Awards News
| Thomas Swerts, a PhD student, has received an NSF Dissertation grant for his research on undocumented immigrants in Chicago and Brussels and their participation in local nonprofit and civic organizations. Filipe Carreira da Silva, a recent post-doctoral scholar in the department, recently published G.H. Mead: A Reader, the first book by Mead that consists entirely of his own writings and covers subjects including crime, social reform, labor relations, war, national identity, and citizenship. Da Silva's first book, Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood and Democratic Politics (2008) earned him the 2010 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award in the section on the History of Sociology by the ASA. Professor Ross Stolzenberg has been awarded the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for career contributions to sociological methodology. PhD student Mary Akchurin has received the Marvin E. Olsen Student Paper Award from the Environmental and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, for her paper, "Constructing the Rights of Nature: Environmentalism, Indigenous Politics, and Legal Mobilization in Ecuador, 1970-2008." PhD student Juhi Verma received a Center for South Asian Studies Dissertation fellowship for her global ethnographic study of migrant laborers. PhD student Li-Chung Cheng received the Academia Sinica Fellowship for Doctoral Candidates in the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as the Dissertation Fellowship for ROC Students Abroad by the Chiang Ching-Ko Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, for his work on political claims and professional development around environmental health. Jae-Mahn Shim, a PhD student, has received the Toyota Dissertation Fellowship from the Center for East Asian Studies for his work on traditional and western medicine in Japan, France, and the U.S. Michaela Soyer, a PhD student, has received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Research Grant from the Law and Social Science section of the NSF for her research on juvenile offenders in Chicago and Boston. Bijan Warner's paper entitled "Dialogical History and the History of a Dialogue: Three Visions of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, 1959-1975," has been awarded the 2011 Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA's Section on the History of Sociology.Second year undergraduate student Samantha Hobson has been selected as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. PhD students Amanda Martinez and Jonathan Rodkin were both recently awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which provides 3 years of funding and support. PhD student Michael Corey received the Best Poster award for his paper, "The Shift is Dying but Evening Work is Thriving: Primetime Work and the Work-Life Balance," presented at the Population Association of America conference. First-year PhD student Jeffrey Parker has been awarded the prestigious Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, which provides 4 years of funding at a highly competitive level. Professor Emeritus Donald Bogue has been honored with two lifetime achievement awards for his contributions to the field of demography. The International Union for Scientific Study of Population has awarded Prof. Bogue with the 2011 IUSSP Laureate Award, and the Population Association of American has named him a Distinguished Demographer. Professor Martin Riesebrodt was recently honored at a conference titled, "Comparing Religions: On Theory and Method. A Conference in Honor of Martin Risebrodt," sponsored by the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion. Undergraduate student Jasmine Hendricks was recently awarded the Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fellowship for Aspiring Teachers of Color. Stefan Bargheer recently co-won the Fifth Worldwide Competition for Junior Sociologists of the International Sociological Association for his paper, "Toward a Leisure Theory of Value: The Game of Bird-Watching and the Concern for Conservation in Great Britain." Juhi Verma won the Society for the Study of Social Problem's Labor Studies Best Graduate Paper for "Manipulating the Weaker Sex Schema: Subversive Gendered Action in Bangalore’s Labor Protests," currently under review at Gender and Society. Sanja Jagesic was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Cristina Mora, a Princeton PhD and current post-doc in our department, has won the 2010 ASA's Dissertation Award for her work, "De Muchos, Uno: The Institutionalization of Panethnicity in the United States, 1960-1990." Kristen Schilt's paper, "Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity" (2009, Gender and Society) was awarded the 2010 Best Article Award from ASA Sex and Gender Section. James Evans’ paper, “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship” (2008, Science) was awarded the 2010 Best Article Award from the ASA Section on Communication and Information Technology. Mario Small’s book, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (2009, Oxford University Press) won the C. Wright Mills Award for best book of 2009 from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and Honorable Mention for the Mirra Komarovsky Best Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Association. Graduate student Laura Goodrich recently won a Fulbright to study microfinance in Panama. Mario Small’s book, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (2009, Oxford University Press) won the C. Wright Mills Award for best book of 2009 from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and Honorable Mention for the Mirra Komarovsky Best Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Association. Karin D. Knorr Cetina (Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences Fellow 2008-09) was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contributions to the Field by the Society for Social Studies of Science and Thomson Scientific in October 2009. |
The Department of Sociology and the Committee on Social Thought have invited Robert Bellah, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, to deliver a public lecture about his recently published book, Religion in Human Evolution. The lecture will take place October 19th, at 4:00 in Swift Hall. The Sociology department is pleased to announce that Michal Engelman and Kathleen Cagney have joined the faculty this fall. Michal is a demographer and gerontologist who focuses on the dynamics of population aging and the determinants of longevity and well being at older ages. She joins us from Johns Hopkins University. Kathleen is a demographer whose research includes the effects of neighborhoods on health, and racial and ethnic differences in access to health care/long-term care. She is also a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and joins us, most recently, from the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago.  In February, the University of Chicago Press published George Simmel’s final work Lebensanschauung (The View of Life), co-translated from German by former sociology graduate student John Andrews and Donald N. Levine, and with an introduction by Levine and Committee on Social Thought alumnus Dan Silver. Composed in the years before his death, The View of Life was, according to Simmel, his “testament,” and is considered by some scholars to be the key to understanding his work.  Mario Small recently co-edited a special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, featuring new research on the relations between culture and poverty. After years of the topic being considered taboo, a resurgence of work has recently emerged. This work is featured in Le Vie des idées, the New York Times and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation". Miller-McCune discusses the implications of Mario Small and Anjanette Chan Tack’s in-depth interview study with pre-teen students and their parents at two high-poverty elementary schools in Chicago. The study examined the impact of student body turnover on friendships among children. Terry Clark's research on amenities and urban economic development, published in his book The City as an Entertainment Machine, was recently referenced in the Chicago Tribune.  James Evans recently published an essay “Machine Science” in Science with Chicago biologist Andrey Rzhetsky about how information regarding the social and technical production of science can be used to automatically generate novel hypotheses. Discussion and consequences of these possibilites were featured in The Guardian, El Pais and Wired magazine. |
Phd student David Schalliol's photography, focusing on Chicago residential and commercial buildings, multistories and one flats with no neighboring structures, was recently featured in the 
Professor Mario Small and a group of other social scientists have created the 
The 
