Department of Sociology News and Events

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2025 News and Events

• The Difference You Make Podcast | Episode 06: Dr. Jennifer Heerwig, Associate Professor & Interim Chair 
  Heerwig talks about her mentors, how she became hooked on political sociology as an undergrad at the Gallatin School, NYU, and how she invites her own students to engage with her ideas – and the rewarding experience her students provide as she brings them
  into her world of research. Listen to The Difference You Make Podcast, Episode 6 on YouTube.
• Congratulations to PhD Candidate Hannah Judson on the publication of their Sage Perspectives blog post, “ChatGPTeaching: Conscious course design in the age of AI.” The piece highlights Hannah’s Teaching Sociology article on the thoughtful integration of
  generative large language models in the classroom, offering timely insights into intentional course design amid rapidly evolving AI technologies.
• Congratulations to Dr. Cristine Khan on her new article, “Unpacking ‘Indo-Caribbean’ Through Intersectional Feminism in New York City,” recently published in the edited volume The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora (Bloomsbury Press). 
• Professor Nicholas Hoover Wilson and his work on corruption were featured in the most recent issue of CS Monitor Weekly. Nick’s research is highlighted prominently as an intellectual frame for the article, and also includes a substantial quote from him on the changing nature of corruption in the United States.
• Dr. Yongjun Zhang & PhD Student Hao Lin, just published a paper in Social Science Computer Review on navigating the risks of using large language models (LLMs) for text annotation in social science research.  Read it here.
• Congratulations to Danial Vahabli's "Mentioning the unmentionable: Perception of opportunities, agency, emotions, and identity in Iranian resistance rap prior and during the women, life, freedom uprisings" was just published in Poetics.
• Congratulations to Marion Harper, who is lead author on "Cash for Conservation?  The Environmental State, Public Payment for Ecosystem Services Programs, and Forest Loss in Low- and Middle-Income Nations," which was just published in Socius.  
• Congratulations to Shin Gyuho, who has published his sole-authored manuscript, "No Time to Fight, People Are Dying Out There: The Impact of Elite Polarization on Developmental Assistance for Health”, in Sociology of Development!
  
  
• Congratulations to Marion Harper on another first-authored publication.  It is entitled "Environmental Spending and Forest Loss: An Examination of the Environmental State in Low- and Middle-Income Nations" and will be published in the upcoming issue of Sociology of Development.
• Congratulating Aarushi Bhandari ,Ph.D. (SBU 2020) for not only her forthcoming book publication, Attention and Alienation, published by Columbia University Press, but also for receiving the very prestigious NSF Career Award for her project: Mindfulness in the Attention Economy: Individualized and Organizational Solutions to the Globalized Risk of Mental Illness.
• Congratulations to Gaelle Aminata Colon on the publication of her article, attached, :"Travels and troubles of intersectionality: understanding the reception of intersectionality in French through a citation analysis" It was published inFrench Politicsas part of a special issue on intersectionality in France.
• Congratulations to Rebekah Burroway, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies on her recent honor of being awarded the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Service by a Graduate Program Director. Also honored, Hannah Judson receiving the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student and Danielle Lucksted receiving the Stony Brook Foundation Board of Trustees Dissertation Completion Endowed Fellowship.
• Congratulations to Assistant Professor,  Wan-Zi Lu on being selected for the NHC Summer Residency Program. Lu will work on her first monograph, The Many Hands of the Healthcare State: The Politics of Valuing Taboo Exchange in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
• Danial Vahabli has won the Society for the Study of Social Problem ("Triple S P")'s Conflict Social Action and Change Division's Graduate Student Paper Award for his “Mentioning the Unmentionable: Perception of Opportunities, Agency, Emotions, and Identity in Iranian Resistance Rap prior and during the Women, Life, Freedom Uprisings.”
• Congratulations to Bulin Li on being accepted into one of the most prestigious SICSS programs this summer!
• Sociology's very own, Raff Thompson has been awarded a (prestigious, competitive, funded) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for his dissertation, "Regulating Political Speculation: Political Prediction Markets in the United States and United Kingdom, 1988 to 2024."
• Congratulating Charles Fung for his co-edited sourcebook on Hong Kong history.  (For non-historians/historical-sociologists, sourcebooks are the equivalent of publishing a dataset; they often collect and collate difficult-to-access sources on crucial topics.) Charles writes: "I have been working with historians in the previous years to edit a new sourcebook (i.e., a new documentary history of Hong Kong; link: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/N/bo247036324.html) on Hong Kong history based on years of retrieving archival materials and archival works. The book will be distributed by The University of Chicago Press in the States. The target audiences of this sourcebook would be historical social scientists and historians who are new to the field of Hong Kong history. I myself contributed also three chapters, the introduction, colonial governance and fiscal/budgetary policy."
• Congratulating Cristine Khan for an article published in a Guyanese newspaper about Indo-Caribbean identity and history in London. "From Windrush to Now: A Caribbean Cultural Awakening in London"
• Rebekah Burroway & Kristen Shorette  collaborated on a fun article that just came out in print in Sociology of Development. This is part of a dual-volume special issue of the journal devoted to feminist development
  
  

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2024 News and Events

• Daniel Levy has been elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association.
• Carrie Shandra has been selected to be a Visiting Professor at the AxPo Observatory of Marked Society Polarization at SciencesPo in Fall 2025.
• Cathy Marrone has been selected as a recipient of SBU's 2024 Excellence in Educational Effectiveness Award.  This award recognizes members of the campus community who demonstrate a commitment to best practices in academic assessment and use assessment results to drive programmatic excellence.
• Kelly Haller, Sociology Department Academic Programs Coordinator, has received the "Supervisor of the Year" award at the Student Employee, Intern, and Community Service Awards Ceremony at Stony Brook.  She was nominated by Higher Education Administration Intern Jennie Hauk.
• Christopher Browning (Ohio State University) Sociology Department Colloquium, April 24th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403 "Racial Segregation and Urban Youth Wellbeing:  The Case for a Mobility-Based Approach"

• Siwei Cheng, (New York University)  Sociology Department Colloquium, March 20th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403  "Beyond High-Paying Jobs: The Rise of Within-job Skill Diversity and Its Implications for Labor Market Inequality."
  
  

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  2023 News and Events

• Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman (University of South Florida) Sociology Departmental Colloquium, November 8th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Second-Class Daughters:  Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery"
• This video shows the queue of people lining up for our own Oyeronke Oyewumi to sign the Portuguese translation of her classic The Invention of Women
• Nicholas Wilson has been interviewed about his new book,"Modernity's Corruption"  in the ASA Theory Section's fall newsletter, Perspectives
• Menisha Desai has been elected Co-President of the International Sociological Association's RC32 Women, Gender, and Society
• Giselle Gerardi (Stony Brook University School of Nursing, Office of Nursing Research)  Sociology Department Colloquium, September 27th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403 "Achieving Health Equity in Perinatal Populations:  A Call for Collaboration."

• Aldon Morris is the first SBU Sociology PhD to be Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Morris is the Leon Forrest Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Black Studies, Northwestern University.
• Cathy Marrone's SOC 339, Sociology of Drugs and Alcoholism and Narcan Training Featured in Newsday on April 27th: "Narcan Training to Prevent OD Deaths"
• Xiaogang Wu, (New York University Center for Applied Social and Economic Research) Sociology Departmental Colloquium, April 7th, 12:00 - 1:30 PM, SBS N403: "Social and Political Consequences of the COVID-19 Crisis in the United States: Evidence from a Longitudinal Survey in 2020 and 2021."

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2022 News and Events

• Tim Liao has been elected as the next Chair of the Sequence Analysis Association
• Nicholas Wilson has been elected to the Executive Committee of the Social Science History Association
•  RebeccaJohnson, (Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy) Sociology Departmental Colloquium, November 4th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Using Text as Data to Understand Treatments: The Case of an RCT on College Navigators in Public Housing
• Jessica Halliday Hardie, (Hunter College) Sociology Departmental Colloquium , October 19th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age n Uncertain Times"
• PROFESSOR NORMAN GOODMAN The Sociology Department mourns the passing of Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor Norman Goodman.  Dr. Goodman, who passed away on June 26th, enjoyed a 56-year career at Stony Brook University.  He was a member of the university’s founding generation beginning his career at Stony Brook in 1964 as one of the earliest members of the Sociology Department.  Professor Goodman chaired the department for 20 years (from 1973 to 1989 and again from 2000 to 2004).  He also served as president of the Arts and Sciences Senate, twice president of the University Senate, served as vice president for the senate for three terms and edited the SUNY University Senate Bulletin for more than 20 years.  Goodman was the author/co-author/co-editor of 10 books, including four textbooks in Introductory Sociology and two textbooks in Marriage and the Family. Goodman also served on the SUNY Distinguished Academy Board from its conception until his retirement last year.  Read more information on the career of Norman Goodman here. In dedication to Stony Brook University and the Department of Sociology, Dr. Goodman has generously bequeathed funds to create the “Norman ‘Norm’ Goodman Endowment Excellence Award in Sociology” which will provide annual $1,000 cash awards for one undergraduate and one graduate student in Sociology who “demonstrates high academic achievement as defined by Stony Brook policy…[and] who demonstrates achievement, experience or commitment to academic excellence, leadership or community service”
• Kristen Shorette is the 2022 winner of  the Environmental Sociology's Section of the American Sociological Association  Teaching and Mentorship Award.
• Nicholas H. Wilson has received a $20,000 Stony Brook Foundation Trustees Faculty Award to pursue research, scholarship and creative art.  Recipients are chosen with an emphasis on the quality of research and publications and scholarship, the institutional impact of achievements and potential for continued professional growth, and the clarity, quality and significance of long-term future research, scholarship and creative activity and their probably impact upon SBU and the scholarly community within the discipline.
• Allison Pugh (University of Virginia), April 4th, 2:30 - 4:00 PM, SBS N403:  "The Stratification of Human Contact:  The Presentand Future of Connective Labor"
• Tim Liao (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), April 6th, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Life Course Trajectory Class Crystallization."
• Prema Kurien (Syracuse University), April 11th, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "The Racial Paradigm and Anti-Caste Activism in the U.S.."
• Biray Kolluoğlu (Boğaziçi University), April 13th, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Social Assemblages in Flux: Global Health and Education"
• Dana Weinberg (CUNY Queens College and The Graduate Center), April 20th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, N403: "From Anti -Vaxxer Moms to Miltia Men: Social Media Influence Operations and Narrative Weaponization."

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2021 News and Events

• Oyeronke Oyewumi has received the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association of the United States.  Established in the 1980s, the award recognizes and honors "scholars who have contributed a lifetime record of outstanding scholarship in their respective field of African Studies and service to thr Africanist community."
• In the recent American Sociological Association election, Crystal Fleming was elected to a three year term as an at-large member of Council, which is the governing body of the association. 

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2020 News and Events

• Jennifer Heerwig, has received a Piper Foundation Research Grant for her work on democracy vouchers, "Comparing Small Donor Public Financing Systems: The Effects of Matching Funds and Democracy Vouchers on Donor Diversity.
• Yongjun Zhang, with his co-author Jeremy E. Fiel, is the co-winner of the 2020 James Coleman Best Article Award in the ASA Sociology of Education Section for his article, "With All Deliberate Speed:  The Reversal of Court-Ordered School Desegregation, 1970-2013." AJS 124(6): 1685-1719.
  
  
• Crystal Fleming, has received a Stony Brook Mid-Career Diversity Award, recognizing a faculty member at the mid-career stage who has a strong record of research and service while also advancing Stony Brook's goals of a diverse and inclusive campus.
• Sarah Bush, (Yale University) Sociology Departmental Colloquium Speaker, March 4th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Gender Quotas and International Reputation"
• Michael Schwartz, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, has received the American Sociological Association's 2020 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching.