SRA New Members 2026

Seth Abrutynis Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, where he studies Sociological Theory, Youth Suicide, Emotions, Social Psychology, and Culture. His work can be found in outlets like American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, and Sociological Forum. He is a former recipient of ASA Theory Section’s Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting (2024), serves on several editorial boards including Society and Mental Health and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, and is former co-editor of the ASA’s public-facing journal, Contexts.

Delia Baldassarri is the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Sociology and Politics at New York University.  Active in the areas of political and economic sociology, social networks, and computational social science, her current work challenges common wisdom about mass political polarization in the U.S. She investigates the social basis of political pluralism and shows how ordinary citizens resist sorting into Republican or Democratic camps. In another line of work, she studies the emergence of cooperation in complex, diverse societies and how communities respond to adverse events.  Her honors include the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Freeman Award, the Raymond Boudon Award, and various ASA and other societies awards. Her work has appeared in Science, PNAS, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Political Science.

Deirdre Bloome is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She is the director of the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy. Her work focuses on socioeconomic mobility, racial inequality, family demography, and quantitative methods. One question uniting several of her current projects is how to precisely map the connections between contemporary and historical inequalities. Her research has been published in sociology, demography, and general-science journals; it has been supported by funders including the NIH, NSF, and RSF; and it has received awards from organizations including the PAA and ASA. She is particularly honored to have received the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award, named in recognition of one of her dissertation advisors. 

Wayne H. Brekhus is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Missouri. His work analyzes how socio-culturally influenced cognitive processes of attention and inattention, identity construction, and categorization shape perceptions of social reality and contribute to social difference and social inequalities. He is the author of The Sociology of Identity: Authenticity, Multidimensionality, and Mobility (Polity Press, 2020), Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality (Polity Press, 2015), Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and co-editor of Interpreting Identities: Dimensions of Power, Presence, and Belonging (with Susie Scott; Bristol University Press, 2025), The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism (with Thomas DeGloma and William Ryan Force; Oxford University Press, 2024), and The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology (with Gabe Ignatow; Oxford University Press, 2019).

David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University and an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University. He is the author, among other books, of The Culture of Control (2001), Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010), and The Welfare State: A Very Brief Introduction (2016). His most recent book is Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton, 2025). At NYU, he regularly teaches a graduate class on Classical Social Theory as well as seminars on the penal state and the welfare state.

Prema Kurien is Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University, the former Director of the South Asian Center, and former President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is a scholar of international migration, politics, race, ethnicity and religion. She is the author of four sole-authored books and over 70 other sole-authored publications. Her latest book, Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization among New Americans was published in January 2025. Her work has been recognized with a career award, an anti-racist scholarship award, three book awards, six article awards, and two teaching awards.

Joya Misra is a Distinguished Professor in Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has been Editor of Gender & Society (2011-2015), Co-Editor of the American Sociological Review, (2026-2028), Vice President (2019-2020), and President (2023-2024) of the American Sociological Association. Her work falls into the subfields of race/gender/class, work & labor, and political sociology. She has won more than six million in funding, published four books and more than 100 articles, chapters, and essays, including in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, Social Forces, and Social Problems.

G. Cristina Mora is Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. Her research focuses on race, immigration, Latino identity, panethnicity, political trust, and inequality, with groundbreaking scholarship on the construction of Hispanic/Latino identity in the United States, especially through her influential book Making Hispanics. Mora’s major contributions include theorizing panethnicity, racial classification, Latino political incorporation, and public understandings of inequality, reshaping scholarship on ethnicity, identity formation, and institutional power. Her work has earned prestigious recognition, including the ASA Distinguished Dissertation Award, Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Awards, UC Berkeley equity and mentoring honors, and statewide commendations. 

Ann Morning is the Divisional Dean for Social Sciences, Vice Dean for Global and Strategic Initiatives, and James Weldon Johnson Professor of Sociology in New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Science. Her research focuses on race and the sociology of science, especially as they pertain to census classification worldwide and to individuals’ concepts of difference.  She is the author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (University of California Press 2011), An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States (with Marcello Maneri, Russell Sage 2022), and numerous articles.

Ted Mouw is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center.  His research interests are inequality, labor markets, and immigration.  In his research on labor markets, his focus is on occupational mobility and careers, and the interplay between changes in the occupational structure and individual mobility.  His current research on immigration focuses on the ethnic economy, neighborhood mobility, and second-generation language use.  He is currently the faculty co-director of the Triangle Census Research Data Center.  He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan.

David Pedulla is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. His research agenda examines the consequences of nonstandard, contingent, and precarious employment for workers’ social and economic outcomes as well as the processes leading to race and gender labor market stratification. David’s research has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, andother academic journals and his book, Making the Cut, was published by Princeton University Press. He was previously a member of the faculty of Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin and received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University.

Andrew J. Perrin is SNF Agora Professor and Chair of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. A political and cultural sociologist, his research focuses on the social and cultural foundations for American democratic citizenship and institutions. He is author or translator of five books, including most recently American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for 20 years before joining Johns Hopkins in 2021. He is currently completing a book project on the failures of public argument in the United States.

Jake Rosenfeld is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. He researches processes of pay determination and workers’ understandings of their pay in the advanced democracies. He is the author of numerous academic articles and two books on the subject, What Unions No Longer Do (2014, Harvard University Press) and You’re Paid What You’re Worth, and Other Myths of the Modern Economy (2021, Harvard University Press). His popular writing appears in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review to the American Prospect and Dissent Magazine.

Richard T. Serpe is an emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Kent State University. His primary research focuses on the relationship between identity/self and social action. His most recent research focuses on prominence, salience, and verification of multiple identities simultaneously as predictors of emotion, self-esteem, self-efficacy, authenticity, anxiety, and depression. He received the Cooley-Mead Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association Social Psychology Section in 2025. He has been the principal investigator on over 40 studies funded by NIH, NIMH, NSF, CDC, Foundations, and other Federal, State, County, and Municipal agencies. He served as the editor of Social Psychology Quarterly and Sociological Perspectives.

Laurel Smith-Doerr is Provost Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst, and currently co-Editor of ASR. Her scholarship investigates the organization of science/technology to understand how knowledge production can serve people more broadly. She is currently supported by an interdisciplinary NSF grant on the Future of Trucking, and in 2026-27 will be Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation to write up what she’s learned from truckers about working with automation and how they imagine the future. Curiosity about organizations led her to serve in roles like NSF Program Officer and inaugural director of the UMass Institute for Social Science Research.

Yang Su is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in social movements and political sociology. For his book Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, he received an honorable mention for the 2024 ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. His earlier honors include the 2012 Barrington Moore Book Award in Comparative and Historical Sociology for his book Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution. 

Robert Vargas is professor of sociology and director of the Justice Project at the University of Chicago. He studies how politics is built, concealed, and exercised through public-safety institutions and technology markets, with a focus on the forces shaping policing, urban violence, and city responses to social problems. Vargas is the award-winning author of two books. Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio brought a political analysis to urban violence, showing how ward redistricting shaped block-level conflict in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. Uninsured in Chicago: How the Social Safety Net Leaves Latinos Behind(NYU Press) is a longitudinal and intersectional ethnography of uninsured Chicagoans navigating the Affordable Care Act. He has published in Social Problems, Criminology, Social Science and Medicine, and numerous public venues. His work has been featured in NBC News, Telemundo, Univision, the Chicago Tribune, and NPR. Vargas has received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the David Hoeft Award for Newly Tenured Faculty at the University of Chicago.

Ashton Verdery is a Professor of Sociology, Demography, and Social Data Analytics in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, a co-funded faculty member of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Associate Director of the Population Research Institute, and Director of the Collaborative on Population Aging Disparities at The Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He researches and teaches about cross-national demographic, family, and social network changes linked to individual and population health, emphasizing novel computational and mathematical methods to sample hard-to-survey groups and model kinship and social networks. 

Andrés Villarreal is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Faculty Fellow at the California Center for Population Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He conducts research in the areas of international migration, race and ethnicity, social stratification and health. Much of his research focuses on Latin America and the Latin American-origin population in the U.S. In an ongoing project, he is examining the long-term economic assimilation of immigrants in the U.S. using administrative data and other sources. He has published extensively in leading sociology and demography journals, and his research has been supported by federally funded grants.