interests: Xiaohong Xu’s primary research interests include state formation, nationalism, organization studies, social movements and revolutions. His dissertation project seeks to develop a sociological analysis of moral reform movements, a common genre of collective action that has so far been largely neglected by sociologists. It compares moral reform movements in revolutionary China with those following the Glorious Revolution in England and examines their institutional transformations in relation to the state by focusing on two organizations, the Chinese YMCA and the English SPCK (the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). The purpose is therefore to generate insights into the historical formation of two different regimes of moral regulation and culturaes of state institution.
Education: B.A. Sociology (Peking University); M.A. Sociology (University of Notre Dame)
Michael Yarbrough
Research interests: Michael Yarbrough works in the areas of law and society; family; the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality; cultural sociology, and South African studies. He is particularly interested in the ways that family and other interpersonal relationships intersect with law and legal institutions. A graduate of the Yale Law School through the joint J.D./Ph.D. program, Michael is currently beginning fieldwork on his dissertation studying the ways everyday South Africans construct family and intimate relationships in light of a rapidly changing legal context. South African family law currently recognizes three types of marriage and a form of civil partnership, with yet other forms of marriage and domestic partnership in varying stages of development. These legal developments echo an astonishing diversity of actual family formations on the ground, both recognized and unrecognized in the law. In this way, while mindful of the country's local particularities, Yarbrough argues that South Africa can also be understood as the bleeding edge of a global trend toward greater family diversity, and as an exemplary case of one potential political and legal response to that trend: the proliferation of an array of legally recognized family categories. While findings from South Africa cannot simply be generalized to other contexts, they can open up new lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry into a set of questions of urgent global importance for social scientists, activists, policy-makers, and people living in families and intimate relationships.
Yarbrough is also finishing work on a project theorizing the significance of deadlocked disputes for understanding the possibilities and mechanics of symbolic action under the highly differentiated conditions of late modernities, using ethnographic observation of small-claims trials among family members and other, as he calls them, “intimate litigants. ”
Education: B.A. Sociology, with honors (University of Chicago); M.Phil, J.D. Yale Law School, 2009; M.A. Sociology, Yale University, 2007
Sandy Zhao
Research interests: comparative historical methods, culture, crime, law. Sandy is interested in studying how conceptions of justice can be constructed and developed in comparisons of U.S. and Russian legal systems, legal culture, criminal justice and legal education.
Education: B.A. Sociology and Government, magna cum laude. (Cornell University)