Pre-Doctoral Fellows
Alphabetical, by last name
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.
Fiona Rose Greenland
University of Michigan
Fiona Rose Greenland is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Public Policy. Her research interests include cultural and scientific policy in archaeology, nationalism, and theoretical and epistemological problems in science and art studies. She is writing an article on the interplay of state institutions, national identities, and knowledge production in an excavation team based in central Italy. Collaborative projects include Responses to Alexander: Film, History and Culture Studies (2010) with Cambridge classics professor Paul Cartledge; and the March 2010 Michigan Theory Conference (Ann Arbor, MI). She has taught courses in Greek and Roman art and architecture; Roman settlements; and sociological theory. Fiona earned her B.A. from the University of Michigan, and her Master’s and Doctor of Philosophy in Classical Archaeology from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Aníbal Gauna-Peralta
State University of New York at Albany
Anne Lin
State University of New York at Albany
Anne Lin is a graduate student in the Sociology Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Albany. She received her undergraduate degree at the National Taiwan University in Taiwan, where she studied international relations and gender theories. Anne’s broad range of research interests include gender and queer theory, body politics, media studies, cultural globalization and transnational interactions, and postcolonial theories. She developed deep interest in gender issues and did many research on topics concerning sex work and body politics. In addition, Anne is also a strong advocate for the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement.
However, Anne’s current research focuses on the transnational media and cultural flows in East Asia. She is aiming to utilize research tools in the strong program paradigm to analyze narratives and cultural symbols that travel around the East Asian region. She also hopes to delineate how countries define and redefine, draw and redraw boundaries between national and cultural borders in an age of postcoloniality and globalization, and how these efforts in interpreting culture weave into webs of meaning structures.
Brian McKernan
State University of New York at Albany
Brian McKernan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Previously, Brian received his M.A. in Sociology from Fordham University. While finishing his dissertation, Brian presently serves as a visiting instructor at Mount Holyoke College. His areas of interests include social theory and cultural sociology, particularly in relation to mass media and popular culture. Brian’s dissertation employs hermeneutical techniques to examine the moral narratives that emerge from video game coverage in different mediated social spaces during different time periods. Besides his dissertation, Brian is working on multiple empirical explorations into the cultural object of celebrity, as well as an analysis of the various ways in which non-American newspapers treat American television. In all these projects, Brian seeks to combine Cultural Sociology’s major principles with recent contributions from Communication and Media studies.
Nickie Michaud Wild
State University of New York at Albany
Nickie Michaud Wild is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at the Department of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her M.A. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her B.A. in English and American Literature from New York University. She is currently working on her Doctoral Dissertation, which examines the evolving trends in political comedy on television during the U.S. Presidential elections from 1980-2008. It hopes to explain the changes in how prominent actors in the public sphere discuss such comedy, its increasing relevance to the language of American politics, and the transformative power of satire. Additionally, her research and teaching areas include Culture, Politics, Democracy, Domestic Violence, Mass Media, and 9/11.
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.
Matthias Revers
State University of New York at Albany
Matthias Revers is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the State University of New York-Albany, where he started his PhD in 2008. His research clusters around US-European comparative media research, particularly focusing on news discourse and journalistic practice from a cultural sociological perspective. Other interests include citizenship discourses, media events, social drama, and sociology of humor. The basis of his dissertation is a multi-site ethnography of political journalists in the US and Germany who facilitate and construct political public spheres around state politics. After two years at the New York State Capitol he is conducting field research in Munich in 2011/12, funded by a research grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) and in affiliation with Ludwig Maximilan University of Munich.
Revers is an Austrian citizen and worked as a journalist, research assistant and teaching adjunct after receiving his BA (2005) and MA (2006) at the University of Graz and before coming to the US.
Lina Rincón
State University of New York at Albany
Lina Rincón is a doctoral candidate and lecturer at the department of sociology at State University of New York at Albany. She was born in Colombia where she studied anthropology. In 2004, she received her M.S. in anthropology from University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her current research analyzes meaning making structures that allow or prevent recent migrants to successfully incorporate to American society. She is currently working on her dissertation examining forms of attachment Latin American engineers create, as a means to incorporate into middle class America. Specifically, she is working with a group of Colombian and Puerto Rican engineers who were hired by American IT companies during the 90s ‘dot com’ boom. In addition, she is collaborating with Dr. Angie Chung to create a model to study migrant liminal identities. She presented her analysis of immigration rhetoric in the CNN Lou Dobbs’ show at the CCS Annual conference in 2010.
Ian Sheinheit
State University of New York at Albany
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.
Ping Wang
Fudan University
Ping Wang is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology at Fudan University. He was born in Hangzhou, a city famous for its picturesque scenery and associations with many celebrated poets and painters. He has lived in Shanghai for more than 10 years, where he received BS in social work and MA in sociology. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation on the social transition and urban poverty in mainland China, especially cultural codes and context in the urban life of ordinary residents. His interests are social stratification, cultural sociology, field methods, and NGO studies. He was the co-director for several marketing research programs and program evaluation of government programs. In addition, he is a licensed social worker with experience working with youth and families.
Jingsi Christina Wu
State University of New York at Albany
Jingsi Christina Wu is a Doctoral candidate in the joint program of Sociology and Communication at University at Albany, State University of New York. She is currently finishing her dissertation while serving as a lead research assistant on a large federally funded project that uses mixed methods to examine social interaction and leadership in online gaming environments. Her research focuses on popular culture and politics, the role of new media in civic engagement. Her dissertation examines how discussions of popular cultural contents help nurture aesthetic public spheres as an extension of the formal Habermasian public sphere, demonstrating their civic significance. Having received her B.A. from Zhejiang University, China, where she studied Journalism and Sociology, Jingsi maintains strong connection with and research interest in China. Combined with her newly developed interest in American popular culture and political communication, she is further moving into comparative media studies.
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