SOCIOLOGY NEWS
Department of Sociology
University at Albany
State University of New York
Spring 2016 Volume 16
From the Chair
It amazes me that another year has
passed. I am just finishing my fourth
year as Department Chair and I am
happy to report I am still having fun with
the job. As you will remember from
your days here, the department has
always had an ability to laugh and to
tease, which helps greatly to relieve
tension. Of course, there are also
challenges of leading this great
department. Even after 20+ years on the
faculty, the University at Albany still has
procedures that I am learning and it still
surprises (or more often annoys) me with
some of its policies.
Nancy Denton
The department continues to change.
Trevor Hoppe, who joined us in
September after a post-doc at UC Irvine,
is settled now and putting us on the map
with his research on HIV and the
criminalization of disease and sex. As I
write this, our THREE new faculty
colleagues are in Albany looking for
housing in preparation to start
September 1, 2016. Stacy Torres, NYU,
is an ethnographer who studies aging,
families, and medical sociology. She
was hired last year but delayed to do one
year at UC Berkeley as a post-doc. Kate
Averett, UT Austin, was the successful
gender recruitment this past year. Kate’s
dissertation is on home schooling and
she has interests in gender, sexuality and
qualitative methods. The last new hire is
Brandon Gorman from UNC-Chapel
Hill. Brandon has done extensive field
work in Tunisia and is interested in
culture, politics, qualitative text analysis
and the Middle East. More information
about them can be found below. A
warm welcome to all of them!
We finally have a full office staff for the
first time in a couple of years. We hired
Ashley Turski in March 2016. Ashley is
quickly learning the job of
undergraduate secretary and is the first
person you see in the main office. Jaime
Galusha is enjoying being
Administrative Manager and helping us
get better organized, and Lisa Klein,
who is now the graduate secretary, is
doing very well and loving that job, even
though it is tough to fill Cathy Rose’s
shoes. And the most exciting news is
that we have received permission to hire
a full-time undergraduate advisor,
something we have been requesting for
many years. The search committee is
meeting and we hope to have someone
in the position starting August 2016.
Amid all the excitement of the arrival of
new people, we also have very sad news.
We lost two of our senior colleagues this
year: Dick Hall passed away on
September 23, 2015 and Al Higgins on
May 5, 2016. Both Dick and Al made
wonderful contributions to the
department and the university. We miss
them.
It is also Steve Seidman’s last year on
the faculty—it is hard to imagine the
place without him as his research on
sexualities attracted so many of our
graduate students to us. We still see
some of the earlier retirees quite
regularly, especially Glenna Spitze, Russ
Ward and Larry Raffalovich, so we
don’t have to miss them quite so much.
As usual we had our Annual Theodore
G. Standing Lecture—the 46th—on April
27, 2016. This is a wonderful event
where we honor our “founders” with
awards to our current students.
Professor Naomi Gerstel from the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
gave a wonderful talk about
“Unpredictable and Unequal Time.” Her
research studied four occupations in the
health field: professional doctors and
nurses and working class EMTs and
nursing assistants to reveal how gender
and class shape these workers abilities to
control their schedules while at the same
time reinforcing or challenging
conventional gender roles.
Along with publishing journal articles
and teaching, members of our
department received accolades and
honors during the year. The biggest
news was that Scott South was named a
Distinguished University Professor by
the Board of Trustees on May 12, 2016
based on his national and international
research reputation. This is the highest
level in the SUNY system and not only
represents a superb achievement for
Scott, but for the department as well.
Congratulations Scott!!!
Angie Chung was the Dr. Thomas Tam
Visiting Professor in Asian American
Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center
this spring. TC Yang won a best poster
award at the Population Association of
America meetings for the third time.
Two graduate students, Josh McCabe
and Qian (Jasmine) Song, won
university distinguished doctoral
dissertation awards. Apologies if I have
missed anyone.
Since I am a demographer, I must tell
you that along with everything else, we
are doing our part to keep the population
growing. Joanna Dreby gave birth to
Nikolai in October, Kate Strully to Elena
and Antoinetta in March, and Aaron
Major became the proud father of Emile
in April. Congratulations to all!
In closing, I want to thank Jim Zetka for
his three years of service as
Undergraduate Director. This job is a lot
of work and he not only did it well, but
also entertained us with his sense of
humor. Of particular note is that he
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re-established the undergraduate
international sociology honor society for
us – more about that below. Aaron
Major will be assuming this position in
the fall. He is currently shepherding our
first two concentrations through the
university bureaucracy and chairing the
search committee for a new advisor.
Let me also say to the alums that though
the department may have changed since
you were here, we still have wonderful
faculty, graduate students, staff, and
adjunct lecturers. We are eager to stay
in touch with our alums and learn what
you are doing. So let us hear from you!
And by all means, if you are in the area
come by to visit the department!
From the Graduate
Director
Rincon, Anibal Gauna Peralta, Jing Li,
Qian (Jasmine) Song and Dan Xu, and
also Nicole Daegele with her MA
degree, and head to a variety of
academic and other positions, including
program research specialist at the New
York State Division of Criminal Justice
Services, a postdoc in the Center for
Population Dynamics at Arizona State,
and tenure track positions at
Framingham State University and Fudan
University in China, among others.
Several others have or will join their
ranks shortly, including at the PhD level
Salvatore Labaro and Sylwia
Piatkowska, Sam Applin, Dan Farr,
Zhen Li, Jiejin Li and at the MA level,
Melissa Labossiere, Arianne Watson,
and Ertugrul (Arthur) Akyol. While we
will miss them all, we wish them well in
their future sociological endeavors and
hope they keep in touch.
Our students continue to achieve
recognition at the university level and
beyond. Two 2015 PhD’s, Qian
(Jasmine) Song and Joshua McCabe,
were recently awarded UAlbany’s
Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation
Award, bringing the department’s streak
to ten years that one (or more) of its’
graduates has won this prize. Emily Pain
and Gowoon Jung also received
competitive Benevolent Association
Research Grants.
Elizabeth Popp Berman
It has been another active and exciting
year for the graduate program. We began
it last August by welcoming a strong
cohort of 12 new students to the
program. Summer and Fall 2015 saw an
unusually large number of PhD students
graduate, including Rak-Koo Chung,
Colin Gruner, Andrew Horvitz, Lina
At the national level, Sylwia
Piatkowska, who will be starting a
tenure-track position at Old Dominion
University this fall, was awarded first
place in the American Society of
Criminology’s Division of International
Criminology Student Paper Competition.
And students have been published in
academic journals—among others—
ranging from Social Forces and
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Sociological Forum to Violence and
Victims, Demographic Research,
Biodemography and Social Biology, and
Food, Culture & Society.
At the departmental level, we continue
to recognize exceptional graduate
student work with the Paul Meadows
Paper Award, given this year to
Kiwoong Park for his paper (currently
R&R at the Journal of Health and Social
Behavior) “Does Higher Family Income
Assure Children’s Better Mental Health
in Adulthood? The Different Roles of
Family Support and Higher Education,”
and the Allen Liska Dissertation Award,
presented jointly this year to Kristen
Hourigan and Lei Lei. As is department
tradition, the awards were presented at
the annual Standing Lecture in April.
As Graduate Director, one of my goals
has been to strengthen students’
opportunities for professional
socialization, beginning in the first year
and continuing throughout the program.
While like most graduate departments
we have long had a proseminar to
introduce new students to the discipline,
we have increasingly been using this to
give students a taste of what the
professional pathway to becoming a
sociologist—either inside or outside of
academia—is like. This year, we have
held panels on how to get the most out
of your TA or RA experience, what to
do in the summers, time management for
graduate students, and how to build a
professional network, among other
topics. I think we all learned from
hearing faculty and students talk about
their strategies for combatting
procrastination.
We have also worked to collect data
about the program and graduates that
had not previously been pulled together
in one place. Graduate student Rachel
Sullivan helped track down the current
employment of our PhD alums from the
last ten years, an exercise that turned out
to be fairly gratifying given the ongoing
tightness of the academic job market.
The majority are in tenure-track
academic positions; there are also a fair
sprinkling of alums in government
offices (the Census Bureau, the
Government Accountability Office, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the
Department of Veterans Affairs), and a
surprising number in administrative
positions within higher education
(director of Institutional Research,
director of Office of Pluralism and
Leadership, director of Accreditation,
Assessment & Strategy, and so on). As
our graduate student body has become
more international in the last decade, we
are also starting to place more students
in academic jobs outside the U.S.,
including in China, Colombia, Germany,
Australia, and Korea. The number of
graduates more than a year out who are
in jobs not related to their PhD or in
temporary academic positions is fairly
small, about 10%.
Finally, another major project this year
has been managing the transition
associated with staff changes. Cathy
Rose retired at the end of the last
academic year, after years of dedicated
service to the department and to graduate
students. We were sad to see her go,
though happy she now has more time to
devote to her grandchildren. But we
were lucky enough to welcome Lisa
Klein into her position a few months
later. Lisa had been doing such an
excellent job managing the front desk
that the department was delighted to be
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able to promote her. She has spent the
year getting up to speed on the
seemingly endless array of rules and
regulations that govern the graduate
program as well as getting to know the
eighty or so students who make it up.
She is doing a great job, and we are very
lucky to have someone so dedicated and
enthusiastic in the position.
As usual, I have to thank everyone who
put in so much work to keep the
graduate program running smoothly this
year: in addition to Lisa, Jaime Galusha
as Administrative Manager; Katie Meck
as President of Students of Sociology;
Richard Lachmann, Zai Liang, Steve
Messner, and Kathy Trent as members
of the Graduate Committee; and last but
certainly not least, Nancy Denton as
Chair. Another nine PhD students—
representing China, Korea, Malaysia and
Spain, as well as the U.S.—will be
joining us in a few months, and we will
start the cycle again.
From the Undergraduate
Director
Jim Zetka
This is my last report as Undergraduate
Director, since I will be replaced next
year by a younger model. So, let’s make
it short and sweet. First, we received
interesting survey data from the
university regarding the fields in which
our undergraduates find jobs. The top for
sociology graduates were social work
(9.9%), health care administration
(5.3%), law enforcement (5.3%), and
finance and banking (4.6%). When we
cluster them into something like
industries or sectors, we get 23.2% in
business, 15.2% in human services,
12.8% in education, 11.4% in crime,
law, public safety, and 9.3% in the
health care fields. So, our
undergraduates find work in a variety of
occupations and industries. Sociological
insight has practical and market value.
Recognizing this, the department is in
the planning stages of introducing
specialized concentrations into the
sociology major. We have permission to
create a concentration in crime and
deviance and one in family and
community. We have proposed a third.
These concentrations will enable our
undergraduates to specialize in particular
areas of sociology. This is a positive
development, and will certainly be an
administrative headache. But, we will do
it for our students.
Second, we have received results from
our recent graduates regarding their
opinions about their undergraduate
experiences. The results were quite
good, although the sample size was
small. The one area that has troubled us
for a long time is undergraduate
advising, which up until now was the
responsibility of each faculty member,
juggling this with their core duties of
research and teaching. With many ever
changing rules, and seemingly with
dozens of exceptions to every rule, this
task was always quite difficult and a
major stressor to all of us. The Dean’s
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Office has kindly given us permission to
hire a professional advisor, and this
should help us to improve significantly.
This is a win-win for both our faculty
and our students.
on the Undergraduate Committee over
the last three years. And, I thank all of
the students I have met and served
during my stint as well. All good, all
positive. Have a wonderful summer.
Third, because of the persistence of our
better undergraduates we have reinstated
the Albany chapter of Alpha Kappa
Delta, the international sociology honor
society. I am now the faculty
representative of our chapter. Student
response has been tremendous. We
signed 24 initiates toward the end of the
spring semester. Our initiation ceremony
was on May 5th. What can I say? Our
better students want recognition for their
achievements, love and respect their
major, and want community with the
like-minded. They deserve an active
chapter and will have one from now on.
From the President of
Students of Sociology
(SOS)
Finally, I will return to normal faculty
duties in the fall both relieved of a
substantial workload and somewhat sad.
We tackled an exhaustive external selfassessment, changed our curriculum to
embed general education competencies
in the major, and revised our selfassessment process during my stint as
director. All of this on top of the usual
semester-to-semester duties,
responsibilities, challenges and
headaches. I thank the staff for all of
their help and good cheer in all of this:
Stacey and Jaime as Administrative
Manager, Melanie, Lisa, and now
Ashley in the staff position responsible
for the undergraduate program.
Everyone was a pleasure to work with
and made my experience transitioning in
and transitioning out much smoother. I
also thank our Chair, Nancy Denton, for
being easy to work with generally, and
for allowing me autonomy to do the job
my way. I thank all the members serving
Kaitlin Meck
This year, Students of Sociology
collaborated with faculty, students, and
other organizations to develop skills and
explore opportunities for professional
development in graduate school as well
as in our future careers. We began the
year with several events focused around
welcoming the first year cohort into the
department. We had an informal dinner
before the beginning of the semester, as
well as the welcome reception hosted by
the department. Continuing the tradition
from last year, SOS sponsored a
departmental mentorship program
between the first and second year
cohorts to help students transition into
their first year in the program. We plan
to continue to foster these relationships
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in the future to create a sense of
connectedness in the department.
During the fall semester, SOS held an
apple picking social, organized the
Thanksgiving potluck, and sponsored the
holiday lunch. Throughout the year, we
hosted brown bag panels on professional
networking and combating
procrastination, as well as several other
brown bag seminars in conjunction with
other organizations. With the teaching
committee, we hosted brown bags on
being a successful TA and what
instructors wish they had known when
they began teaching. We also worked
with GODS to host seminars on
preparing for conference presentations
and addressing a “revise and resubmit.”
We found these collaborations to be
extremely effective and hope to continue
working together in the future.
In an effort to strengthen our
interdisciplinary relationships, SOS cohosted a series of Equity and Inclusion
film nights with the Anthropology
Graduate Student Organization, which
featured culturally relevant
documentaries followed by
anthropological and sociological
discussion. SOS and AGSO also cohosted a workshop on webpage
development during the spring semester.
We look forward to co-hosting more
professional development and social
events with AGSO as well as the new
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
RGSO in the future!
Special thanks to the departmental staff
for helping us to plan all of our events
this year, and thank you to all the faculty
and graduate student speakers that have
taken time out of their busy schedules to
participate as well. Thanks to all grad
students for helping to make these events
a success! We look forward to helping
out the next cohort as they take over
SOS next year.
From the Center for
Social and Demographic
Analysis
Zai Liang
The 2015 academic year is a major year
of transitions in leadership for the Center
for Social and Demographic Analysis
(CSDA). After outstanding service and
leadership for many years, Tim Gage
(Professor in Anthropology) has stepped
down as Director of the Center and
Nancy Denton (Professor and Chair in
Sociology) also stepped down as the
Developmental Core Director.
Fortunately, both of them remain
actively engaged in CSDA in slightly
different functions, Tim as the Associate
Director and Nancy as a key member of
the Executive Committee. Big thanks to
both of them for their long and dedicated
service to the success of CSDA!
CSDA welcomes new members among
the leadership group: Benjamin Shaw
(Professor in the School of Public
Health) as our new Center Director and
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myself, Zai Liang (Professor in
Sociology) as Developmental Core
Director. The CSDA leadership group
has already begun working on NIH
Population Center Grant renewal.
In the past academic year, CSDA
attracted a group of outstanding scholars
to give presentations in our colloquium
series, covering domestic and especially
international topics. These speakers
included UAlbany visiting scholar
Esperanza Tuñón-Pablos from Colegio
de la Frontera Sur, Chiapas, Mexico,
who discussed obesity and diabetes
among Mexican migrants in the United
States; Jeffrey Bingenheime from
George Washington University
presented new findings from his project
to study family influence on adolescent
sexual activity in Ghana; Martin Dribe
from Lund University in Sweden
presented recent work on diffusion of
fertility decline during 1880-1900 in
Sweden; and Jennifer Van Hook, Penn
State University, presented new findings
using NHANES data to study health and
nutrition among immigrant children.
As usual, CSDA associates have been
busy at work to attract more research
grants and so far have yielded several
exciting funded projects this year. Here
is a sample of grants CSDA associates
received this year. Kate Strully
(Professor in Sociology) received a 2year NIH grant to study how state and
county immigration enforcement laws
affect the health of undocumented
immigrants (defined as individuals born
outside the U.S. and not authorized to
reside or work in the U.S.) and their
children. Robert Rosenswig (Professor
in Anthropology) received a grant from
the National Geographic Society to
collect magnetometer data at the site of
Las Viudas in the Soconusco region of
Mexico. Myself, along with Katy
Schiller (Professor in School of
Education and Glenn Deane, Professor
in Sociology), received a 3-year NSF
grant to examine the education and
health consequences of migration for
children in China. I also received
another grant from Chiang-ching Kou
Foundation for International Scholarly
Exchange (USA) to investigate the
adaptation process of African migrants
in China.
As we celebrate another banner year for
CSDA, it is also important to
acknowledge the contributions of our
dedicated supporting staff, including
Walter Ensel, Linda Lawrence, Jin-wook
Lee, Jeffrey Napierala, Hui-Shien Tsao,
and Ruby Wang. Thank you all!
Congratulations to Our
Recent Ph.D. Recipients
(completed as of May, 15 2016)
In chronological order:
Colin Gruner
"Welfare and Crime Revisited: Beyond
Yea or Nay"
Rak-Koo Chung
"The Third Wave of Democratization:
Consolidation of Nominal Democracy"
Andrew Horvitz
"From Actor to Object: Political
Influence, Political Entertainers, and the
Symbolic Construction of Rush
Limbaugh during the 2008 U.S.
Presidential Election"
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Lina Rincon
"Between Nations and the World:
Negotiating Legal and Social Citizenship
in the Migration Process. The Case of
Colombian and Puerto Rican Engineers
in the American Northeast"
Qian (Jasmine) Song
"The Great Migration and Health of the
Left-Behind Elderly in Rural China"
Jing Li
"Taming a Profession: State and
Economists during China's Economic
Reform, 1979-2012"
Anibal F. Gauna Peralta
"Neoliberalism, Populist Mobilization,
and State-Making in Latin America: The
Cases of Mexico and Venezuela"
Dan Xu
"Reforming the Chinese Book
Publishing Industry: An Analysis of a
Strategic Action Field"
Salvatore Labaro
"The Impact of Race Amongst Hispanics"
Sylwia Piatkowska
"Subnational Predictors of Racially
Motivated Crime: A Cross-National
Multilevel Analysis"
Samantha Applin
"Work-Family Structures and CrossNational Rates of Women's Offending"
Zhen Li
"Minority Migration from 1985 to 2005
in China: Migration Process, Migration
Outcomes, and Socioeconomic
Incorporation at Destination Places of
Four Ethnic Minority Groups"
Entering Graduate
Students Fall 2015
Xuemei Cao graduated from Sun Yatsen University in 2014 with a MA in
Sociology. She is primarily interested in
gender, families and education.
Jake Carias graduated from SUNY
New Paltz with a BA in Sociology in
2015. His intended specialization area is
urban sociology.
Annemarie Daughtry graduated with a
BA from Kutztown University of
Pennsylvania in 2013. She is enrolled in
the Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies MA/Sociology PhD dual
program here at UAlbany, and is
primarily interested in gender, families,
sexuality, and culture.
Danielle George graduated from
Hartwick College in 2014 with a dual
degree in Sociology and History. She is
primarily interested in family
demography and is looking forward to
expanding her horizons within the
department.
Sonya Grover graduated from the
University of Washington in 2005 with a
BA in Communications. Her current
interest is in studying the effects of an
aging society on younger generations,
specifically, she intends to compare the
strategies of Japan and the U.S. for
dealing with this issue on both the
national and local levels.
Elizabeth Harwood graduated from
Central Connecticut State University in
2014 with a BA in Sociology and minors
in Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies as well as Psychology. She is
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interested in social theory, political
structures, and feminist pedagogy.
Aysenur Kurtulus graduated with a BA
in Social and Political Science from the
Sabanci University, Turkey. She then
completed her MSc on Global Crime,
Justice and Security at the University of
Edinburgh, UK. Her main interests are
migration, and crime and law.
Cassie Sever graduated from the Relay
Graduate School of Education with a
MA in Secondary Science in 2015. She
received her BA at the Winthrop
University, in Science Communication
in 2009.
Yinzhi Shen graduated from the
Chinese University of Hong Kong in
December 2014. Her research interests
are crime and deviance in China,
immigration and restorative justice. Her
hobbies are cooking and making
documentary films.
Feinuo Sun graduated from Southeast
University with a BA in Engineering.
She is interested in urban and rural
migration in China.
Christine Walsh graduated with a BA
in Sociology from Hendrix College in
Arkansas. She recently graduated from
Texas Tech University with a MA in
Sociology. In her thesis, she interviewed
sexual assault detectives and prosecutors
focusing on how they perceive and
respond to acquaintance sexual assaults
and victims. Her areas of interest
include criminology, law, deviance, and
social theory.
Weihui (Angela) Zhang graduated from
the University of Texas at Austin in May
2014 with a MA in Public Affairs. She
is primarily interested in researching
demography and health.
Alumni News from our
Ph.D. Graduates
In June, Dalia Abdelhady will be
meeting with Nancy Fischer, a fellow
UAlbany sociologist, who is bringing a
group of her students on a field trip to
Copenhagen-Malmo. Dalia will get to
enjoy a global Albany sociology
moment while lucky students will get to
hear her explain about Middle Eastern
immigrants in Malmo. In addition, she
has three new publications and a new
grant from her employer at Lund
University to study Syrian refugees in
the Copenhagen greater area (which
includes parts of Sweden).
After 7 years in Nebraska, Jukka
Savolainen and Wendy Furst moved to
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jukka accepted a
faculty position at the Institute for Social
Research, University of Michigan. He is
the Director of the National Archive of
the Criminal Justice Data at the ICPSR.
Wendy works for the Survey Research
Center in the same building. Their two
boys have adjusted well to life in
Michigan.
Min Zhou and her co-PIs received a
research grant titled “Immigration,
Integration, and Social Transformation
in the Pacific Rim” from the Singapore
Ministry of Education. In addition she
has published two new books, The Asian
American Achievement Paradox (with
Jennifer Lee, Russell Sage Foundation,
2015) and The Rise of the New Second
Generation (with Carl Bankston III,
Polity Press, 2016); and has a new 3rd
edition of co-edited volume,
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Contemporary Asian America: A
Multidisciplinary Reader (with Anthony
Ocampo, New York University Press,
2016) and four new journal publications.
Lori Latrice Martin published three
books in 2015, White Sports/Black
Sports, Big Box Schools, and Lessons
from the Black Working Class (with
Hayward Derrick Horton and Teresa
Booker), and contributed to an edited
volume, The Assault on Communities of
Color. Lori’s book White Sports/Black
Sports was named 2015 Outstanding
Academic Title by CHOICE. In
addition, Lori was awarded tenure and
began serving as Director of Graduate
Studies (Department of Sociology) in
August at Louisiana State University.
She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Taboo: The
Journal of Culture and Education.
James Joseph Dean published “Being
Straight in a Post-Closeted Culture” in
Contexts and his book, Straights:
Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted
Culture (2014), will go into its second
printing with NYU Press in fall 2016.
Deb White began her term as President
of the Midwest Sociological Society.
Paul Knudson will present his paper
"Why Middle Class Parents Choose
Urban Public Schools" at the American
Sociological Association annual meeting
in Seattle this August.
Roberto Velez-Velez published "Sixty
Years before the Homicide: The Vieques
Movement and Trauma Resolution" in
the American Journal of Cultural
Sociology. Roberto also received tenure
and promotion to Associate Professor at
SUNY New Paltz; and received funding
from the SUNY System’s Conversations
in the Disciplines to coordinate a oneyear conference on memory and
remembrance.
Kevin Fitzpatrick received promotion
to University Professor at the University
of Arkansas and has a new edited
volume on the intersection of food and
place, Place-Based Perspectives of Food
in Society (Palgrave/Macmillan).
Chip McCormick is now working for
Apple as a Team Lead. After writing an
ethnography of open source
programmers, he “went native” and
became one himself. His research is
online at: tinyurl.com/opensourcestudy.
Graduate Student News
Elham Pourtaher presented “Narratives
of HIV and AIDS in Iranian
Newspapers” at the Yale University
Annual Spring Conference, Center for
Cultural Sociology; and “Sexualization
and Feminization of HIV and AIDS in
Iran” at the New School for Social
Research Conference Order, Chaos and
Everything in Between.
Wendie Choudary co-authored a poster
in the Southern Demographic
Association (SDA) Meeting and
accepted a position as Statistician for the
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
in Washington, D.C. working on
bankruptcy and unemployment.
Colleen Wynn presented two posters at
the Population Association of America
annual meeting, "Paternal Multipartner
Fertility and Children's Locational
Attainment" and, with Samantha
Friedman and Joseph Gibbons,
"Religion, Housing Discrimination, and
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Residential Attainment in Philadelphia:
Are Muslims Disadvantaged?" She has
also been selected to participate in the
Population Reference Bureau's 20162017 U.S. Policy Communication
Training Program.
Kristen Lee Hourigan received the
Department’s 2015-2016 Liska
Dissertation Research Award and has a
forthcoming article, "Homicide
Survivors' Definitions of Forgiveness:
Intra-personal, Inter-personal, and Extrapersonal orientations," in Violence and
Victims.
Daniela Pila published her Master's
thesis in Sociological Forum. Her
article, “I'm Not Good Enough for
Anyone,” explores how legal status
impacts the dating lives of
undocumented men and women.
Gowoon Jung’s most recent
achievements this year include a
UAlbany Benevolent Association
Graduate Research Award.
Se-Hwa Lee received a Graduate
Student Association Professional
Development Grant and has a
forthcoming article in Amerasia Journal
titled “Only If You Are One of Us: Wild
Geese Women’s Intensive Mothering,
Socializing and Empowerment within
the Korean Immigrant Community.”
Faculty News
Peter Brandon contributed two chapters
to Grandparenting in the United States
and with economics colleagues
published “Job mobility among parents of
children with chronic health conditions:
Early effects of the 2010 Affordable Care
Act.” Journal of Health Economics. His
work in the UK continues on measuring
the benefits of publicly-provided child
care for disadvantaged children.
Angie Y. Chung spent the fall semester
in Los Angeles collecting data for her
NSF-funded research project on
redevelopment politics in Koreatown
and Monterey Park and the spring
semester as a Dr. Thomas Tam Visiting
Professor at CUNY Graduate Center.
She has been giving talks on both the LA
research and her book, Saving Face: The
Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant
Family Myth, which is expected to be
released in August 2016.
In April, Steve Messner was a
Distinguished Lecturer at the Justice
Center for Research at Penn State
University. He talked about his research
on traditional forms of neighborhood
crime control in contemporary urban
China.
Zai Liang presented a keynote speech at
the international conference on
“Financing Education for Disadvantaged
Children”, held at Peking University
during Oct 27-29, 2015. He also
presented a paper at a conference on
“Linkage between Internal and
International Migration” at Columbia
University May 9, 2016. Zai and Steve
Messner, along with other Urban China
Research Network colleagues, have
organized an international conference on
urbanization in China to be held June
28-30, 2016 at Xi’an Jiaotong University
in China.
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Richard Lachmann gave lectures in
Lisbon, Abu Dhabi and Yerevan,
Armenia; and published articles in
Poetics, Revue Internationale de
Philosophie, and the Handbook of
Developmental Sociology.
Welcome to Our New
Faculty
Joanna Dreby’s book Everyday Illegal:
When Policies Undermine Immigrant
Families (University of California Press
2015) received an honorable mention
from 2016 Mirra Komarovsky Book
Award from the Eastern Sociological
Society.
Stacy Torres
Tse-Chuan Yang won a best poster
award at the 2016 Population
Association annual meeting (editors’
note: this was TC’s third consecutive
PAA best poster award). His recent
publications have appeared in Journal of
Rural Health, Urban Affairs Review
(with Joseph Gibbons), Medical Care
Research and Review, Journal of Urban
Health (with Kiwoong Park), and PLoS
One.
Trevor Hoppe was elected to the
council of the Sexualities Section of the
American Sociological Association. He
presented at the International
Sociological Forum in Vienna, Austria,
Law and Society Association in New
Orleans, and American Society of
Criminology in Washington, D.C. He
has forthcoming articles in Medicine and
Law & Social Inquiry; and 2015
publications in the Journal of the
International AIDS Society and
Punishment & Society.
Stacy Torres comes to Albany after
spending the last year as a UC
President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Department of Sociology at the
University of California at Berkeley. Her
research examines urban belonging,
social ties, and the usage of
neighborhood public spaces among
vulnerable populations.
Stacy completed her PhD in Sociology at
New York University in 2015 and holds
a BA in comparative literature from
Fordham University and MFA in
nonfiction creative writing from
Columbia University. Her dissertation
examined how older people aged 60 and
older struggle, survive, and thrive in 21st
century urban America. We know
belonging matters for elders but less
about how, why, and what facilitates it.
How do older people maintain their
independence when faced with multiple
vulnerabilities? What forms of social
relationships exist? How do older people
create or resist belonging? She
investigated these questions by drawing
on five years of ethnographic fieldwork
among older adults in a gentrified New
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York City neighborhood, following
participants as they coped with
gentrification, the accumulated losses of
neighbors, friends, and family, health
setbacks, financial struggles, and other
everyday challenges.
Stacy is currently working on a book
based on her dissertation research and
under contract with the University of
California Press. Her research and
teaching interests include gender, the
family, urban communities, aging and
the life course, health, and qualitative
research methods. Stacy’s research has
been supported by fellowships from the
Ford Foundation and the American
Sociological Association (ASA)
Minority Fellowship Program and has
received awards from the ASA sections
on Family, Urban and Community
Sociology, Aging and the Life Course,
and Sociological Practice and Public
Sociology. Her articles, essays, and opeds have appeared in Contexts, Reuters,
Slate, The New Republic, San Francisco
Chronicle, and The New York Times.
Beyond academia, Stacy enjoys reading
fiction, nature walks, exploring urban
architecture and discovering fossilized
places frozen in time like ancient dive
bars and greasy spoon diners.
Kate Averett
Kate Averett comes to Albany from the
University of Texas at Austin, where she
completed her PhD in Sociology with a
graduate portfolio in Women’s and
Gender Studies (LGBTQ/Sexualities
Track) in May 2016. Her research is
broadly in the area of gender and
sexuality in childhood; specifically, she
focuses on how childhood gender and
sexuality are constituted in the
institutional arenas of family, education,
and religion. Kate’s dissertation was a
mixed-methods project that examined
competing discourses of gender and
sexuality within the homeschooling
movement in Texas. Her research
reveals points of both departure and
overlap in the ways homeschooling
parents and social movement leaders
understand childhood in a historically
bifurcated, yet rapidly growing and
shifting, movement. The Sexualities
section of the American Sociological
Association awarded her the Martin
Levine Award for outstanding
dissertation in 2015.
In addition to her PhD, Kate holds an
MDiv degree from Harvard Divinity
School. Her work has been published in
numerous edited volumes and, recently,
in Gender & Society. Her recent article,
“The Gender Buffet: LGBTQ Parents
Resisting Heteronormativity” was
awarded the 2015 Norval Glenn Prize by
the Department of Sociology at the
University of Texas at Austin, and
received an honorable mention for the
2015 Sally Hacker Award from the Sex
& Gender section of ASA.
Kate is currently working on a book
project that expands upon her
dissertation research, using the
homeschooling movement as a case
study to examine conflicting
14
understandings of childhood needs and
children’s rights in larger debates about
gender and sexuality.
Outside of academia, Kate enjoys dance,
musical theater, Scandinavian crime
fiction, and spending time with her
extended family. Kate, her wife, Sanden,
and their yellow lab, Henry Louise, are
excited to be back living in the
Northeast.
Brandon Gorman
Brandon Gorman comes to Albany
after finishing a PhD in the Department
of Sociology at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research
investigates how individuals and
organizations engage with international
politics by analyzing large bodies of
texts from newspapers, government
publications, and internet message
boards, cross-national public opinion
surveys, and in-depth interviews. Much
of his work is on the Middle East and
North Africa, primarily Tunisia. He
reads French and is fluent in Tunisian
colloquial Arabic, Stata, and Python 2.7.
even otherwise secular Muslims to
support implementing shari’a law. His
dissertation research was supported by
grants from the American Institute of
Maghreb Studies and the Royster
Society of Fellows.
In addition to his doctorate, Brandon
also holds a graduate certificate from the
Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East
Studies, a MA in Political Science from
the University of Georgia, and a BA in
Political Science and Middle East
Studies from Georgia State University.
His research has been published in
Social Forces and Middle East Law and
Governance, presented at annual
meetings of domestic and international
professional associations, and covered
on NPR.
Brandon is currently working on two
major projects. Expanding on his
dissertation research, the first uses
supervised machine learning algorithms
to analyze discussions of Islamism and
Islamist organizations in tens of millions
of Arabic-language posts scraped from
internet discussion boards. The second
investigates the role of perceptions of
threat on identification with global
society using quasi-experimental
techniques that compare attitudes in the
weeks before and after major terrorist
attacks.
Outside of academia, Brandon enjoys
fishing, hiking, making delicious
fermented foods, and traveling. He is a
die-hard Georgia Bulldogs football fan.
His dissertation examined the causes and
content of Islamist political orientations
among Muslims. Specifically, it
investigates how exposure to critical
global discourses and policies drives
15
New Departmental
Speaker Series
The junior faculty are excited to
announce a new sociology departmental
speaker series for the 2016-2017
academic year. Each of our six junior
faculty will invite a sociologist to
present their research on campus at
University at Albany. We will plan for
three talks in the fall and three talks in
the spring. Keep your eyes peeled for a
formal announcement and schedule,
coming soon!
Jaime Galusha
Thanks to Our
Departmental Staff
Lisa Klein
We are happy to announce that our
department staff is finally back to “full
strength.” Our Administrative Manager,
Jaime Galusha, and department
secretary, Lisa Klein, were joined this
spring by Ashley Turski.
Ashley is in her sixth year of state
service; starting in Facilities
Management before moving over to
Student Affairs and is now learning the
academic side of the university in our
department. In May, she earned her
Bachelors of Science in Health and
Human Services.
With the addition of Ashley as
Undergraduate secretary, Lisa assumes
the responsibilities of Graduate
secretary. We are pleased to welcome
Ashley and wish Lisa well in her new
responsibilities.
Ashley Turski
We’d Like to Hear From You!
Comments, submissions, information
updates should be sent to: [email protected]
or
Department of Sociology, AS-351
University at Albany, SUNY
1400 Washington Ave.
Albany, NY 12222
Visit our website at
www.albany.edu/sociology or like us on
Facebook at UAlbany Department of
Sociology to keep abreast of the latest news!
16
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