Sociology

Faculty | Emeritus Faculty | Associate Research Scholars | Lecturers

Elizabeth M. Armstrong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology with joint affiliations in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Office of Population Research.   Her   research interests include public health, the history and sociology of medicine, risk in obstetrics, and medical ethics. She is currently conducting research on diseases and agenda-setting, and on fetal personhood and the evolution of obstetrical practice and ethics. She is the author or coauthor of articles in Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Marriage and the Family, International Family Planning Perspectives, and Studies in Family Planning and is the author of Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 1998-2000. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.

Delia Baldassarri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests are in the fields of economic sociology, political sociology, and methodology of social research, with a focus on social networks and influence dynamics, collective action, cooperation and economic development, human decision-making, public opinion and political behavior, civil society, conflict, and social integration. Her current research projects include a field experiment on the impact of social and spatial networks on cooperation and economic development in rural Uganda; and a research on inequality in political representation in the USA. She has written articles on civil society inter-organizational networks, formal models of collective action, dynamics of interpersonal influence, political polarization, public opinion and voting behavior. Her book The Simple Art of Voting. The Cognitive Shortcuts of Italian Voters (Il Mulino, 2005) has been awarded the Italian Political Science Association Prize for the Best Book in Political Science by a young scholar.

Miguel A. Centeno is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. .  From 2003 to 2007, he served as the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.  From 1997-2004 he also served as Master of Wilson College at Princeton. He has published many books as author or editor including Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (2nd. 1997), Blood and Debt: War and Statemaking in Latin America(2002), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory and Latin America, (2000), Discrimination in an Unequal World (2010) and Global Capitalism (2010). He is currently working on several book projects including: Paper Leviathans: State Building in the Iberian World and War and Society as well as an essay on the rise and fall of neoliberalism. Through the Mapping Globalization project, he has worked on improving the quantitative scholarship available on globalization. In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program, which provides intensive supplemental training for lower income students in three local high schools.  For this work, he was recently awarded the Jefferson Award for Public Service and the Bonner Foundation Award. From 1980 to 1985 he worked in advertising and private marketing consulting dealing with the US Hispanic Market.

Paul DiMaggio is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. He has written widely on organizational analysis, sociology of culture, and social inequality. Among the several books he has written or edited are The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (with Walter Powell); Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (with Francie Ostrower); and The 21st-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective.   He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-85) and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). He has also served on the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and on the board of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.   His interests include the sociology of art and culture, social stratification, economic sociology, complex organizations, and the social implications of technology. He is Director of the Center for the Study of Social Organization, active in the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Information Technology and Public Policy. He is involved in research on inequality of access to the new digital technologies, new approaches to identifying patterns in attitude data, and patterns of participation in the arts.

Mitchell Duneier is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and author of Slim’s Table (Chicago), Sidewalk (FSG), On Ghettos (with Alice Goffman, forthcoming FSG, 2011), and Introduction to Sociology (with Giddens et. al., Ninth Edition, 2012).  His ethnographic film, Sidewalk (with Barry Alexander Brown. 2010) begins where the book ended and updates his stories of the vendors on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. [It is available at no charge by contacting cindy@princeton.edu.] A graduate of the University of Chicago, he works in the traditions of urban ethnography that began there in the 1920s.  Recent graduate seminars include “Ethnography and Public Policy,” “The Chicago School,” and “Ethnographic Methods.”  Undergraduate courses  include “Introduction to Sociology,” “The Ghetto,” and “Sociology from E-Street: Bruce Springsteen’s America.” 

Thomas J. Espenshade is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. He is director of the National Study of College Experience (NSCE) and Campus Life in America Student Survey (CLASS) projects. His past research has concentrated on social demography, with a particular emphasis on population economics, mathematical demography, family and household demography, and contemporary immigration to the United States. His current research is focused on diversity in higher education; recent articles include "Diversity Outcomes of Test-Optional Policies,” "The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class Rank, and Elite College Admission," "Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Academic Success in College," and "The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities." His new book from Princeton University Press is No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Espenshade received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton in 1972. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty in 1988, he held teaching or research positions at the University of California-Berkeley, Bowdoin College, Florida State University, The Urban Institute, and Brown University.

Patricia Fernandez-Kelly holds a joint position as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and as a Research Associate in the Office of Population Research. Her field of interest is international development with an emphasis on immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender. She is the author of For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier, listed as a favorite title by Contemporary Sociology, a book which has never gone out of print since 1983 when it was first published. With filmmaker Lorraine Gray, she produced the Emmy-Award winning documentary "The Global Assembly Line," which focuses on the effects of economic globalization on working women and their families in the Philippines, Mexico, and the U.S. Her latest book (edited with Jon Shefner, University of Tennessee) is Out of the Shadows: Political Action and Informal Economy in Latin America (Penn State University Press 2006). Her current law-related work includes two projects: (a) in collaboration with the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF) research among Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants towards the creation of a legal advocacy clinic; and (b) in collaboration with Hispanic Americans for Progress (HAP), a not-for-profit organization created and maintained by long-term inmates at the New Jersey State Prison, research and advocacy focusing on the American prison system.

Angel Harris is an Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies. He is also a faculty member in the Joint Ph.D. Program in Social Policy and Sociology, and a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research, the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, and Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. Harris' research interests include social inequality, policy, and education.  His work focuses on the social psychological determinants of the racial achievement gap. Specifically, he examines the factors that contribute to differences in academic investment among African Americans, Latino/as, Asian Americans, and Whites. Harris also studies the impact that adolescents' perceptions of opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility have for their academic investment, and the long-term effects of youths' occupational aspirations both within the United States and Europe.

Scott Lynch is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and a faculty fellow in the Office of Population Research.  His interests are broadly in social epidemiology, the demography of aging, and statistical methods. More specifically, he studies how social and behavioral factors, like race, socioeconomic status, stress, social support, etc. influence health and how they do so differently across the lives of individuals and across time. In this process, he spends a considerable amount of time developing and examining statistical methods to make full use of the capabilities of, and handle the limitations of, social science data. 

Doug Massey is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, he is the current president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is a member of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences and co-editor of the Annual Review of Sociology. He currently serves as Director of the Office of Population Research. Massey’s research focuses on international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty, stratification, and Latin America, especially Mexico. He is the author, most recently, of Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times, coauthored with Magaly Sanchez and Published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Sara McLanahan is William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School, and is Director of the Center for Research on Child Well-Being. She is the coauthor of Fathers under Fire; Social Policies for Children; Growing Up with a Single Parent; Child Support and Child Well-Being; and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma. She has served on the boards of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America and is currently a member of the board on Families, Youth, and Children of the National Academy of Sciences. An associate of the Office of Population Research, her research interests include family demography, stratification, and social policy. She teaches courses on poverty and family policy. Ph.D. University of Texas.

Devah Pager is an Associate Professor of Sociology. She is the Co-Director of the Joint Degree Program in Social Science and Social Policy, and a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. Pager’s work has featured the use of field experiments to study discrimination facing racial minorities and ex-offenders in low wage labor markets. Representative publications include, “Discrimination in a Low Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment” (ASR, 2010); “Walking the Talk: What Employers Say Versus What They Do” (ASR, 2005); and “The Mark of a Criminal Record” (AJS, 2003). Her book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007) builds on these themes of racial inequality and criminal justice intervention in contemporary society. Pager holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alejandro Portes is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University.  He   is the author of 250 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. He has published 30 books and special issues. His books include City on the Edge – the Transformation of Miami (California 1993), co-authored with Alex Stepick and winner of the Robert Park Award for best book in urban sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for best book in urban anthropology in 1995; and Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd edition, (California 2006), designated as a Centennial Publication by the University of California Press in 1996. His current research is on the adaptation process of the immigrant second generation in comparative perspective, the role of institutions on national development, and immigration and the American health system.

Georges Reniers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with joint appointments in the Woodrow Wilson School and Office of Population Research. Most of his work has been on the demography of African populations.  He has published on methodological issues in the measurement and estimation of HIV prevalence and AIDS mortality, and on the behavioral mechanisms that account for the unequal spread of HIV. He is particularly interested in the interplay between individual agency and marriage market constraints, and their implications for individual exposure to HIV and population-level HIV prevalence.  His current research focuses on Malawi, South Africa and Ethiopia. In South Africa Reniers is studying the impact that community-based interventions have on the uptake of health services. In Ethiopia his research tracks AIDS mortality following the rollout of an antiretroviral program. Highlights of recent publications include “Polygyny and the spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa: a case of benign concurrency” (2010) and “Refusal bias in HIV prevalence estimates from nationally representative seroprevalence surveys” (2009) inAIDS, and “Marital strategies for regulating exposure to HIV” in Demography (2008). Reniers received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for the United Nations in Ethiopiaprior to entering graduate school. 

Gilbert Rozman is Musgrave Professor of Sociology. He specializes on Northeast Asian societies: China, Japan, Korea, and Russia. He has compared them, most recently concentrating on national identities. In addition, he works on sociological factors in international relations, emphasizing mutual perceptions and barriers to regionalism. His recent books include: Chinese Strategic Thought toward Asia, U.S. Leadership, History and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia, and East Asian National Identities: Commonalities and Differences.

Martin Ruef is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in sociology. His research interests lie at the intersection of organizational, economic, and historical sociology. He has written on the institutional evolution of the healthcare field, as well as the agricultural and industrial transformation of the American South following the Civil War. Professor Ruef’s books include Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations (with W. Richard Scott and colleagues), Organizations Evolving (with Howard Aldrich), and The Sociology of Entrepreneurship (co-edited with Michael Lounsbury). In a recent volume, The Entrepreneurial Group, he examines the interplay of social networks, identities, and collective action among individuals trying to create new business organizations.

Matthew J. Salganik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. His interests include social networks, quantitative methods, and web-based social research. One main area of his research has focused on developing network-based statistical methods for studying populations most at risk for HIV/AIDS. A second main area of work has been using the World Wide Web to collect and analyze social data in innovative ways. His research has been published in journals such as Science, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. His research is currently funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and Google.

Kim Lane Scheppele is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with joint appointments in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, and is Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs. . Prior to joining the Princeton faculty in 2005 she was the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law and professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary field is comparative constitutional law and she has spent nearly half of the last decade doing field work under three different grants from the National Science Foundation in post-socialist countries undergoing constitutional transformations. She has published extensively in both law reviews and social science journals on post-socialist constitutionalism and has a book in progress called "How Constitutions Work: Rethinking Constitutional Theory Through Constitutional Ethnography." She also conducts research on constitutions under stress, most recently writing about post-9/11 responses in comparative perspective in a series of law-review articles as well as a book called "The International State of Emergency." Her book Legal Secrets won special recognition from the American Sociological Association and, in an earlier form, a dissertation prize from the American Political Science Association.

Paul Starr is Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, with joint appointments in the department and the Woodrow Wilson School.   He is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect . He received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine and the 2005 Goldsmith Book Prize for The Creation of the Media. His most recent book is Freedom's Power: The History and Promise of Liberalism. Professor Starr has written extensively on American society, politics, and both domestic and foreign policy. In 1990, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, he co-founded The American Prospect, a liberal magazine about politics, policy, and ideas. During 1993 he served as a senior advisor at the White House in the formulation of the Clinton health plan. He is currently working on a book about the new public and its problems.

Edward Telles is Professor of Sociology, having come to Princeton in 2008 after spending most of his career at UCLA. He has published widely in the area of immigration, race and ethnic relations, social demography and urban sociology. His books have won several major award including the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association (for Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil) and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in Social Demography, which he won twice (for Race in Another America and Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race with Vilma Ortiz). His articles have appeared in the top sociological journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review and Demography. He has fielded major surveys in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Colombia and has received grants from the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Haynes Foundation. He served as the Human Rights Program Officer for the Ford Foundation in Brazil from 1997 to 2000. He has been a visiting fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation and is currently the Vice President of the American Sociological Association and the Principal Investigator for the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA).

Marta Tienda is Maurice P. During '22 Professor in Demographic Studies, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with joint affiliations in the Office of Population Research and the Woodrow Wilson School.   From 1997 to2002, she served as director of the Office of Population Research. She is co-author and co-editor of several books, including of The Hispanic Population of the United States (1987), Divided Opportunities (1988), The Color of Opportunity (2001), Youth in Cities (2002), Ethnicity and Causal Mechanisms (2005), Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies (2006), Hispanics and the Future of America (2006), and Africa on the Move (2006). She has published over 150 scholarly papers in academic journals and edited collections, in addition to numerous research bulletins and articles for a lay audience. She holds a BA in Spanish from Michigan State University and a MA and Ph.D., both in Sociology, from the University of Texas at Austin. She received honorary doctorates from The Ohio State University (2002), Lehman College (2003) and Bank Street College (2006).

Paul Willis is Lecturer with Rank of Professor, and editor and founder of the international journal Ethnography, based at Princeton.  He has published widely on work, culture, education, and method.  Among his many works are  Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs  and The Ethnographic Imagination.  After studying literature at Cambridge, he received a  PhD in 1972 from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. At Princeton he teaches seminars for juniors and seniors in research methods, the sociology of work, as well as the required course for concentrators, “Claims and Evidence in Sociology.”

Robert Wuthnow is Gerhard R. Andlinger `52 Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion. He has published widely in the sociology of religion, culture, and civil society. His publications include After the Baby Boomers:  How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion; America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity; and Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society.  His most recent books are Boundless Faith:  The Global Outreach of American Churches and Remaking the Heartland:   Middle America Since the 1950s.   His current research and teaching focuses on social change, the sociology of belonging, communities, rural America, religion and politics, and sociological theory.

King-To Yeung is an Assistant Professor of Sociology.   He is interested in how formalized organizational setups and routines interact with informal relations and organizational crises. He has studied different types of organizations with various degrees of formalization. A current project examines how Chinese state bureaucracy of the 19th century responded to large-scale social rebellions.   His areas of teaching interest include cultural sociology, sociological theory, and claims and evidence.

Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has published books on the development of life insurance, the changing economic and sentimental value of children, and on the place of money in social life. Her book, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton University Press, 2005) deals with the interplay of economic activity and personal ties, especially intimate ties, both in everyday practice and in the law. She has also studied topics ranging from economic ethics to consumption practices. She is currently working on a project about “circuits of commerce” which deals with distinctive set of social relations within which people carry on a variety of weighty economic activities. Different from markets, hierarchies, and networks, these economic connections include microcredits, migrant remittances, mutual credit associations, local currencies, coalitions within corporations, and care relations.   Her most recent book is Economic Lives:   How Culture Shapes the Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Howard Taylor taught at Princeton from 1973 until his retirement several years ago and is now Professor of Sociology Emeritus. His interests include social psychology, small groups, Afro-American studies, sociology of education and research methods. He   is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1998 Du Bois-Johnson-Fraizer Award from the American Sociology Association and the 2000 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. He has recently conducted research on African American leadership and elites, to be summarized in the forthcoming book The Black Elite Network in America. He is also at work on a book entitled Race, Class, and The Bell Curve in America.

Walter Wallace is Professor of Sociology Emeritus.   He is the author of numerous articles and books including The Logic of Science in Sociology, Sociological Theory, Principles of Scientific Sociology, and Malthus, Darwin, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Ibn Khaldun:   On Human Species Survival.   His work focuses on integrating multiple sociological theories into a single set of commonly held ideas.

Charles Westoff is Professor of Demographic Studies and Sociology, Emeritus . He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania and is former chair of the Department of Sociology and former Director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton.   The author of numerous articles and books, his interests include population   policy, comparative fertility in developing countries, fertility surveys, and family planning.

Ana Maria Goldani holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Demography from El Colegio de Mexico. She is currently Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research. She was a professor from July 200 to July 2008 at the University of California in Los Angeles. Before that, she was professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Sao Paulo, Brazil where she taught and had other professional activities. Shehas also participated extensively in national and international professional activities. Some of these activities include General Secretary of the Brazilian Population Association (ABEP), Coordinator of the Demographic Study Group (GEADE) at SEADE Foundation in Sao Paulo; member of the Committee on Comparative Fertility of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and Visiting Professor at the Center of Demographic and Urban Studies at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and at the Open University of Lisbon in Portugal.

Deborah Kaple is an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology.   She is interested in the organization and the organizational foundations of communist rule. She focuses on Stalinism, the Soviet Gulag, and the Sino-Soviet relationship. She also works on understanding the immigrant experience in the USA through fiction, poetry and essays. She has worked as an economic consultant, as a teacher, as an editor, and as a manager, and has written widely in scholarly, non-fiction and fiction publications. She is the author of Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Dream of a Red Factory: High Stalinism in China (Oxford University Press, 1994). Her next projects include  a history of the Soviet Advisors’ Program in China in the 1950s, and a comparative analysis of this program with others like it in Cuba and in 1930s Spain.

Michaela DeSoucey is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Social Organization and a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology.   She received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University in 2010, where she was also a Graduate Legal Studies Fellow.  She studies the interplay of social movements, markets, and state systems shaping the cultural and moral politics of food. Her dissertation, Gullet Politics: Contentious Foie Gras Politics and the Organization of Public Morality in the United States and France, won the 2010 SION (Social Interaction & Organizing at Northwestern) Arthur Stinchcombe Dissertation Prize in Organization Studies. An article drawn from her dissertation, “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union,” was published in June 2010 in the American Sociological Review and has won graduate student paper awards from the ASA sections of Political Sociology, Economic Sociology, and Sociology of Culture. Michaela has also conducted research and published articles on the rhetoric of organizational restructuring; local food movements; the regulation and institutionalization of the organic food industry; and the development of a market for grass-fed beef and dairy products.

Tey Meadow is the LGBT Studies-Cotsen Fellow and a lecturer in sociology. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and a J.D. degree from Fordham University School of Law. Her work examines the ways that law, political institutions and the family respond to challenges to gender and sexual classifications. Meadow is preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, "Telling Gender Stories: Parents, Doctors and the Transgender Child." She is teaching an undergraduate course in sociology on sex, gender and sexuality, and a freshman seminar entitled "From Mars and Venus: Cultural Ideas of Male/Female Difference."

Adam Slez recently received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests lie at the intersection of historical and political sociology, spanning a range of topics including the relationship between politics and markets, state-building and the formation of the political field, and the spatial organization of political cleavage structures. Using both spatial data analysis along with more traditional forms of historical inquiry, his recent work examines the way in which policies related to the expansion of the railroad network contributed to patterns of third-party mobilization in the American West over the course of the late-19^th century. His previous work on state and party formation in the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787 has appeared in the American Sociological Review. 

Sarah Thébaud is an American Sociological Association/National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Center for the Study of Social Organization and a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology. Often focusing on cross-cultural comparisons, her research integrates theory and methods from the areas of Gender, Economic Sociology, Social Psychology, Organizations, Work and Labor Markets, and Social Policy. Sarah recently completed her Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, where her dissertation utilized survey data and laboratory studies to investigate why men are approximately two times more likely than women to be entrepreneurs in most industrialized nations after accounting for gender differences in relevant resources. Her research has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly and Gender & Society and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In a current project, she is investigating the impact of the financial crisis on gender inequality in high-tech entrepreneurship.

Janet Vertesi is a member of the Princeton University Society of Fellows and a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology.   She received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University with a dissertation titled, “‘Seeing like a Rover’: Images in Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.”  Her research analyses the use of images to both conduct scientific investigations of Mars and plan robotic operations on its surface, demonstrating how interactions with and around Mars Rover  images create a social space that is both public and political.   She holds a B.A. in Religion, Literature and the Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University.   She has won many awards for her undergraduate and graduate work, including NSF, Mellon, Sage, SSHRC, and History of Science Society/NASA History Office Fellowships.   Her numerous publications cover a variety of topics in the history and sociology of science, technology, and visual studies, including “Picturing the Moon: Hevelius and Riccioli’s  Visual Debate,” “Robots in Space,” “Pygmalion’s Legacy: Cyborg Women in Science Fiction”  and an award-winning article published in Social Studies of Science (2008): “’Mind the Gap’: The London Underground Map and Users’ Experience of Urban Space.”   At Princeton she is working on developing her dissertation into a book, and will also pursue a second, interdisciplinary research project, “The Social Life of Spacecraft,” funded by an NSF grant, which introduces a comparative ethnographic aspect (a study of the Cassini mission to Saturn) to her analysis of the internal, socio-technical organization of space missions.   Her teaching experience as a graduate student included such courses as the history of computers, science in the public arena, and the sociology of science, as well as a Freshman seminar she designed on the relationship between science and art.  At Princeton she will teach courses on “The Sociology of Technology” and “The Art of Science, The Science of Art.”