Global Dimensions
and Social Inequalities

Welcome to the Department of Sociology at Stony Brook University!

Our department focuses on global phenomena, as well as their connection to national dynamics.  We thus hold a leading position in the discipline of sociology and, as such, are integral to the university's global focus. Our faculty expertise is concentrated in Computational Social Science, Environment, Health, International Development, Inequality, and Politics and Culture.  We are a methodologically diverse department that spans both quantitative and qualitative methods. We aim to teach students how to use the best methods available to inform the most pressing policy and social issues of our time.

The Sociology Department at Stony Brook University is committed to advancing equity and justice.  We acknowledge that social justice oriented scholarship has a long tradition in sociology, including contributions from members of historically marginalized groups, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Jane Addams.  We thus affirm the value of a wide variety of approaches to sociological research, including scholarship that is explicitly oriented toward addressing and dismantling injustice alongside inequalities. We are committed to rigorous research and teaching that seeks to improve both global and local conditions for everyone.

 

Leadership

Address

Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, New York 11794-4356
Telephone: (631) 632-7700
Fax: (631) 632-8203

Fall 2022 Newsletter
Spring 2022 Newsletter

January 2022

• The Stony Brook Sociology Graduate Student Forum would like to invite proposal submissions for our Spring graduate student colloquia, surrounding the theme: “Turbulent times: living through pandemics, conflicts, and climate crises."   The conference will be on March 24th, 2023.  Learn More.

December 2022 

• Tim Liao has been elected President of the Sequence Analysis Association

November 2022

• Nicholas Wilson has been elected to the Executive Committee of the Social Science History Association
• Rebecca Johnson, (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"

October 2022

• 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"

May 2022

• 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 probable impact upon SBU and the scholarly community within the discipline.

September 2021

• • 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."

June 2021

• • 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.

September 2020

• • 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.
    
    

June 2020

• • 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.

May 2020

• • 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.

 March 2020

• • Sarah Bush, (Yale University) Sociology Departmental Colloquium Speaker, March 4th, 1:00 - 2:30 PM, SBS N403: "Gender Quotas and International Reputation"

January 2020

• • Michael Schwartz, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, has received the American Sociological Association's 2020 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.

 Read More

Welcome to the Department
Our New Chair:  Tim Liao

This January we are welcoming our new Chair, Professor Tim Liao.  Tim has a wealth of administrative experience at the departmental level, having served two terms as department head at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also provided consistent service over the past three decades to disciplinary associations and journals, notably as a former editor of Sociological Methodology (2009–2015) and currently a deputy editor of Demography and an associate editor of Advances in Life Course Research, as well as an editorial board member of the American Sociological Review. He has also recently been elected President of the Sequence Analysis Association.

Tim’s research spans collective memory, inequality, life course, methodology and socialdemography. Of the many publications he is proud of, several research articles from the past 10 years are noted here. The first is Tim’s 2013 Time & Society paper, which he wrote with five undergraduate students, and defined and analyzed the meaning of social time on a university campus. It is one of two papers he has published with undergraduate students. The second is Tim’s 2021 piece in JAMA Network Open, coauthored with a former PhD student, which has broadened his research into health and the pandemic. Since that paper, Tim has published two more pandemic-related papers. The third is his 2021 Socius paper on income inequality and happiness, based on his research during a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship (2017–2018) and his methodological proposal for measuring inequality at the individual level. Finally, Tim is particularly proud of this long in-press overview/review paper on sequence analysis that celebrates the 50th anniversary of Social Science Research, for which he successfully coordinated a dream team of a dozen international scholars, all of whom contributed meaningfully to the paper!

Tim loves teaching, especially engaging students who love to learn. Three of his popular courses are advanced social statistics, which has attracted graduate students from multiple disciplines; social photography at both the undergraduate and graduate level, with one of these classes producing the first paper above; and a publication workshop which offers a boot camp for writing, revising and reviewing graduate student research papers with the sole purpose of getting them published.