Center for Cultural Sociology

Sunwoong Park
Korea National University of Education

Sunwoong Park (Ph.D., Sociology, UCLA) is an associate professor of the Department of Social Studies, the Korea National University of Education in South Korea. He has researched on youth subculture, consumption and class identity, media discourse, and social movements. He has just finished an article on the ritualization of social movements (in Korean) and is now working on the politics of representation on educational crisis, drawing upon Alexander’s model of civil discourses. He translated one of Alexander’s books, The Meanings of Social Life into Korean, which is coming soon. (Visiting Fellow, Fall 2007 – Fall 2008)

Natasha Kirsten Kraus
Scholar in Residence

Natasha Kirsten Kraus is the CCS Scholar in Residence for the 2007-08 academic year. Her book, “A New Type of Womanhood”: Social Movement and Discursive Politics in Antebellum America is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Kirsten is currently engaged in a number of projects including: a book of essays on film, cultural studies, and new critical theories (queer theory, poststructuralist feminist theory, critical race theory, and critical disability theory); an article on Terri Schiavo, Terri Schiavo’s Body, and the Nation; and archival research for a new book Sexuality and the Victorian Governess: The Cultural Shaping of England’s Middle Class. (Ph.D., Sociology, University of California at Berkeley, 1999;M.A., Sociology, University of California at Berkeley, 1991)

Sonja van Wichelen
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam

Sonja van Wichelen is a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow for the academic years 2007-2009. She is also affiliated as a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, where she obtained her PhD in Political Science. Her dissertation – entitled Embodied Contestations: Muslim Politics and Democratization in Indonesia through the Prism of Gender – focused on Islam and gender debates in times of political transition. Her current research-project centers on “transnational adoption” and examines adoption practices in the United States and the Netherlands. Together with Marc de Leeuw she is also preparing a manuscript provisionally entitled Transformations of Dutchness, which explores changing discourses of liberalism and tolerance in contemporary Dutch society. (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Fall 2007 – Fall 2008)

Pavel Barša
Charles University, Prague

Pavel Barša is professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University and a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. He has written on nationalism and ethnocultural justice in Central Europe. His current research focuses on the correlation between national identities and immigration policies. He is also interested in the politics of memory in post-communist societies.(Fulbright Scholar, Spring 2008)

Mats Trondman
Växjö University

Professor of Cultural Sociology, mainly working in the field of social and cultural theory and youth culture studies at Växjö University, Sweden. Will be opening the Center for Cultural Sociology at Växjö University in the Fall of 2008, in collaboration with Anna Lund, who been a visiting doctoral student at the CCS at Yale University. It will be a part of the School of Social Sciences. The center in Växjö will to a great extent be informed by the the ’strong’ program developed at Yale. (Visiting Fellow, Spring 2008)

Jason Mast
University of California, Los Angeles

Jason Mast is writing his dissertation on the social performative dynamics at play in the Clinton-Lewinsky Affair. He is also co-editing a book on the Performative Turn in Sociology with Jeff Alexander and Bernard Geisen.