Faculty News
Shamus Khan joined the department July 1, 2007. Khan will receive his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. Khan does a range of work, from historical investigations into modernist classical music, to experimental work on deliberative processes, to a study of the development of feminist sociological thought. His dissertation, “The Production of Privilege” is an ethnographic study of an elite boarding school. It explores class reproduction in the United States.
Carla Shedd also joined the department as Assistant Professor, July 1, 2007. Shedd received her doctorate from Northwestern University in June 2006. Her research and teaching interests focus on: crime and criminal justice; race and ethnicity; law and society; social inequality; and urban sociology. Shedd anxiously awaits the opportunity to use New York City as her urban laboratory, but is now focused on expanding her dissertation research into a larger multi-method project that places the micro-level interactions of youth with police, teachers, and their parents within the overarching structural context of racial, class, and gender dynamics in Chicago neighborhoods and schools.
Yinon Cohen came to Columbia from Tel Aviv University, Israel on July 1, 2007. He has conducted research on the schooling of immigrants and assimilation of second generation immigrants in Israel. He is teaching Israeli Society this fall and will be stepping into the role of Director of Graduate Studies.
Saskia Sassen comes to Columbia with a joint appointment with the Committee on Global Thought. Sassen was most recently at the University of Chicago where she was the Ralph Lewis Professor Sociology. She is also Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.
Peter Bearman’s Doormen was placed on the list of “20 of the fall 2005 season’s best, most important (though not necessarily most popular) works of fiction and nonfiction you should read” by the Philadelphia Inquirer (9/11/05). Peter's article, "Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks," won the 2005 Roger Gould Prize given by the American Journal of Sociology. Peter received the prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a $2.5 million award that will support his study of the social determinants of autism.
Jonathan Cole has been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest honorific society in the United States (started by Benjamin Franklin). Jonathan was also recently elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Gil Eyal's book - The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford University Press) - argues that before the formation of Israel, Jewish experts participated in constructing the Orient as both a metaphor for the rejuvenation of the Jewish nation, and an enchanted space populated by hybrid figures that mixed Jewish and Arab elements. But following the creation of the state, these experts took up a new role: creating boundaries (both external and internal) between Jews and Arabs, purifying the hybrids that inevitably exist on the margins of boundaries. The enchanted space of the Orient was destroyed, and its place was taken by expert discourses that reinforce the cultural separation between Jews and Arabs.
Thomas DiPrete was awarded the 2005 SOEP Prize for the best published scientific paper during 2003 and 2004 in any academic discipline that analyzes data from the German Socioeconomic Panel for his paper “Estimating Causal Effects with Matching Methods in the Presence and Absence of Bias Cancellation” (coauthored with Henriette Engelhardt and published in Sociological Methods and Research). Tom's advisee, Amelie Quesnel-Vallée, was co-winner of the 2005 American Sociological Association Dissertation Award. The ASA Dissertation Award honors the best Ph.D. dissertation from among those submitted by advisors and mentors in the discipline. Tom has been elected chair of the ASA Section on Methodology for 2006-2007. Tom (with his collaborator Claudia Buchmann) has recently published two articles (in Demography and in the American Sociological Review) on the emerging gender gap in college completion favoring women. This research was reported in the New York Times and was featured on the NPR news program "On Point" in July. A segment of the NPR program "The Best of Our Knowledge" is being devoted to this research in October. The September issue of the "ASA Member News and Notes" highlighted his August ASR article and distributed it as a full-text PDF to all members of the American Sociological Association, and the ASR web site is currently featuring it as a "selected article" for 2006.
Dana Fisher's book Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America has been published by Stanford University Press. Fisher examines the history and rationale behind political outsourcing on the Left, weaving together frank interviews with canvassers, high-ranking political officials across the political spectrum, and People's Project management. She compares all of this to the grassroots efforts on the Right, which remain firmly grounded in communities and local politics.
Herbert Gans announces the new Italian edition of Democracy and the News to be published by Rubbettino Editore in 2008, for which Herb has written a new foreword. Herb's essay, entitled "Wishes for the Discipline's Future," was published in the special section of the Chronicle of Higher Education that celebrated the 100th year of ASA. Herb also authored the lead article, "Race as Class," for the November 2005 issue of Contexts. Herb was honored with the 2006 Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award at the ASA Annual Meeting in Montreal.
Nicole Marwell won the Robert Park Best Article Award from the Community and Urban Section for her 2004 ASR paper, “Privatizing the Welfare State: Nonprofit Community-Based Organizations as Political Actors.” American Sociological Review 69: 265-291.
Debra Minkoff (Barnard) is the recipient of the 2005 Best Published Article Award from the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements for "Conceptualizing Political Opportunity." (Social Forces, June 2004, vol. 82, no. 4: 1457-1492 with David S. Meyer).
Allan Silver has been awarded a Guggenheim grant in the amount of $30,000 to study the political sociology of war in America after World War II.
David Stark's paper with Daniel Beunza, "Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room," Industrial and Corporate Change 2004, 13(2), won the Outstanding Publication Award from the ASA section on Communication and Information Technologies. David has received a major grant from the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation for a project "Politicized Business Ties: Network Dynamics of a Democratizing Polity and a Globalizing Economy.” Balazs Vedres (Columbia Ph.D. 2004) is project Co-PI.
Charles Tilly was honored with the 2005 Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award at the ASA Awards Ceremony and Presidential Address session of the ASA meeting in Philadelphia. In 2005, Chuck published Trust and Rule (Cambridge University Press), Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (Paradigm Publishers), a revised paperback edition of Popular Contention in Great Britain (Paradigm Publishers), and co-edited with Maria Kousis Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective (Paradigm Publishers), and is the 2006 triennium recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Society Sidney Hook Memorial Award. In 2006, Charles Tilly received the Karl Deutsch Award for Comparative Politics from the International Political Science Association and the Sidney Hook Memorial Award from Phi Beta Kappa. During the same year, he published Why? (Princeton University Press), the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Analysis (Oxford University Press, co-edited with Robert Goodin), Contentious Politics (Paradigm Publishers, co-authored with Sidney Tarrow), and Regimes and Repertoires (University of Chicago Press). His Democracy (Cambridge University Press) appeared in 2007.
Diane Vaughan was honored with the 2006 Award for Public Understanding of Sociology the ASA Annual Meeting in Montreal.
Sudhir Venkatesh won the C. Wright Mills Award for his book, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard University Press, 2006). Each year, this honor is awarded to a book that critically addresses an issue of contemporary public importance, advances social scientific understanding of the topic, adds a fresh perspective, and contains implications for courses of action.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor looks at a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. Sudhir also published in 2006, with Ronald Kassimir, Youth, Globalization, and the Law (Stanford University Press) addressing the impact of globalization on the lives of youth, focusing on the role of legal institutions and discourses.
Harrison White’s book, Markets from Networks, was co-winner of the Zelizer Award for best book from the Economic Sociology Section of the ASA in 2004. Harrison has been Luhmann Visiting Professor at Bielefeld, Pierre Fermat Prize Chair at Toulouse, and he offered a a one-week markets modeling course at AILUN, Italy. He is immersed in a rewrite of Identity and Control, from 1992, that is also being translated into French.
Josh Whitford was named a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow; a program "modeled after the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, which were created by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., in 1955 to provide crucial and flexible funds to outstanding researchers early in their academic careers." Josh was selected among a pool of "highly qualified scholars in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise to contribute to the field of industry studies, to the advancement of knowledge, and to U.S. industrial development and economic competitiveness."
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Student News
Shannon Arvizu was published in the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian. Her article, about permaculture and its impact on sustainable development, is here.
Amanda Czerniawski's article, "From Average to Ideal: The Evolution of the Height and Weight Table in the United States, 1836-1943," was published in Social Science History.
Jennifer Booher-Jennings won the 2006 ASA Sociology of Education section's graduate student paper award for her qualitative paper on school choice in NYC. Jennifer was the 2006 recipient of the Alex Inkeles Prize, awarded to her at the Annual Fall Reception. Her op-ed piece regarding No Child Left Behind legislation, published on October 5, 2006 in the Washington Post, is here. Jennifer has also received a 2007-2008 AERA/IES Dissertation Grant from The American Educational Research Association (AERA).
Danielle Lindemann was published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law: "Pathology Full Circle: A History of Anti-Vibrator Legislation in the United States," Volume 15, No. 1. 2006: 326-346.
David Madden has been awarded a doctoral dissertation grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. David is one of twelve winners in this competition. For more details, see: http://www.oup.org/grantee/fy07ddrg.asp
Randa Serhan is editing a volume titled Democracy, Inequality, and Political Participation in American Life. to be published by Paradigm Publishers, 2007. The book is in honor of Herbert Gans.
Dani Vos is the winner of the 2007 Collective Behavior and Social Movements Outstanding Student Paper Award for his paper, "Social Movements and Citizenship: Conscientious Objection in France, the United States, and Israel." His work will be recognized at the 2007 CBSM section business meeting at the American Sociological Association meetings in New York.
Anna Zamora coauthored with Michael Leach "Ilegals/ Ilegales: Comparing Anti-immigrant/Anti-refugee Discourses in Australia and Spain" in JILAS, the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol 12, no 1, July, 2006, pp. 51-64.
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