Department News

In Memoriam: Arlene Kaplan Daniels
December 10, 1930 – Janauary 29, 2012

In 1975 Northwestern University invited Daniels to become the head of its new Program on Women and a professor in the Department of Sociology. She accepted Northwestern’s offer but chose to maintain her permanent home in California. In 1979 Daniels stepped down as the head of the Program on Women but retained her position in the Department of Sociology. She retired in 1995 as a Northwestern University professor emeritus. (Provided by Northwestern University Library Archives.)

On December 6, 2011, a ceremony was held by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences to celebrate the investiture of an endowed chair for Bruce Carruthers.

2011 Newsletter

Jess Koski was awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, from the NSF Science, Technology, and Society Program (2012).  Jess's dissertation project is titled “Human Rights and the Warming World: Investigating the Use and Impact of Social Knowledge Claims in the Climate Debate”.

Alok Nadig has won a Fall 2011 Northwestern Undergraduate Research Grant for his project Legal Implications of Gendered Conceptions of Homosexuality in India in the Past Ten Years.

Bruce Carruthers has been named to a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair (2011).

Georgi Derluguian has been awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa, an honorary doctorate, from the University of Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, 2011. The university is located in one of Georgi's field sites: the man who was central to his book Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus, for instance, was a native of Kabardino-Balkaria.

James Mahoney, Professor of Sociology and Political Science, has won four major awards from the American Sociological Association and American Political Science Association for his book Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective.

Steven Epstein has been elected Chair of the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, for a two-year term to commence in 2013.

Nicola Beisel, Georgi Derluguian, Steven Epstein, and Karrie Snyder have been selected by students for this year's Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll.

Erin McDonnell has won the Art Stinchcombe Dissertation Prize in Organization Studies from the Social Interaction and Organizing at Northwestern group.

About the Department

About the Department

Sociologists study systems made up of relations among people, such as families, formal organizations, ethnic groups, or countries and their politics. The Northwestern Sociology Department concentrates especially on those relations that create and maintain inequalities, looking at the social movements, legal and economic systems, institutions, organizations, and cultural forms that shape, redress, or defend these systems of inequality. Read more