Junior Fellows
Alphabetical, by last name
Elisabeth Becker
Yale University
Sorcha Alexandrina Brophy
Yale University
Sorcha Alexandrina Brophy graduated from Harvard College with a degree in the Comparative Study of Religion (high honors). Her research interests include the sociology of morality, the sociology of religion, and postcoloniality. Her current projects include papers on American Protestant social identities as well as a study of cultural policy, civility and propriety in the Anglophone Caribbean.
Andy Cohen
Yale University
Andrew Cohen graduated from Fontbonne University in 2008 with a dual major Sociology and Advertising and a minor in American Culture Studies. His interdisciplinary education in advertising and his professional experience in the industry turned into a deep interest in advertising as a sub-cultural production. His aim is to develop a cultural sociology of the advertising agency, looking at the narratives and structures of meaning which shape the products of the advertising industry. He is also interested in gender and queer theory, as well as just about any social creation of meaning.
Thomas Crosbie
Yale University
Research interests: Tom Crosbie is currently developing a cultural approach to the study of civil-military relations, military theory and military organizational change. He is also interested in media, particularly the development of complex televisual narratives and the role of film in indigenous cultures. His past research focused on modernist literature. Education: BA [Memorial University of Newfoundland (English)], MA [La Trobe University (Literary Studies)]
Mira Debs
Yale University
Research interests: Culture, trauma and memory including the role of art in Italy, post-colonial memory in India, post-civil rights memory in the American South, and the sociology of education.
Education: B.A. Humanities with honors, (University of Chicago), MPhil European Politics and PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education), Oxford University.
Shai Dromi
Yale University
Shai Dromi completed his B.A. in sociology, cultural anthropology and communication and his M.A. in sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His Master’s thesis focused on the relation between moral evaluation, emotions and the media. He has worked at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute as part of a research group, Israeli Hearts: Culture and Emotional Praxis in Contemporary Israel and was and a Fulbright doctoral fellow for the years 2009-2011. Currently Shai is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology. His research interests include cultural sociology, sociology of morality, and sociology of emotions, and his dissertation focuses on the rise and transformation of transnational humanitarian organization in the 19th century.
Jesse Einhorn
Yale University
(B.A. Sociology, Haverford College.)
Alison Gerber
Yale University
Alison Gerber is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale University and a junior fellow of the Center for Comparative Research and the Center for Cultural Sociology. Her research focuses on work, culture, and public life.
Her dissertation research examines variation in the ways artists define the value of their activities in order to investigate mechanisms that influence monetary valuation and occupational commitment. The project aims to develop a theory of valuation and its variation within occupations, and to illuminate valuation outside of stable employment relationships in order to contribute to our understanding of artists as well as economic and working life more generally.
Alison holds a BA and BFA from the University of Minnesota, attended Critical Studies at Malmö Art Academy / Lund University, and holds an MA and MPhil from Yale University.
Isabel Jijon
Yale University
Isabel Jijon graduated from Yale University in 2011. Her senior thesis was on cultural globalization, looking specifically at the interplay between sport and race in a rural Ecuadorian community. She has published on Latin American culture and politics. Her research interests include identity politics, race relations and the global discourse of human rights, as well as cultural sociology more generally
Jin Su Joo
Yale University
Joseph Klett
Yale University
Joseph Klett is a doctoral candidate and junior fellow in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His research interests include sound studies, knowledge production, science and technology studies, new media, music and aesthetics, social movements, and human-animal relations. Joseph’s dissertation is titled ‘The Social Life of Noise: Perception, Technology, and Culture.’ This work concerns the meaning of “noise” as a sonic concept in audio engineering and American music education. Through ethnographic studies, Joseph approaches sound through theories of practice and cognition to address issues of meaning and meaning-making, realism, expertise, space, aesthetics and communication, and objectivity. Joseph’s previous research projects have included a study on meaning-making in the genre of American ‘Noise Music’, a study of digitized music consumption on reception, and the coding of non-human animals in the discourse of animal rights. (B.A. Sociology, University of California, San Diego; M.A. Yale University)
Carolyn Ly
Yale University
Research Interests: Culture; Race and Ethnicity; Organizations, Occupations, and Work; Community and Urban Sociology; Social Psychology/Microsociology; Ethnography; Qualitative Methods. Carolyn’s dissertation utilizes historical, interview, and ethnographic methods to examine how institutional changes and meanings of work transform over time within the Urban Fire Service. In particular, her project examines cultural meanings of firefighting work and group processes – emphasizing the reproduction of (occupational) culture through everyday interaction and boundary work. Her research is framed by a broader contextual understanding of organizations under duress within the urban (sociopolitical) context. Carolyn has conducted research on cultural images of Asian Americans in popular media; she has also published work which ethnographically examines the significance of the local library in an impoverished urban neighborhood. Carolyn is a Doctoral Candidate and Junior Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology and the Center for Comparative Research at Yale.
Education: B.A. Sociology, summa cum laude (Hunter College, City University of New York); Phi Beta Kappa; M.A. Sociology, Yale University; M.Phil. Sociology, Yale University.
Todd Madigan
Yale University
Todd Madigan is studying the various meanings of voluntary human suffering, particularly when this suffering is adopted in response to the misery of others. He is also developing the concept of ambiguous social performance and inquiring after its place within the framework of cultural pragmatics. In both these research areas, he is interested in deploying the interpretive insights of philosophical hermeneutics, narratology, and performativity.
For the decade prior to his arrival at Yale, Todd worked closely with the homeless young people of Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Moscow, Russia.
Education: B.A. philosophy, summa cum laude, San Jose State University; M.A. English, San Francisco State University
Tim Malacarne
Yale University
Tim Malacarne graduated from Georgetown University in 2006 with a BS in Foreign Service. His senior honors thesis examined American socio-political divisions and viewing preferences for popular cinema. Tim is interested in the way in which entertainment spectacle both shapes and reflects society and its component groups. He is particularly interested in examining differences between the way this occurs in cosmopolitan and rural areas.
Samuel Nelson
Yale University
(B.A. Sociology honors, University of Chicago.)
Jensen Sass
Yale University
Jensen Sass is a Doctoral Candidate and Junior Fellow in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale. He is interested in the place of culture within various social, political, and economic phenomena. His dissertation examines how culture both shapes and is shaped by processes of market formation for new technologies, and he is conducting other research on the meanings of deliberation within various institutional contexts.
(M.Phil Political Science, Australian National University)
Christine Slaughter
Yale University
Christine Slaughter studies social movements, culture, and the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. Her dissertation project studies the efforts of activists in African-American and LGBTQ movements to shift cultural representations of their groups in the public sphere. Her previous work has examined gender and American political discourse using Nancy Pelosi as a case study, and the social meaning of humor and its connection to ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality in the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival.
Yasushi Tanaka
Yale University
Research Interests: Yasushi is interested in culture as a negotiative space where sentimentality is seen as a vital component to the construction and upholding of it. Specific interests include the Japanese civil sphere in relation to the dissemination of trauma narratives, material culture and iconicity as artifacts of the civil sphere, public sociology and critical pedagogy, causality in cultural analysis, and the paradigmatic dispute between the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology and British Cultural Studies. Education: B.A. Sociology, with First Class Honours (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Michael Yarbrough
Yale University
Michael Yarbrough works in the areas of law and society; family; the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality; and political subjectivity. He is particularly interested in the roles of law and legal institutions in interpersonal relationships. A recent graduate of the Yale Law School through the joint J.D./Ph.D. program, Michael is currently developing a dissertation comparing marriage reform debates in the United States and South Africa, which seeks to understand the relationship between legal change and changing understandings of family and self. He is also researching small-claims disputes among family members, friends, and others with pre-existing relationships. (B.A. Sociology – honors, University of Chicago; J.D., Yale Law School; M.A., Sociology, Yale University)