Center for Cultural Sociology

Jonathan Roberge
University of Ottawa

Jonathan Roberge is a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow for the academic year 2009-2010, with a grant awarded by the FQRSC Fund. His first book, Paul Ricoeur, la culture et les sciences humaines was published in the spring of 2008. Jonathan is currently involved in a number of research projects including: the co-edition of a forthcoming book entitled Après la fin de la société?; an article concerning Cultural Pragmatics; and another article on Critical Hermeneutics. He is also interested in the cultural and performative aspects of new social movements. (Ph.D., Sociology, Université de Montréal, M.A. and B.A., Political Science, Université Laval, Canada)

Esteve Ollé Sanz
Postdoctoral Fellow

Esteve Ollé is interested in exploring the relation between culture, power and instrumental reason through the analysis of certain television productions. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Catalonia, with a focus on the cultural and technological transformations of contemporary public bureaucracies, and a M.Phil. in Political Science from the LSE, based on a three-year research project on the political and emotional elements of global event episodes. In 2008 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, where he learned about the changing structure of television industry and the contemporary trends of television fiction. (Post-Doctoral Fellow, February 2009 – February 2010)

Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Vered’s academic interest focused in the last decade on the notions of collective memory and commemorations at the macro social level. More specifically, she is curious about the ways in which societies cope with their difficult pasts, embarrassing moments, shameful events and the like. Within that framework, she is working on the ingredients from which the sociology of commemoration is made (time, space, discourse and agency) and on commemoration as a lens through which one can study various social groups more generally. In addition, she is interested in the city as a text, in autobiographical occasions, in the sociology of courtrooms, in the notions of silence and forgetting and in the ways in which death is announced and managed. Her research agendas spin themselves out between the emotional turbulence of the high school reunion in the United States (see under After Pomp and Circumstance, University of Chicago Press, 1998) the commemoration of an assassinated Prime Minister in the context of the fractured collective identity of society in Israel (see under, Yitzhak Rabin Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, State University of New York Press, 2009); between the knock on the door which announces the worst news of all and the everyday drama of the courtroom. In each instance, an autobiographical occasion of crisis at the individual, the organizational or the national level occupies center stage, as do questions of memory and identity, the management of emotion and the quest for meaning within the constraints and opportunities afforded by culture and social structures. She is currently editing [together with Jeffry K. Olick and Daniel Levy] The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). (Visiting Fellow, August 2009 – August 2010)

Andreas Hess
University College Dublin

Andreas Hess teaches sociology at University College Dublin. He was awarded a UCD President’s Fellowship for the academic year 2009/10 and is currently Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale. He is interested in the life and work of the influential political theorist Judith N. Shklar, particularly how the experience of exile has shaped Shklar’s political theory. Recent publications: (as editor) Intellectuals and Their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, Farnham, Surrey 2009: Ashgate) and (as sole author) Reluctant Modernization: Plebeian Culture and Moral Economy in the Basque Country (Oxford 2009: Peter Lang). (Visiting Fellow, Fall 2009)

Bing Xu
Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Bing Xu is an associate professor in the Institute of Sociology (IS), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). He was awarded a scholarship under the CASS Fund and visits the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS) at Yale from August 1, 2009 to July 31, 2010. He is interested in cultural psychology and cultural sociology, social theory from the hermeneutical view, and the construction of the modern self of Chinese people. The collection of his several papers and book reviews advocating the hermeneutical approach has been sent by IS into the process of the application and examination of the CASS Press. The proposal of his visit is to make a theoretical framework of his empirical study which is a “deep description” of the identity crisis of contemporary Chinese people from the hermeneutical view. (Ph. D, Sociology, CASS, 2003; MA, Sociology, CASS, 1996; BA, Psychology, 1989) (Visiting Fellow, August 2009 – August 2010)

Marc de Leeuw
Independent Researcher

Marc De Leeuw is affiliated with the CCS as an independent researcher for the academic year 2009-2010. He is also a researcher with the University for Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands. His Ph.D. examines the dialectic of fallibility and capability within the philosophical anthropology of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur with an emphasis on questions of narrative, self, memory and ethics. Currently, he is also working on a manuscript, together with Sonja van Wichelen, on the crisis of liberalism and tolerance within the contemporary Dutch public sphere. His main interests concern theories of (individual and collective) identity, culture, and ethics within the fields of continental philosophy, cultural sociology, comparative literature, gender studies and political history.

Natasha Kirsten Kraus
Independent Researcher

Natasha Kirsten Kraus is a visiting independent scholar for the 2009-10 academic year. Her book, “A New Type of Womanhood”: Social Movement and Discursive Politics in Antebellum America has recently been published 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)