Center for Cultural Sociology

Christopher Bail
Harvard University

Christopher A. Bail is a Doctoral Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. His research compares the evolution of symbolic boundaries towards Muslims in the U.S. and U.K. since 9/11 through 1) archival analysis of the policy process; 2) network analysis of social movements; and, 3) longitudinal qualitative interviews. Bail’s previous studies of symbolic boundaries and anti-racism have appeared in the American Sociological Review and Revue Europeenne de Migrations Internationales . He is the recipient of grants from the German Marshall Fund, the National Science Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the Center for American Political Studies. In 2007, he received the Aage B. Sorensen Award, and currently enjoys affiliation with the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Center for American Political Studies. Bail holds an A.M. from Harvard University, an A.B from Bowdoin College, and has been a visiting PhD Student at The Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Paris) and the London School of Economics. Before coming to Harvard, he interned at the United Nations Development Programme in Geneva, Switzerland. During his childhood, Chris spent time in the Congo, Switzerland, and China where he developed his passion for comparative cultural sociology.

Werner Binder
University of Konstanz

Werner Binder is doctoral student and research assistant at the Department of Sociology at the University of Konstanz. He was born in Medias, Romania, but raised in Germany, where he studied sociology, philosophy and literature at the Universities of Mannheim, Potsdam and Berlin. In 2006, he received his M.A. (with honors) with a thesis on the relevance of ethnic and religious categories in the Turkish ethnic community in Germany. He is currently working on his PhD project on the Abu Ghraib scandal investigating its impact on the torture debate after 9/11. He is particularly interested in the interplay of civil discourse, public morality and visual icons. His further intellectual interests are sociological theory, interpretative methods and qualitative methodology, especially hermeneutics of the visual. He is also concerned with normativity, violence, trauma and human rights from a cultural sociological perspective.

Shai Dromi
Yale University

Tanya Omeltchenko
University of Virginia

Tatiana (Tanya) Omeltchenko was born in Moscow, Russia. She received her Master of Arts in Sociology from George Mason University in 2004. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include sociological aspects of meaning-making in situations of crisis. In her doctoral dissertation she wants to explore how ordinary Americans may have constructed their political talk to restore a sense of order after September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. E-mail: to3y at virginia dot edu

Julia Sonnevend
Columbia University

Julia Sonnevend is a Ph.D. student in Communications at Columbia University, a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. She received her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, her Juris Doctorate and her Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Sonnevend studies the intersections between communications, art history, visual studies and legal theory. Her research areas include visual culture theories, the theory of (digital) photography, critical communications studies, the canon of communications/media studies, visual representations of justice in art and media, law and performance, art and activism, cultural trauma, access to knowledge, law in the digitally-networked environment, global media policy, post-socialist identities and Eastern-European media.

Yasushi Tanaka
Yale University

Previous Pre-Doctoral Fellows

2006-2007

Asia Friedman, Shannon Latkin Anderson, Sophia Accord, Anna Lund, Stephen Vaisey, Andrea Voyer, Mervyn Horgan, Nicolas Howe, John Dickson