Welcome to the Department of Sociology

Our Programs

Sociology at Arizona has a history of excellence in research and teaching, and has long been a wellspring of innovation in theory and methods.

Sociology explores and analyzes issues vital to our own lives, our communities, our nation, and the world. The undergraduate major provides a foundation for careers in many professional fields, and for graduate training as a sociologist in academia, government, business, or community agencies. Learn More ...


Our graduate training prepares students for careers in research and teaching. The Department is widely recognized as one of the top programs in the United States. Our faculty includes senior members who are nationally and internationally acknowledged authorities in their fields, and some of the best young scholars in the country. Learn More ...

Departmental News

Robin Stryker has been awarded an Earl H. Carroll Magellan Circle Fellowship.

Charles Ragin was elected to Council of the ASA Methodology Section.

Lane Kenworthy's chapter "Labor Market Activation" appeared in the Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Henry A. Walker's book, Building Experiments: Testing Social Theory, (with David Willer, University of South Carolina) has been published in Chinese by Chongqing University Press, May 2010.

Celestino Fernandez recently won the John David Arnold National Humanitarian and Service Award, the Cox Communications: Arizona Hispanic Man of the Year award and the LULAC Community Service Award.

Don Grant published "Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production" in the American Sociological Review (with Mary Nell Trautner, Liam Downey, and Lisa Thiebaud). (2010 75:479-504).

Jeff Sallaz's book, "The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Afirca," received the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the ASA's Section on Labor and Labor Movements. He also received a 2011 Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship for study in southeast Asia.

Charles Ragin published the second edition of Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method, with Lisa Amoroso (July 2010). He also recently presented workshops on Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Fuzzy Sets at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-Irvine, Syracuse University, and the 2010 meetings of the ASA.

Ronald Breiger (principal investigator) was awarded a $1.08 million grant funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Breiger, along with Brinton Milward, director of the UA School of Government and Public Policy, and investigators from two other universities (The University at Albany-SUNY, and the START Center at the University of Maryland), seeks to enhance and leverage existing open-source datasets relevant to violent non-state actors in order to develop new analytic tools to model human networks engaged in the pursuit of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons.

Ronald Breiger, along with Paul Cohen (head, UA Department of Computer Science) and Brinton Milward (director, UA School of Government and Public Policy), are co-principal investigators on a five-year, five-university, $7.5-million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant awarded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The purpose of the grant is to advance research that infers structure and forecasts dynamics on evolving networks. The principal investigator is P. Jeffrey Brantingham of UCLA.