Alumni Connections
Stay in touch – send your news about new positions, honors, and other items of interest to stown@bu.edu
Honors and Awards
Wornie Reed (PhD, 1976) was appointed Director of the Center for Race and Social Policy at Virginia Tech University, where he is also a full professor in the Department of Sociology. Earlier in his career he chaired the Department of Black Studies and developed and directed the William Monroe Trotter Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The full story on his new appointment can be found at http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2009&itemno=185.
Philip Kasinitz (B.A., 1979) received the 2010 ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (written with Mary Waters, John Mollenkopf, and Jennifer Holdaway; Harvard University Press, 2008). Kasinitz is a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College of the CUNY and a former President of the Eastern Sociological Society. His previous work has won numerous other awards, as well.
Keith A. Roberts (Ph.D., 1976) has been awarded the 2010 ASA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching. A professor of sociology at Hanover College, in Indiana, Roberts is only the third teaching honoree who has made a career in a small liberal arts college. He has published textbooks in the sociology of religion and introductory sociology. His book, Religion in Sociological Perspective, is the best selling textbook in that field in the U.S. and is used extensively beyond the U.S., as well.
Kiri Gurd (PhD candidate) won a Pardee 2010 Summer Fellowship for intensive interdisciplinary research and writing at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at BU. Returning to Boston from her year of work with the International Center for Transitional Justice, Kiri will be writing up portions of her dissertation, “Truth Commissions in Sociological Perspective.”
Silvia Dominguez (Sociology/SSW PhD ’05) received the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship for Achieving Excellence in College and University Teaching in 2009. Her book, Getting Ahead: Social Mobility, Public Housing and Immigrant Networks (2011 NYU press), is based on three years of ethnographic research in two public housing developments in Boston and describes the way in which Latin American immigrant women get ahead.
News from Recent PhD Graduates
Don Gillis (Current PhD Student) recent book review of Activists in City Hall: The Progressive Repsonse to the Reagan Era in Boston and Chicago, By Pierre Clavel (Cornell University Press) was published in the Winter 2011 issue of Commonwealth Magazine, an independent political, idea and civic life magazine.
Frances Chaput Waksler (PhD, 1973) announces her forthcoming book, The New Orleans Sniper: A Phenomenological Case Study of Constituting the Other (University Press of America, 2010). Frances is phenomenological sociologist and Professor Emerita from Wheelock College. She dedicates the book to Sociology Department Professors Emeriti George Psathas, Julius Roth, and John Mogey, as well as Erazim Kohak of the philosophy department.
Roman R. Williams (PhD 2010) is an Assistant Professor of sociology in the Institute for International and Intercultural Studies at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.
Sonali Jain (PhD 2010) is a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University’s Social Sciences Research Institute.
Thanh-Nghi Nguyen (PhD 2009) is living in Hawaii with her husband. Tani co-authored with Prof. Eckstein on a paper, “The Making and Transnationalization of an Ethnic Niche: Vietnamese Manicurists,” presented at Harvard Migration and Immigration Workshop, February 2010.
Xiaoshuo Hou (PhD 2008) accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in St. Lawrence’s Sociology department in Fall 2009.
Colleen Butler (PhD 2008) is an Assistant Professor in-residence at University of Connecticut.
Masayo Nishida (PhD 2008) continued her research on integration of highly skilled migrants as a post-doc fellow at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy.
Polly Rizova (PhD 2003) is an Associate Professor of Management and Sociology at the Atkinson Graduate School of Management,
Willamette University, Portland, Oregon. Her book, The Secret of Success: The Double Helix of Formal and Informal Structures in an R & D
Laboratory was published by Stanford University Press in October 2007.
Timothy J. Berard (PhD 2002) is an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Kent State University, Ohio.
Susan Lee (PhD 2002) is teaching at the College of General Studies, Boston University. She has studied the economic practices of Cambodian rural widows in her book “Rice Plus:” Widows and Economic Survival in Rural Cambodia (2006). Currently, she is looking at religious influences on women’s value in Cambodia.
News From Sociology Majors
Sarah Tosh (BA, 09) will begin her doctoral studies in sociology this fall (2011) at the CUNY Graduate Center, which has awarded her a fellowship to support her studies
David McElhattan (BA, 2010) has accepted a fully-funded offer to pursue his doctoral studies in sociology at Northwestern University. David, who graduated with distinction in sociology and a double major with philosophy, will continue his work in the area of the sociology of law, a field of particular strength at Northwestern
Matt Grace (BA, 2009) was offered five years of funding in a Sociology Graduate Program at Indiana University.
Emily Vogel (BA, 2003) student speaker at her Sociology graduation, Dr. Emily Vogel earned her medical degree in 2007 at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine, where she was a member of the AOA Honor Society and president of her medical school class.
Alumni News
Michael Borer (PhD, 2006) Has gone on to make a name for himself in cultural sociology. His book,”Faithful to Fenway”, was published by NYU Press in 2008 and he is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
Steve Offutt (PhD 2008) is currently working with the Human Needs and Global Resources program at Wheaton College (in Illinois) and in January will begin a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Development Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary.
Anthony T.Woart (PhD 1997) is Professor of Sociology at Bluefield State College, in West Virginia, and Director of the College’s Minority Health Institute, which has been the recipient of multiple NIH grants for programs that seek to reduce the burdens of health disparities among the minority populations of the Appalachian region.
Doris Hamner (PhD 1997), published Building Bridges: A Student Guide to Service-Learning, with Allyn and Bacon in 2002.
Jennifer Drew (PhD 1988), teaches Sociology at Lasell College in Newton.
Ewa Morawska (PhD 1976) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK. Her scholarly research focuses on comparative-historical sociology of international migration, ethnicity, and citizenship (past and present, North America and Europe). Select books include A Sociology of Immigration. (Re)Making Multifaceted America, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; and International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity co-editor (with Michael Bommes) of the volume, Ashgate Press 2005.
Supporting the Department
In 2008, the department received a generous bequest from an anonymous alumnus, named in honor of the department’s first Chair, Albert Morris. The Morris Fund now provides valuable research and travel assistance to faculty and graduate students and supports an exciting annual lecture series. If you’d like to contribute your own bequest or add to the Morris Fund, you can contact Karen Weiss Jones, CAS Chief Advancement Officer.
Phone: 617-358-1214
E-mail: karenwj@bu.edu