About the Department of Sociology
Sociology connects. Sociology clarifies. Sociology empowers students to engage effectively with the world around them. By linking ideas, people, disciplines and organizations, Sociology provides useful tools for making sense of a rapidly-changing global environment. The discipline was born over a century ago in an effort to understand the effects of modernity on family, work and urban life. Since then, it has continued to offer coherent analysis of the complex array of facts and perspectives we encounter in modern life.
Brown’s Sociology department has been particularly successful in this regard, bringing together a dynamic group of scholars whose courses are among the most popular in the University and whose expertise has made them sought-after advisors to government and business organizations worldwide. The faculty enjoy an international reputation for outstanding scholarly achievement in our three core research areas: social demography, the sociology of health, and macro-sociology. Social demography examines families and children, fertility, migration, urbanization and international population issues. The sociology of health examines processes that extend from the individual’s health experiences to the organizations that provide care and the structure and functioning of entire systems of care. And finally, macrosociology at Brown covers issues of economic development, states and social institutions, and comparative organizations.
The Sociology faculty are included among the highest caliber teachers and scholars to be found at Brown. In three of the past five years, one of Brown’s highest awards for excellence in teaching—the Wriston Fellowship—has been awarded to junior faculty members in Sociology. The faculty have also been recognized for their research contributions by numerous national awards and grants. With funding from leading grant-making organizations, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Sociology faculty not only produce world-class research, but contribute millions of dollars annually to the university. And although we are a moderate-sized department (15 fulltime faculty), our faculty hold endowed and university-named chairs.
A significant portion of faculty research contributes directly to the enhancement of the educational process at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Most of Brown’s Sociology faculty provide funding through their grants for student research assistants; this is an important component of the department’s rigorous training and mentoring program, and has frequently led to publications that are jointly authored by faculty and students. These publication experiences are crucially important in helping our doctoral students develop their expertise and their credentials for securing employment in the highly-competitive academic job market. In addition, Brown’s Sociology program is highly unusual for combining excellence in research with a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching. Our undergraduates enjoy close working relationships with faculty not only in the classroom, but through research collaborations that allow students to participate in creating professional-caliber work.
The intensive training provided by the department has led to an outstanding record of placing our students in the jobs and graduate programs of their choice. Our undergraduate concentrators leave the department with the analytical and critical thinking skills highly prized in all fields. Upon graduation, they regularly obtain the most coveted spots in business and government; in addition, a significant number of our students have been admitted to the most selective graduate programs in the nation, including the doctoral programs in Sociology at Stanford University, UCLA, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the MBA program at the Harvard Business School. With the introduction of a new degree program focused on quantitative analysis—the Bachelor of Science in Sociology—we expect to further extend our ability to prepare undergraduates for excellence in their careers beyond Brown.
We have had similar success in our doctoral program, placing recent graduates in tenure track positions at highly-ranked universities such as McGill, Tufts, Ohio State and Michigan State, as well as in postdoctoral training programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. These Brown graduates are now heads of research departments or centers such as the Carolina Population Center, the National Center for Education Statistics, or within organizations such as the World Bank. Our current doctoral students show promise of equally significant achievements; for example, one second-year student recently received a professional-level multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation. In addition, many of our international students have become leaders in their home countries, returning to take up posts in leading academic centers, including Peking University in China, Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and Euhwa Women’s University in South Korea.
Training a new generation of international scholars is just one way that Brown’s Sociology faculty contribute to international development. Several faculty members have established research and training centers in Africa and Asia, recruiting the most promising local students and giving them the tools they need to assume positions of leadership in their countries’ universities, governments and corporations. This enriches the local supplies of intellectual and social capital, and helps reverse the long-standing pattern of “brain drain” that has afflicted developing countries.
Other faculty members have been asked to contribute their expertise on matters of domestic policy and business development. This includes projects as diverse as consulting for some of the country’s most dynamic firms, including the Bank of America and amazon.com, as well as working with the United States Social Security Administration to evaluate privatization proposals for the federal government’s largest program. Our faculty’s engagement with the most timely issues in public policy and business has resulted in coverage of our research in media outlets such as the New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazines, as well as CNN and the BBC. This has brought increased visibility for the department worldwide.
Finally, the Sociology faculty contribute to the vibrant intellectual life of Brown University through joint appointments and projects that span departments, programs and research centers. All of our faculty members hold joint appointments in at least one other field, creating active scholarly connections between the Sociology department and the programs in Urban Studies, Development Studies, Latin American Studies, Community Health, and Environmental Studies. Furthermore, several of the Sociology faculty hold positions of leadership in the University’s most active and high-profile research centers, including the Population Studies and Training Center, the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research, and the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions.
Housed within the Sociology department itself are two new exciting programs: Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4), and the undergraduate program in Public and Private Sector Organizations. The latter has grown so rapidly in popularity since its inception in 1999 that now the Economics Department and the Division of Engineering are joining forces with Sociology to create a joint concentration in this area, to be called Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship. Through its leadership in COE, as well as in several of the major research centers across campus, the Sociology department is poised to contribute to the ongoing growth of the University’s reputation for innovation and excellence in scholarship.
Excellence within, and dynamic connections throughout: Sociology, both the discipline and the department at Brown, connects, clarifies, and makes sense of complex social structures in a rapidly-changing global environment.