Current and Future News & Events
Fall 2022 Newsletter
Spring 2022 Newsletter
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.
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.
December 2022
- Tim Liao has been elected as the next Chair of the Sequence Analysis Association
November 2022
- 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
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"
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. Further information on the career of Norman Goodman can be found 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”
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 probably impact upon SBU and the scholarly community within the discipline.
April 2022
- 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."
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.