Stephen Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology, the College and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies.

He is interested in statistical models for child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods. He is best known for his work developing hierarchical linear models, with broad applications in the design and analysis of longitudinal and multilevel research. he is currently studying the development of literacy and math skills in early childhood with implications for instruction; and methods for assessing school and classroom quality. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the recipient of the American Educational Research Association award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research.

Omar M. McRoberts is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and The College.

McRoberts' scholarly and teaching interests include the sociology of religion, urban sociology, urban poverty, race, and collective action.

His first book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood is based on an ethnographic study of religious life in Four Corners: a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Boston containing twenty-nine congregations. It explains the high concentration, wide variety, and ambiguous social impact of religious activity in the neighborhood. It won the 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

McRoberts currently is conducting a study of black religious responses to, and influences on, social welfare policy since the New Deal, culminating with George W. Bush's Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. He is also initiating an ethnographic project on cultures of death and dying among black congregations in low-income urban contexts.

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.

Karin Knorr Cetina is interested in financial markets, knowledge and information, as well as in globalization, theory and culture. Her current projects include a book on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies. She continues to do research on the information architecture of financial markets, on their "global microstructures" (the global social and cultural form these markets take) and on trader markets in contrast to producer markets. She also studies globalization from a microsociological perspective, using an ethnographic approach, and she continues to be interested in "laboratory studies," the study of science, technology and information at the site of knowledge production - particularly in the life sciences and in particle physics.

Knorr Cetina is interested in dissertations having to do with finance and markets, science, and information, and globalization and post-social theory, that is attempts to theorize the role of (material, epistemic, consumer, artificial) objects in social life. Current dissertation students work, for example, on global debt relief technologies and software systems produced within the framework of international organizations, and on the conception, use and production of social robots in different countries. These students use an ethnographic approach to better understand the theoretical and cultural construction and the various dimensions of the respective domains.

Typically in residence at Chicago in the autumn quarter, Hans Joas teaches courses and mentors students in contemporary social theory. For more details on his research program, see his webpage (linked below).

Kimberly Kay Hoang is Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. 

Her research examines deal making in frontier and emerging economies. 

Dr. Hoang is the author of two books. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press 2022). This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the rich and powerful use offshore shell corporations to conceal their wealth and make themselves richer. Drawing on rich interview data this book uncovers the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. Spiderweb Capitalism is the winner of five distinguished book awards from the Association of American Publishers and the American Sociological Association. 

Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California Press 2015). This monograph examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam's informal economy. Dealing in Desire is the winner of seven distinguished book awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Association for Asian Studies.

She received the 2020 Lewis A Coser Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Sociological Theory— a mid-career award for Theoretical Agenda Setting. Her books and articles have been awarded over 26 prizes from several different professional associations. In addition to her research, she is the winner of the 2018 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Teaching at the University of Chicago. 

Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, City & Community, Contexts, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her peer reviewed journal articles have won over 14 prizes and honorable mentions from the Sociologists for Women in Society, Vietnam Scholars Group, and the American Sociological Association: Section on Global & Transnational Sociology, Section on Race, Gender and Class, Section on Sociology of Sex & Gender, Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment, Section on Asia and Asian America, and the Section on Sexualities.

Visit Julian Go's website

Julian Go’s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. 

Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in articles and books such as The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (co-edited with Anne Foster, Duke University Press, 2003), American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008) and Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His other work is on postcolonial thought and social theory, culminating in his book Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford, 2016; and global historical sociology and transnational field theory: Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited with Monika Krause, Wiley & Sons, 2016) and Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge, 2016). 

His most recent book, Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present (Oxford, 2023) explores imperialism’s impact upon police militarization in the US and Britain. He is also working on a project that recovers anticolonial thought as a critical form of social theory.

His scholarship has won prizes from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association, among other institutions. He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association. In 2021-2022, Julian serves as the President of the Social Science History Association.

Andreas Glaeser is a sociologist of culture with a particular interest in the construction of identities and knowledges. His work interlaces substantive interests with efforts to build social theory. In this vein, his first book develops a theory of identity formation processes in the context of an ethnographic study of Germany's post-unification woes. He is currently finishing a book aiming at the development of a political epistemology which asks how people come to understand the world of politics from within their particular biographical trajectories and social milieus. The substantive focus of this book is the late socialist German state's effort to understand its citizens and to control the opposition as well as the opposition members' efforts to form their independent understanding of state socialism. He has begun work on a new project which studies the emergence of dominant understandings about Muslim immigrants in the interaction between contingent historical events, the cycles of electoral politics, everyday experiences and mass-mediated discourses in Germany, France and Britain.

Glaeser is the co-editor of Chicago Studies in the Practices of Meaning.

I am a political and urban sociologist who does research on democracy, corruption, social inequality, and segregation primarily in the context of the Philippines, although I’ve also written about Singapore, Cambodia, and the United States.

I have a number of ongoing projects. I’m currently writing a book on corruption, politics, and the politics of knowledge in the Philippines (and Cambodia too for a part of it). The book is part of a broader project of understanding corruption as a socially and historically embedded phenomenon—one inextricable from politics and the politics of knowledge. My collaborators and I have an edited volume forthcoming with Cambridge University Press called A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption.

I’ve also collected the data for another book, an ethnography of democracy in the Philippines. The focus here is on people’s experience of democracy and how it has changed over time with the aim of better explaining the country’s “illiberal turn” of late. Broadly, I’m interested in charting a sociology of politics as distinct from both political science and political sociology. It's an approach to politics as embedded in social structures and history.

Finally, I’m editing a volume on historical and ethnographic approaches to Philippine politics. The aim is to challenge prevailing conceptualizations of Philippine politics around a set of “bad words” (oligarchy, patronage, corruption).

My previous work examined the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. I sought to connect this relationship with urban structure on the one hand and political dissensus on the other. In the process, I highlighted the role of class in shaping urban space, social life, and politics. I wrote a book on the topic called The Patchwork City https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo40850773.html.

Flores’s primary research interests are in the fields of international migration, race and ethnicity, and social stratification. His research explores the emergence of social boundaries around immigrants and racial minorities across the world as well as how these boundaries contribute to the reproduction of ethnic-based social inequality.

His work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. His research has been profiled in multiple news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Fox News, USA Today, Newsweek, FiveThirtyEight, among others. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Sociological Association, and the Paul Merage Foundation.

He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University. Flores serves on the editorial board of the American Sociological Review and is an Associate Editor at the American Journal of Sociology.

At the University of Chicago, he co-directs the Immigration Workshop.