Florence Borchert Bartling Professor
Office: Social Sciences 312
Phone: 773-702-7098
Fax: 773-702-4849
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
John Levi Martin received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was recently a professor, after being a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an assistant professor at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick. He is now a professor at the University of Chicago at Chicago, where he enjoys teaching classical theory and writing about himself in the third person.
He is best known for his mathematical modeling of the occupational standing of imaginary animals in a single children’s book; he has also written on, and occasionally researched, the formal properties of belief systems and social structures, the constitutional convention of 1787, the rationalization of infantry war, and the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology. He recently finished a book that he started ten years ago, and enjoyed it so much that he is seriously considering reading another one again some time in the future.
Selected publications
2015 Thinking Through Theory. Norton.
2011 The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.
2009 Social Structures. Princeton University Press.
2009 “The Formation and Stabilization of Vertical Hierarchies among Adolescents: Towards a Quantitative Ethology of Dominance among Humans.” Social Psychology Quarterly 72:241-264.
2007 (With Adam Slez:) “Political Action and Party Formation in the United States Constitutional Convention.” American Sociological Review 72:42-67.
2006 “Jointness and Duality in Algebraic Approaches to Dichotomous Data.”Sociological Methods and Research 35:159-192.
2005 “The Objective and Subjective Rationalization of War.” Theory and Society34:229-275.
2000 “What Do Animals Do All Day?: On the Totemic Logic of Class Bodies.” Poetics27:195-231.
