Center for Cultural Sociology

Martin de Santos
Visiting Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Martin de Santos works at the intersection of cultural, economic, and media sociology. He is currently working on three projects. The first explores the cultural and social life of statistics in the public sphere. Using a case study from Argentina, it develops the concepts of fact-totem and public number to theorize and make visible the public life of social indicators and statistics. He is working on extending his research to other cases and national contexts. The second project (with Pablo Boczkowski) examines changes in the media sphere brought about by Internet news and their effect news homogeneity. Last, he has a project underway (with Jeffrey Alexander) that looks at global civil society and its cultural and institutional infrastructure (or lack thereof) (B.A., Princeton University, 1993; M.A., Yale University, 2002; Ph.D., Yale University, 2007)

Tanya Goodman
Independent researcher

Tanya Goodman recently submitted her dissertation entitled Setting the Stage for a “New” South Africa: A Cultural Approach to the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. (B.A., Tulane University, 1989; M.A., Yale University, 1998; Ph.D., Yale University, 2005.) E-mail: tanya dot goodman at aya dot yale dot edu

Anna Lund
Växjö University

Research Interests: Cultural Sociology, Youth Culture, Sociology of the arts, Artistic Careers, Educational Practices, Cultural Policy Research, Performance Theory, Pierre Bourdieu Studies, Durkheimian Studies, Ethnography. .(B.A., Umeå University, 1996; M.A., Umeå University, 1997; Licentiate Degree in Sociology, Växjö University, 2004)

Jason Mast
University of California, Los Angeles

Jason Mast received his Ph.D. from UCLA. He is presently converting his dissertation, “Politics and Performance: The Cultural Pragmatics of the Clinton Presidency,” into a book manuscript. The work draws on cultural and political sociology as well as theories of action to offer a new performance-based framework for analyzing interactions between America’s political and civil spheres. Jason co-edited a volume titled, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (2006), with Jeffrey Alexander and Bernhard Giesen. The volume’s chapters elaborate the performance framework’s theoretical foundations and exemplify the approach’s empirical purchase. Jason’s chapter in the volume, “The Cultural Pragmatics of Event-ness: The Clinton/Lewinsky Affair,” (co-)won 2006’s Best Graduate Student Paper prize in the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Culture section. Jason is currently working on projects in the subfields of theory, culture, politics, and ethnography. He also serves as the Managing Editor of Sociological Theory.

Maria Rovisco
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, ISCTE, University of Lisbon

Maria Rovisco gained her doctorate in Sociology from the University of York. In 2006 she was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. She has published articles on the tradition of European films of voyage, cosmopolitanism, the idea of Europe, and on symbolic boundaries and collective identity formation. She is currently working on a project on the Arts and the Public Sphere in Portugal (1960-2005), sponsored by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, and is co-editing the book Cosmopolitanism in Practice (Ashgate). (B.A., 1995, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal; MPhil, 2001, ISCTE, Portugal; Ph.D., 2003, University of York) Email: maria at rovisco dot com

Steve Sherwood
Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles

Steve Sherwood is a cultural sociologist who received his doctorate from UCLA in 2002 and has been a lecturer there since then. His current interests are in Pop as a cultural movement, Andy Warhol and the ideas of iconicity and iconic experience. His research is inspired by the continuing deep relevance of Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, especially the “totemic” Chapter 7. His most recent publication is “Seeker of the Sacred: A Late Durkheimian Theory of the Artist” in Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick (editors), Myth, Meaning and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts (2006).

Julia Zhang
Lecturer, University of Illinois

Julia’s long-standing research interests include, but not limited to classical and contemporary cultural theory, cultural sociology, sociology of the arts which mostly concerns a new, meaning-centered approach of examining the relationship between cultural production and the social structure; aiming at combining the unpacking of the complex symbolic meaning and formal quality embedded in works of art and the necessary examination of the field of artistic production, to understand both the larger social processes in which art is produced. The other common thread among her past researches is an area focus on modern and contemporary Chinese society, with special attention given to Chinese intellectual history.(B.A., Nanjing University; M.A. and M.Phil.,Yale Univerisity)