Junior Fellows
Alphabetical, by last name
Elisabeth Becker
Yale University
Elizabeth Breese
Yale University
Elizabeth Breese graduated from Wellesley College in 2006 with a major in sociology and a minor in philosophy. She wrote a senior honors thesis on human rights education in the United States Army based on field research conducted at U.S. Army bases and educational sites. Elizabeth’s areas of interest include cultural sociology, trauma theory, and ethnography.
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.
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. Currently Shai is a doctoral student at the Department of Sociology and a Fulbright doctoral fellow for the years 2009-2011. His research interests include cultural sociology, sociology of morality, and sociology of emotions.
Jesse Einhorn
Yale University
(B.A. Sociology, Haverford College.)
Alison Gerber
Yale University
Alison Gerber’s primary interests are public space and public life. She is currently working on a comparative study of artists’ unions and professional associations, as well as papers on social theory and social problems. She studied at the University of Minnesota, the University of Iceland, Malmö Art Academy / Lund University, and the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm.
Isabel Jijon
Yale University
Jin Su Joo
Yale University
Andrew Junker
Yale University
Andy has analytical interests in religion, culture, and politics and regional interests focused on East Asia, especially China. Andy has studied, researched, or worked in Japan, China, Thailand, Nepal and India, including one year researching Japanese and Tibetan artisanship as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. His foreign language training is in Chinese and Japanese, including intensive study at the Associated Kyoto Program (Dōshisha University, Kyoto), the East Asian Summer Language Institute (Indiana University), and the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University (Beijing). At Yale, Andy has used ethnography to explore the interplay of myths, legends and truth claims in the mobilization of an immigrant community. (B.A. East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University; M.A. Religious Studies, Indiana University)
Joseph Klett
Yale University
Joseph Klett is interested in art and aesthetics (with an emphasis on music), new media, human-animal relations, and social movements. His current work is a sociological investigation of ‘noise’ as a sonic, sensual, and social phenomenon. This project includes a genealogical understanding of the concept of noise as developed in cultural negotiations of the sacred and profane (ala Durkeimian theory), noise as otherness in language and action (deconstruction, Bataille), and noise as a sensual category (Simmel, Serres). At the moment, his research considers the paradoxical genre of ‘Noise Music’, as it represents both an inversion of cultural codes and an emergent argument for expanded socialization. In this project and more broadly, Joseph’s work incorporates ideas from critical theory, literary theory, postmodernism, art criticism, aesthetic theory, musicology, and science and technology studies (STS). Previous research has included a study of digitized music consumption on reception, a cultural analysis of the use of torture as response to terrorism, and the coding of non-human animals in the discourse of animal rights. Joseph is a current participant in the Animal Ethics working group at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. (B.A. Sociology, University of California, San Diego; M.A. Yale University)
Carolyn Ly
Yale University
Research interests: Cultural sociology, work, occupations, and organizations, race and ethnicity, and urban ethnography. Carolyn’s dissertation utilizes historical, interview, and ethnographic methods to examine how institutional changes and everyday meanings of work transform over time within the Elm City Fire Service. Her project also broadly examines cultural meanings of firefighting work, identity, and concepts of organizations under stress within the urban (sociopolitical) context. Carolyn has conducted research on cultural images of Asian Americans in popular media; she has also ethnographically documented the varying roles of a 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.
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.)
Matthew Norton
Yale University
Matt is interested in problems related to political order and state formation, with an emphasis on the cultural and institutional dimensions of states. His dissertation examines the relationship between systems of classification and state coercive power through a comparative analysis of English efforts to stamp out piracy in their maritime empire around the turn of the 18th century. (B.A. Philosophy, Villanova University; M.A. Conflict Resolution, Bradford University.)
Jensen Sass
Yale University
Jensen is interested in a range of questions concerning the place of culture within social and political theory. He is currently examining the methodology of field theory as well as the cultural constitution of civic practices. Prior to coming to Yale Jensen completed an MPhil at the Australian National University.
(B.A. Honors, Deans Scholars Program, Monash University; MPhil Social and Political Theory, Australian National University)
Inge Brooke Schmidt
Yale University
Inge Schmidt graduated from Mount Holyoke College (B.A., Sociology and Politics, cum laude with High Honors). She is interested in Political Sociology and Cultural Sociology, with a focus on American Political Culture. Her senior undergraduate thesis, “The Missing Generation,” focused on changes in youth political participation (or the lack thereof) in the United States following the 2000 Presidential Election and September 11th. Currently, she is interested in political participation and political ritual in the United States. (B.A. Sociology and Politics – cum laude with High Honors, Mount Holyoke College.)
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)