Research Interest/
Contact Information
Graduate Student News
Awards/Honors | News, Pubs, Presentations
ASM Conference | Congrats
Awards and Honors
The recipient of the Rose Laub Coser Award for 2009 was Simone Ispa-Landa for her dissertation proposal "Social and Academic Effects of Participation in an Urban to Suburban Racial Desegregation Program."
Matthew Baggetta (Ph.D., June 2009) was selected by the University as one of the first Harvard College Fellows.
Congratulations to Sarah Halpern-Meeken and Laura Tach, who won this year's Best Student Paper Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association for "Heterogeneity in Two-Parent Families and Adolescent Well-Being." Journal of Marriage and Family (2008) 70: 435-451.
Christopher Bail has been awarded the following grants: the Dissertation Grant from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy; the Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Center for American Political Studies; the Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship from the Harvard GSAS; and the Mid-Dissertation Fellowship from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Simone Ispa-Landa has received an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and will be a dissertation fellow at the Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics at the Weatherhead Center next year. Simone's dissertation is on the social effects of participating in an urban-to-suburban desegregation program.
Matthew Baggetta has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Center for American Political Studies.
Oana Dan has received a graduate summer travel grant from the Center for European Studies. Oana plans to visit Paris and Bucharest conducting research work for her qualifying paper.
Charles Loeffler, Simone Ispa-Landa, and Matt Kaliner received a grant from the Harvard Real Estate Initiative for their pilot research on mapping urban migration in Boston
Tamara Pavasovic is one of five Harvard graduate students who has received the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates. "Pavasovic’s innovative approach to section for Sociology 128: “Models of Social Science Research” left her students impressed. In addition to creating opportunities for group projects and teamwork, she offered extensive office hours, worked tirelessly with students to revise their papers, and created a supportive community environment." Read the entire article in the May 1, 2008 edition of the Harvard Gazette. This is the first time a Sociology Ph.D. student has been selected to receive this special recongition.
Sociology is very fortunate to have many excellent teaching fellows. The following students have received Certificates of Distinction in Teaching from the Bok Center for their teaching during the past calendar year: Matthew Kaliner (Soc 179), Ann Owens (Soc 128), Tamara Pavasovic (Soc 128), Dan Schrage (Soc 203a), Chana Teeger (Soc 179), Crystal Fleming (Sco 97), Catherine Turco (Soc 67), and Shawna Bowden Vican (Soc 109).
Lauren A. Rivera received the Rose Laub Coser Dissertation Award from the Eastern Sociological Society. The prize is given to the most outstanding dissertation proposal relevant to issues of gender and society. Her dissertation ("Hiring and Inequality in Elite Professions") explores the role of gender, race, and class on hiring decisions in investment banks, consulting firms and law firms. Rivera was also recently awarded a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant for this research.
We are pleased to announce that this year's winner of the Sorensen Prize for the best Qualifying Paper is Chris Bail, for his paper: "Diverse Diversities: The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries Towards Immigrants in Twenty-One European Countries". The faculty members of the CHD, which choose the Sorensen Prize winner, this year were Chris Winship and Neil Gross. The decision this year was quite a difficult one as a number of first rate papers were nominated.
News, Publications and Presentations
The 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association will be held August 1-4 in Boston. Matthew Baggetta will be presenting a paper at a roundtable session entitled "Explaining Volunteer Leader Time Commitment: Civic Resources, Personal Motivations, and Organizational Characteristics." His co-authors are Kenneth Andrews (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Hahrie Han (Wellesley College). Matthew will also be the Presider at the ASA Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtable entitled "Mobilizing Resources". Oana Dan will be presenting her paper, "United in Diversity: The Determinants of European Union Citizenship", in a Regular Session on Transnational Communities. Matthew Kaliner will be presenting his paper, "Does Neighborhood Reputation Matter? Estimating the Cost of a 'Bad' Reputation on Housing Prices," which was accepted into a panel titled "Urban Imagery and the Future of Cities," organized by the Community and Urban Sociology section. Alison Denton Jones will be presenting her paper in the Voluntary and Non-Profit Organizations 2 regular session. The paper, "Studying the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector from the Bottom Up," is co-authored with Christopher Winship. Laura Tach and Sarah Halpern-Meekin will be presenting a co-authored paper at ASA called "How Does Premarital Cohabitation Affect Trajectories of Marital Quality?" at a regular session on the family: Marriage, Civil Unions, and Cohabitation. Sara Sternberg Greene will present her paper, " Keeping it Out of the Courtroom: Differences in Trust and Utilization of Courts between Poor Whites and African Americans," at a regular session on Sociology of the Law: Law, Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality.
Alison Denton Jones will also be presenting at the Association for the Sociology of Religion Annual Meeting to be held in Boston on August 1st, 2008, entitled, "This is Not Your Grandmother's Buddhism: Chinese Buddhists Rejecting Religion."
Lauren Rivera's Qualifying Paper, "Managing 'Spoiled' National Identity: War, Tourism, and Memory in Croatia," will be published in the American Sociological Review, 73: 613-634.
Several graduate students presented their recent work at the 5th annual Inter-Ivy Sociology Symposium (IISS) at Princeton University in March 2008. These students included Weihua An, Matthew Baggetta, Jeff Denis, Katherine Drake, Maocan Guo, Dong-Kyun Im, and Lauren Rivera.
Crystal Fleming was recently interviewed by France 24 about the US race for president. Crystal is based in Paris this semester conducting fieldwork for her dissertation.
Laura Tach's research on mixed-income housing policy was a feature article titled "Challenging Assumptions" in the fall/winter 2007 issue of The Yard.
Christopher A Bail's article, "The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries toward Immigrants in Europe." has been published in the American Sociological Review, 2008, 73:1. 37-59.
Stacey J. Bosick's paper Operationalizing 'Crime' over the Life Course has been accepted for publication in Crime and Delinquency. She also presented "Crime and the Transition to Adulthood in London" at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society.
Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference
In April 2008 our graduate students hosted the twelfth annual Aage B. Sorensen Memorial Conference (in collaboration with Stockholm University and University of Oxford-Nuffield) which focused on "New Frontiers of Research on Inequality and Social Exclusion". Begun as a collaboration amongst the world's leading social stratification theorists Aage Sorensen at Harvard, John Goldthorpe at Nuffield, and Robert Erikson, the conference has matured into a valuable event for the exchange of cross-national ideas on a variet of sociological topics. See conference website http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~hos/ for more information on this year's participants and presentations.
Updated: June 9, 2008
Matthew Baggetta
Oana Dann
Christopher Bail
Tamara Pavasovic
Lauren A. Rivera
Crystal Fleming