Sociology Faculty Rack Up ASA Awards
From tracing the connection between architecture and post-war European state politics, to building theoretical frameworks to predict the future, to assessing online journalism’s “clickability” phenomenon, it is an exciting time for academic exploration in The New School for Social Research’s sociology department. The program’s curriculum compels students to take an interdisciplinary approach to examining contemporary public problems. An impressive group of faculty members guides these students along their paths of inquiry, and the American Sociological Association (ASA) has taken note. The century-old organization, comprised of over 13,000 teachers, researchers, practitioners, and students, just recognized three New School academics for their outstanding contributions to the field this past year.
The awards reflect the diverse areas of research covered in the program. Virag Molnar, who teaches sociology at Eugene Lang College, won the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book for her tome, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State formation in Postwar Central Europe. Director of graduate studies, Iddo Tavory received the Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article for “Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation.” Co-written with University of Southern California professor Nina Eliasoph, the article was published in the American Journal of Sociology. And lastly, incoming Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Angèle Christin won the 2014 Shils-Coleman Award for Best Student Paper, which recognizes a professional-level paper written without a faculty co-author. Her work is titled “Counting Clicks: Quantification and Commensuration in Online Journalism.”
Sociology department co-chair, Jeff Goldfarb notes that the awards are further proof of the strong tradition of critical research the department was founded upon. “The papers and books honored are the work of our distinguished young colleagues, but the work exemplifies our department’s strengths and extends them. Theory, culture, the history of the present, and urban sociology are all central to the department and are creatively developed in these works,” he says. The awards will be given at the ASA meetings taking place in San Francisco later this summer. Learn more about The New School’s sociology program.