Associate Professor
he/him – (Mijs is pronounced “Mice”)
Dr Mijs (Ph.D. Harvard University) is a scholar of social inequality. His work centers on how people form their beliefs about inequality and what leads them to change their views. It builds on a broad methodological repertoire, ranging from qualitative field work to longitudinal data analysis, computational sociology, original surveys, and experiments.
He has published 35 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals such as Social Forces, Social Problems, Socio-Economic Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.
Dr Mijs’s scholarship is supported by over $2M in external funding from national and international organizations such as the Volkswagen Foundation, European Commission, and the Dutch Research Council.
He is the recipient of the International Society for Justice Research Morton Deutsch Award, International Sociological Association Alan C. Kerckhoff Award, and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Early Career Award.
His work has been featured in media outlets in half a dozen countries, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, El País, Valor and De Volkskrant.
Dr Mijs served as a subject matter expert for Amnesty International, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Governments of Canada and The Netherlands, and he was a technical consultant on the Hulu series Paradise.
At BU, Dr Mijs teaches SO 391 Social Inequality in America, SO 497 / SO 897 Understanding Meritocracy, SO 201 Sociological Methods and SO 702 Proseminar in Sociological Methods.
He is available to supervise dissertations and student research projects. Please reach out by email or schedule an in-person or office hour visit using the Calendly link provided below.
Recent publications include:
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B. and Adaner Usmani. 2024. “How Segregation Ruins Inference: A Sociological Simulation of the Inequality Equilibrium”. Social Forces 103(1): 45-65
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B. 2023. “Learning About Inequality in Unequal America: How Heterogeneity in College Shapes Students’ Beliefs About Meritocracy and Racial Discrimination”. Research in Stratification and Social Mobility 85: 1-13
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Anna Dominique Herrera Huang and William Regan. 2023. “Confronting racism of omission: Experimental evidence of the impact of information addressing misperceptions about ethnic and racial inequality in the United States and the Netherlands”. Du Bois Review: 1-23
– Carbone, Luca and Jonathan J.B. Mijs. 2022. “Sounds like meritocracy to my ears: exploring the link between inequality in popular music and personal culture”. Information, Communication and Society 25(5): 707-25
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B. and Elizabeth Roe. 2021. “Is America Coming Apart? Socioeconomic Segregation in Neighborhoods, Schools, Workplaces, and Social Networks, 1970 – 2020”. Sociology Compass 15(6): 1-16
Please visit Dr Mijs’s Professional Website for more information and PDFs of his published research.