Center for Cultural Sociology

Johannes Lang
Danish Institute for International Studies

Johannes Lang holds degrees in psychology from the University of Exeter and the University of Copenhagen, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2009 and has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the psychology of genocide. He completed courses in philosophy, law, and government as well at the University of Oslo and at Harvard. Lang is a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology, studying the social psychology of the Nazi death camps and social psychology’s theoretical potentials and limitations vis-a-vis history and sociology. His most recent publication, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Fall, 2010), is entitled “Questioning Dehumanization: Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the Nazi Concentration and Death Camps.”
(CCS Post-doctoral Fellow, September 2010-February 2011)

Peter Meylakhs
Centre for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg, Russia

Peter Meylakhs, Ph.D. (sociology) is a qualitative sociologist, who works at Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. He defended his dissertation in St. Petersburg State University in 2007. Peter Meylakhs has participated in more than a dozen studies devoted to drug use and blood-borne viruses. In 2008-2009 he was a Fogarty fellow at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. He worked as a researcher at National Development and Research Institute, New York, where he studied how long-term drug injectors manage to stay HIV and Hepatitis C free. In 2010 Peter Meylakhs was a member of Scientific Committee of XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna (Track D: Psycho-Social and Behavioral Sciences Committee).

His main research interests include studying discourses on risk and risk-taking behaviors, cultural theory of risk, cultural aspects of drug use, and Durkheimian sociology. Currently, he is developing Douglasian cultural theory of risk as applied to various phenomena that elicit heightened intensity of society’s collective sentiments. His other research interests lie in the symbolic interactionist approach to drug use, including such problematics as self and identity of drug users.
(CCS Post-doctoral Fellow, Academic Year, 2010-2011)

Eric Woods
London School of Economics, UK

A research student in the Government Department at the LSE, Eric is currently writing up his dissertation, entitled From Saviour to Sinner: the Anglican Church of Canada and the Trauma of the Indian Residential Schools. In this project, Eric eschews explanations that focus on the rise of minority politics and, instead, goes in search of an internal, cultural explanation for why many members of ethnic majorities in the West feel responsible for wrongs committed by their predecessors. To summarize, he argues that the “circle of responsibility” is widened because of efforts to return to ethnic majorities their sacrality. The first paper to come out this project, ‘the cultural pragmatics of official apologies’, will hopefully emerge published sometime in 2011. In addition to exploring the religio-cultural logic of the social life, Eric has an abiding interest in settler-indigenous relations and problems associated with accommodating minority nationalisms. To this end, Eric recently completed an article entitled ‘rethinking nations and nationalism in canada’ that will appear in Ethnicities in 2011 and is co-editing (with Robert Schertzer) a special issue on managing ethnic conflict to appear in Commonwealth and Comparative Politics in 2011. In keeping with this, for the past two years, Eric chaired the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) and while at this post played an integral role in conceiving and organising three international academic conferences and two public lecture series. Eric is also a student member of the Nations and Nationalism editorial team. A late-comer to the Strong Program, but who has nevertheless become entranced by the possibilities it offers, Eric is extremely grateful for the opportunity to be swept into the effervescence being generated at the CCS for the 2010-2011 academic year.
(Visiting Graduate Student, Academic Year, 2010-2011)

Lizzie Seal
Durham University, UK

Lizzie is has been Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University since 2008. She is currently researching public attitudes to the death penalty in England and Wales, 1930-65. This project aims to analyse the everyday meanings of capital punishment during this era. The political dimensions of the abolition of the death penalty, in terms of the parliamentary process and the campaigning activities of interest groups, have been well covered. Very little attention has been given to the general public’s conceptions of execution. The project explores the cultural life of punishment against the socio-cultural history of mid twentieth-century Britain and is researched from sources such as the letters that Home Secretaries received about particular capital cases. It is funded by grants from the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Academy. One of Lizzie’s other main research interests is gender representations of women who kill, on which she has published a book entitled Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill.
(CCS Visiting Fellow, January 17 – March 6, 2011)

Maria Luengo
Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain

Maria Luengo is a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain). Her work focuses on the cultural dimensions of journalism, with a specific interest in the typologies of professional values and attitudes in the 21st Century. She is a participant in the ethics and excellence in news information: introducing and consolidating ethical practices in Spanish media corporations, a national project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Her research interests also deal with the epistemology of journalism, specially the symbolic approach and the narrative models applied to academic inquiry in the field. During her stay at the CCS at Yale, she will be conducting research on the roots and links between cultural currents and social narratives, in order to explain the current trends of story telling as a way of narrating news and the journalists as storytellers.
(Visiting Fellow, January 31 – July 29, 2011)

Jonathan Roberge
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Mondialisation, Citoyenneté et Démocratie, UQAM

Jonathan Roberge’s 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)
(Independent Researcher, Academic year, 2010-2011)

Andrea Voyer

Andrea Voyer (Ph.D, MS, Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison; MA, BA, University of Chicago) is a CCS Visiting Researcher for the 2010-2011 academic year. She is interested in the influence of multiculturalism on immigrant incorporation, the constitution of the civil sphere in locations where immigrants settle, and the manner in which immigrants embrace existing and create new ethno-racial identities. Her dissertation, “Doing Difference: Diversity Training, Diversity Talk, and Somali Immigrant Incorporation in Lewiston, Maine,”
examines the meanings and practices structuring the reception and management of Somali settlement, and the nature of Somali identity in a Maine town. She is currently completing a book manuscript based upon her dissertation project. She is also developing a program of cross-national research on multiculturalism, and designing a study of American ethnic festivals. (Ph.D, MS, Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison; MA, BA, University of Chicago)
(Independent Researcher, Academic year, 2010-2011)

Christian Morgner
Cambridge University, UK

Dr Christian Morgner is an affiliate researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge (UK) and also lectures at Sotheby’s Institute London (UK) and at the University of Lucerne (CH). Christian Morgner’s current research, ‘art and world society’ analyses globalisation trends in the art world. This project deals with a neglected subject in world society and globalisation studies, that of the arts. Since there is hardly any sound research or hard data available, a strong empirical focus seemed to be necessary when the project was initiated. The author conducted intense ethnographic research in London’s art districts and gallery scene, collected a large amount of statistical data, and interviewed leading art experts and curators of large-scale exhibitions such as the Documenta, Gwangju Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale, Biennale of Istanbul, Whitney Biennale and Dak’Art (others will follow). During his stay at the CCS at Yale, he is conducting additional research on New York’s art scene. The attempt of the project is thereby to identify the structures that cause and contribute to the world formation of the art world and to develop theoretical concepts through which we can describe those global developments and processes.
(CCS Visiting Fellow, Summer 2010)

Diane Grams
Tulane University

Diane Grams is an assistant professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans. Prior to joining Tulane’s faculty in 2007, she served as the associate director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago (2003-2007), and the executive director of The Peace Museum in Chicago (1992-1998). She is
currently working on a third book provisionally titled, Chicago and New Orleans, A Comparative Analysis of Local Art Production as Object or Performance. This is comparative study contrasting two theoretical frameworks of urban culture: one in which social inequality is maintained through cultural objects and institutions and the other in which social order is structured through performance. Video clips and photographs from her current ethnographic research on the New Orleanian public parades by Mardi Gras Krewes, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs can be seen on youtube. Among her other books are: Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago, (University of Chicago Press 2010) and Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts (Grams and Farrell, Rutgers University Press 2008).
(CCS Visiting Fellow, Fall 2010)