The Harvard University Department of Sociology

Graduate Student News

Awards/Honors | News, Pubs, Presentations
ASM Conference | Congrats

Awards and Honors

Patrick Sharkey is the 2006 recipient of the Aage B. Sørensen Memorial Award for his paper "Navigating Dangerous Streets: The Sources and Consequences of Street Efficacy" which has also been accepted for publication in the American Sociological Review. Patrick received three grants/fellowships for his dissertation research: a dissertation completion fellowship from the Weatherhead Center's Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics; the Robert K. Merton Award for Social Theory and Public Policy from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy; and a research grant from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Zoua Vang received the award last year for her paper "The Immigration-Crime Nexus: Unraveling the Relationships Among Generation Status, Culture Conflict, and Crime". The yearly award recognizes the research (qualifying) paper judged to be the most outstanding of those submitted by graduate students in the Department of Sociology. Zoua was recently awarded the American Society of Criminology Graduate Minority Fellowship for 2006-07. She is currently in Ireland for the semester doing fieldwork for her dissertation.

Christopher Bail was recognized as a German Marshall Fund Fellow at the annual Council for European Studies Conference in Chicago in April. 

The paper Tamara Pavasovic presented at the ASN (Association for the Study of Nationalities) World Convention in NYC in March, won the best graduate student paper award. The title of the paper is "Reconstructing Ethnic Identity in Serbia: Ethno-Nationalist Socialization through Textbooks."

Stacey Bosick won first place in a Student Paper Competition sponsored by the Juvenile Justice Section at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Meeting in February.

Simone Ispa-Landa presented a paper titled "Suspended Causality: Cultures of Intimacy among Two Cohorts of Russian Families" at the Fifteenth International Conference of the Council for European Studies (CES), Chicago, IL, March 29 -April 2 2006. Simone also received a Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Summer Travel Grant and will return to Russia over the summer to continue her interview of Russian men.

Awards for Teaching: The Derek Bok Center announced recipients of its Awards for Excellence in Teaching (for teaching during the fall 2006 term) which were given to Sociology graduate students Christopher Bail (Foreign Cultures 46), Marco Gonzalez (Sociology 153), Stephanie Howling (Women and Gender Studies 1125), and Graziella Silva (Sociology 10) for the fall 2005 term. Lauren Rivera (Psychology 1501, received two years running); Paromita Sanyal and Peter DeWan (Sociology 97), Seth Hannah (Sociology 107), and Christopher Wimer (Sociology 166) also received teaching awards during 2004-05. The awards are given to outstanding teaching fellows at a special reception each semester. Award recipients have achieved 4.5 or above on the CUE evaluation's 5-point scale.

News, Publications and Presentations

Lydia Bean and her parents, Rev. Alan Bean and Rev. Nancy Bean, were instrumental in overhauling the way law and order operates in Texas. The full account was reported in an article, The Beans of Tulia, Texas, in the April 27th issue of the Harvard Gazette.

Jason Gabler: Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the Twentieth Century (Stanford University Press, 2006); "The Natural Sciences in the University: Change and Variation Over the Twentieth Century," Journal of Sociology of Education (with David John Frank), 2006; "Chess, Cheerleading, and Chopin: What Gets You Into College?" (with Jason Kaufman), in Contexts, spring 2006.

Christopher A. Bail: "Sur les frontières de la recconnaisance: Les catégories internes et externes de l'identité collective" ("On the Boundaries of Recognition: Internal and External Categories of Collective Identity") (with Michèle Lamont), Revue Européenne de Migrations Internationales, 21(2) 61-90, 2005.

Helen B. Marrow: "New Destinations and Immigrant Incorporation." Perspectives on Politics 3 (4): 781-99, 2005.

The March-April 2006 issue of Harvard Magazine featured graduate student Nathan Fosse's ongoing ethnographic study of sexual and romantic relationships of inner-city black men conducted with Michèle Lamont. (See Sex and the Inner City) in the "Right Now" section of the magazine's current issue.

The March 2 issue of the Harvard Gazette featured a longitudinal study of 410,272 elderly American couples conducted by Felix Elwert and Nicholas Christakis which found the health effects of a spouse's death to differ radically between blacks and whites. Read the full article: Whites more likely to die soon after spouse's death. Their findings have been published in an article in the February issue of the American Sociological Review. This research was also highlighted in the March 20, 2006 issue of the Boston Globe (Health and Science section).

Chris Bail will be presenting his qualifying paper "Three Worlds of Xenophobia: Towards a Typology of Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Europe" to the International Comparative Social Science Conference in Tokyo, Japan this summer.

At the 2006 ASA meeting, Helen Marrow will present her paper on "Not Just Conflict: Intergroup Relations in a Southern Poultry Processing Plant." "Change of Employment Patterns and Workplace Disputes in U.S. Organizations" is the title of Soohan Kim's paper that he will present at the regular session on Workplace Transformation. Alison Denton Jones will present her paper "Strictness, Subcultural Identity, and Skillful Means: Strategies of Boundary Work in Religious Organizations" at the Sociology of Religion Section Session. Simone Ispa-Landa will present her paper on "Rapport, Reciprocity, and Truth-Telling in Qualitative Data Exchanges." Sarah Halpern-Meekin and Laura Marie Tach will be presenting a coauthored paper "Heterogeneity in Two-Parent Families and Child Well-Being" at an ASA Regular Section on Kinship and Families. The 2006 American Sociological Association (ASA) Meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, August 11-14, 2006.

Zoua Vang will attend the SUNY Buffalo IGERT program in Geographic Information Science Vespucci Summer Institute, July 3-7, in Fiesole, Italy.

Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference

The 2006 Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference for Graduate Students in Sociology was held at the Department of Sociology, Stockholm University on April, 18-19. It is the tenth in the annual series of graduate student conferences organised between the Departments of Sociology at Harvard University, Nuffield College at Oxford, and Stockholm University. It originated from pre-existing cooperation among faculty at the three participating institutions and has intensified the exchange by also bringing together advanced graduate students to present ongoing research projects in a formal setting.

The conference presents new work from all areas of Sociology. It is organised by graduate students for graduate students and presents an opportunity for intellectual exchange among peers and a venue to foster transatlantic cooperation.

The six students who traveled to Stockholm to presenter papers (along with their paper titles were Chris Bail: "Three Worlds of Xenophobia: Towards a Typology of Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Europe;" Tamara Pavasovic: "The Political Dynamics of Ethnicity Change: A Case Studyof Serbian Texbooks, 1970-2002;" Crystal Fleming: "Black Cultural Capitalists: African Amerian Elites and the Organization of the Arts in Boston, 1918-1930;" Sabrina Pendergrass: "Negotiating Race and Nation: Black Barbers, Black Military, and the Embeddedness of Identity Categories and Discourses;" Therese Leung: "Motherhood Wage Penalty;" and Laura Marie Tach: "The Use of Propensity Score Matching in Education Research: Estimating the Impact of Ability Grouping on Achievement in Elementary School Classrooms."
For more information on the conference and a complete schedule, see: The Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference, Harvard-Oxford-Stockholm 2006.

Congratulations

To Alexandra (Ali) Marin who has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto beginning July 1; to Matissa Hollister who will be an assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College; to Patricia Banks who will be an assistant professor of sociology at Mt. Holyoke College; and to Wendy Roth who will be assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

More Milestones

Helen Marrow married Michael Jason Redd on May 13. Helen and Michael will be living in Philadelphia for 2006-07 while he finishes his MBA at Wharton and she finishes her dissertation. Jesse Bradford and his wife Monica welcomed son Dylan into the world; Patrick Sharkey and his wife Alyssa had a baby boy, Thomas William; and Kirsten Hoyte welcomed her daughter Ridley (Ivy) Eve. Kirsten also gave birth to a first novel which was published earlier this year - Black Marks (Akashic Books, 2006)

 

 

 

Patrick Sharkey

Zoua Vang

Felix Elwert

Alan, Lydia, and
Nancy Bean

(Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)