A political and comparative-historical sociologist, I specialize in the comparative studies of capitalism(s), socialism(s), and transitions in between, with a special emphasis on political economy and the dynamics of development in the Global South. I am particularly intrigued by questions pertaining to the politics of class, democracy, (de)mobilization, production and social reproduction.

I am currently turning my doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively entitled “Whither Socialism? Workers’ Democracy and the Class Politics of China’s Post-Mao Transition to Capitalism”. This project provides a distinct class-based explanation of China’s transition from socialism to capitalism, arguing that the way in which urban industrial workers –ideologically and rhetorically celebrated as the “leading class” of Chinese socialism – interacted with the Party-state in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s significantly shaped the historical trajectory of China’s post-Mao reform. Through this project, I attempt a bold rethinking of what it means to understand socialism, capitalism, democracy, authoritarianism, and class subjectivity comparatively and transnationally. Those who are interested in reading this work in its dissertation form can access it here.

My previous research has examined economic policymaking, class politics, mobilization dynamics, and populism in a variety of contexts and using diverse methods. In particular, an award-winning article published in Theory and Society used the case of taxation on private homeownership as a lens to both make sense of a key moment - the "Chongqing Model" - in China's recent political history and advance a Bourdieusian state theory. 

While in graduate school, I was extensively involved in academic labor organizing. I was part of the Harvard graduate workers’ successful campaign to form a union in 2018, as well as the multi-year organizing efforts that led to the historic UC-UAW strikes of 2022. I have also been a proud supporter of UAWD, the rank-and-file movement for democratic reform in the UAW.

Bernard Koch is a sociologist with research interests in the science of science; culture; cultural evolution; AI ethics; and computational social science.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Koch was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2023.

Zahra Khoshk Jan’s primary approach (in research and study) is social constructionism. Accordingly, her main field of research is “the political sociology of religion,” a multidisciplinary field concentrating on the relationship between religious and political constructions. She is also interested in qualitative research methods (discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, and The Grounded Theory Method), especially in studies regarding the interactions between religion and political issues.

Linda Zhao's research focuses on how social contexts (such as levels of diversity or inequality in a population) can shape intergroup dynamics in social networks, how social networks and social contexts are linked to our behaviors and decisions, and how such networks can generate inequality. Her projects investigate intergroup dynamics, inequality, and social influence in networks within the areas of immigrant integration, policing, and public health. Zhao's current work leverages data from a range of contexts such as adolescent friendships in classrooms, officer networks in police departments, as well as quasi-experimental settings using computational models. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Zhao was a Frank H.T. Rhodes Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Population Center. Zhao earned a PhD from Harvard in Sociology in 2020, a MA in Statistics from Harvard in 2017, and a BA in Economics from Princeton in 2013.

Kazuo Yamaguchi is the Ralph Lewis Professor. He was department chair in 2008-2011, and was Hanna Holborn Gray Professor in 2005-2013. Yamaguchi is interested in statistical models for social data and mathematical models for social phenomena, life course, rational choice theory, stratification and mobility, demography of family and employment, process of drug use progression, and Japanese society. His current research focuses on methodology (causal models for categorical data, decomposition analysis, and panel data analysis), and gender inequality and work-life balance in Japan and Korea.

Geoff Wodtke’s research is in the areas of urban poverty and neighborhood effects, group conflict and racial attitudes, class structure and income inequality, and methods of causal inference in observational research. He is currently working on several projects dealing with the impact of poverty on child development, class and racial disparities in exposure to environmental health hazards, and new methods for estimating causal effects with observational data. His previous work on these topics has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Demography, and Sociological Methodology, among other outlets. Wodtke completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of Michigan, where he also earned his MA in statistics.

Linda Waite is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, sexuality and social well-being. She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the NIA-funded National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a population-based longitudinal study of health among older adults. The hallmark of NSHAP is its comprehensive approach to the health and well-being of older, community-dwelling Americans. At the heart of this project is a nationally-representative survey, first fielded in 2005, with reinterviews in 2010, 2015 and 2021. The interdisciplinary team of investigators has developed cutting-edge methods for measuring population health, and in 2020 an NSHAP COVID19 study was conducted to learn about the experiences of older adults during the pandemic. This project has produced ground-breaking knowledge on the links between social relationships and physical, psychological, cognitive and functional health.

Waite is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Vargas is a social scientist interested in research on cities, law, and race. His writing and teaching focus on identifying the political-economic forces shaping neighborhood conditions and city responses to social problems. His multi award-winning book Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio brought a political analysis to the study of urban violence by showing how ward redistricting shaped block-level violence in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. His second award-winning book, Uninsured in Chicago: How the Social Safety Net Leaves Latinos Behind (NYU Press), is a longitudinal and intersectional ethnography of uninsured Chicagoans' experiences with the Affordable Care Act. He has published in a variety of journals such as Social Problems, Criminology, and the Social Science and Medicine. Professor Vargas has won numerous awards such as the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the David Heoft Award for Newly Tenured Faculty at the University of Chicago. His research has been featured in numerous media outlets such as NBC News, Telemundo, Univision, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, and National Public Radio. 

Professor Vargas leads the UChicago Justice Project, a research group devoted to institutional change in cities. The Justice Project is pursuing two research agendas: the first is on block-level historical trajectories of homicide, and the second is on the political economy of policing. 

To schedule a meeting with Professor Vargas, please contact Jasmin Becerra (jbecerra@uchicago.edu). 

My training is in two areas: social demography & the sociology of religion. Bridging these two fields, my work features the demographer’s characteristic concern with data and denominators and an insistence on connecting demographic processes to questions of meaning. I ask a lot of questions about data quality, and I may or may not be addicted to data collection.

I’ve written extensively on the role of religion in the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, but religion permeates my research, even when it isn’t present as a variable. Since 2008 I have been the principal investigator of Tsogolo la Thanzi (TLT)—an ongoing longitudinal study of young adults in Malawi. Demographers use terms like “relationship instability” and “fertility trajectories,” but very plainly: TLT asks how young adults negotiate relationships, sex, and childbearing with a severe AIDS epidemic swirling around them. The TLT research centre, located in Balaka (Southern Malawi), is staffed by over two dozen talented locals and supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Kristen Schilt's research interests center on sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. A central focus of her work is finding new ways to make visible the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality that serve to naturalize and reproduce social inequality. She has written extensively about the experiences of transgender people in the United States and about the development of transgender studies as a field in sociology. Her work also explores qualitative research methods in sociology, and feminist and queer cultural movements. In addition to her academic writing, she has co-directed a documentary short and feature film with Chase Joynt, titled “Framing Agnes,” about their archival research into the history of transgender research in 1950s sociology.  From 2017-2023, Schilt served as the faculty director for the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at the University of Chicago.

Schilt is the author of Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press). Until the 2000s, transgender people met with legal, medical, and social opposition when they sought to transition on the job. As “blue states” such as California started to put transgender workplace protections into place, however, the demand for safe, supported workplace transitions became a central tenet of transgender rights movements and a touchstone for cultural anxieties about gender and sexuality – particularly in “red states” such as Texas. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observational data, Schilt brings empirical weight to social constructionist theories of gender by documenting the workplace experiences of transgender men in Southern California and in Central Texas. Most of the men she interviewed started their career trajectories when they were still living as women. As men at work, they often met with unexpected experiences. Some men faced resistance from employers and co-workers who had little prior knowledge about transgender identities, particularly men in blue collar jobs. Men of color found that they were racialized in new, dangerous ways. But, for many white trans men, they found they received greater recognition and more authority at work than they had previously – even when they stayed in the same job and worked with the same people.

One of the major theoretical contributions of the book is to explain this unanticipated outcome. Trans men have the same human capital, the same childhood gender socialization, and the same skills before and after they transition on the job. Schilt argues that their experiences at work illustrate the social processes that underlie workplace gender inequality more broadly – namely deeply held cultural beliefs that there is an innate male/female binary that determines men and women’s skills and abilities. While a workplace gender transition could theoretically “trouble” these beliefs, Schilt shows that co-workers and employers adopt strategies that allow them to ignore the potential challenge by framing this gender transition as the only solution to a biological error, an error that has trapped a man in a woman’s body. These experiences show that boundaries between men and women are flexible – co-workers can reposition one trans man in the gender structure at work – at the same time they are stable – notions about men and women’s inevitable differences remain unchanged. Just One of the Guys argues that workplace gender inequality persists in part because these boundaries can be renegotiated on an individual level with no accompanying structural change in relations of power.

With D’Lane Compton and Tey Meadow, Schilt co-edited Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (University of California Press). Located within the critical conversation about the possibilities and challenges of utilizing insights from humanistic queer epistemologies in social scientific research, Other, Please Specify presents to a new generation of researchers an array of experiences, insights, and approaches, revealing the power of investigations of the social world. With contributions from sociologists who have helped define queer studies and who use a range of interpretative and statistical methods, this volume offers methodological advice and practical strategies in research design and execution, all with the intent of getting queer research off the ground and building a collaborative community within this emerging subfield. 

Schilt is currently working on two book projects. Conceptualizing Agnes: Exemplary Cases and the Disciplines of Gender is a historical sociology book about the history of transgender research in the social sciences in the 1950s. The book draws on the original archival research Schilt did with Chase Joynt in the Harold Garfinkel archive. It examines the back story behind Garfinkel’s canonical case study of “Agnes,” a 19-year old trans woman who came to UCLA in 1958 seeking gender-affirming care. The second project, tentatively titled New You or True Self: The Social Process of Major Life Change, examines the experiences of people making a major change to their identity or bodies that is unanticipated to those around them. She focuses on four case studies: people who experience rapid weight loss after a bariatric surgery, people who come out as gay or lesbian later in life, people who undergo a gender transition, and people who convert to Judaism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with “changers” and those in their social networks, as well as ethnographic observations of support groups, Schilt examines the ways in which people draw on understandings of what is innate (such as sexual identity) and what is changeable (such as weight) to support or challenge these major life changes.