Elaine Enriquez,
graduated with a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Arizona in 2001. She followed that adventure with two years in Kazakhstan, two years working in business, then two years studying for a Masters in Russian (University of Arizona).

Areas of sociological interest include economics, specifically informal economies, clan/networks in politics, and corruption. She is currently conducting research on prison economies. She looks forward to capitalizing on her language skills and previous experience to approach each of these areas in interesting and provocative ways.

Phillip Connor,
B.A Acadia University (Canada); MDiv Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary; M.A. McGill University. Phillip has worked on a number of research projects with religious organizations prior to beginning his graduate study at Princeton, including an online immigrant tracking system and a new church study. Phillip's general interests surround immigration and religion. His previous graduate work looked at the effect of religious context on immigrant religious participation over time in Canada, Quebec, and the United States. In the future, Phillip plans to investigate how multicultural versus melting pot incorporation policies for immigrants affect their religious outcomes.

Rachael-Heath Ferguson,
B.A. Sociology, Columbia University. Rachael's research interests include ethnography, inequality, culture, social networks, and urban sociology. Her current focus is on the structure and interactions of networked groups in the informal economy, notions of durable inequality, and the formation of social capital in disenfranchised populations. Previously, Rachael studied Philosophy and Theology at the University of Durham (England) and worked for several years as a Wall Street equities trader.

Jennifer Huynh,
B.A. Sociology (University of California, Berkeley), M.A. Anthropology (University of Bristol). Jennifer's general interests include immigration, ethnography, and race/ethnicity. Her previous research included work in central/southern Vietnam with racial minorities and in the United Kingdom with first and second generation Somali immigrants. Before joining Princeton, she worked as a sociology instructor in northeast China.

Julia Gelatt,
B.A. Sociology/Anthropology (Carleton College). Julia's research interests include immigration, immigrant assimilation, inequality, demography, and gender. Before coming to Princeton, Julia worked at the Migration Policy Institute, researching trends in immigrants and labor force growth, US retirees moving abroad, the second generation in fourteen US communities, and shifts in federal policies related to immigrant integration.

Jeffrey Lane,
B.A. in Sociology, Wesleyan University (2001). Jeffrey's research interests include race, social stratification, ethnography, criminality and deviance, and popular culture and imagery. Jeffrey is the author of Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), an exploration of race, culture, and individualism in professional and college men's basketball over the last thirty years. In 2002, Jeffrey founded Schoolhouse Tutors, a mentorship and tutoring program for middle school and high school students in his hometown of NYC.

Jayanti Owens,
Jayanti is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Entering in Fall 2007, Jayanti received her B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2006 completing majors in Policy Science, Sociology, and Educational Studies through the Honors Program. Her interests include social inequality, stratification and social mobility, higher education, education policy, and immigration. Before coming to Princeton, Jayanti was a research assistant in the Education Policy Center of The Urban Institute. Her past research has focused on shifts in federal higher education policy in the last 60 years and their impacts on poor and minority students opportunities for higher education and social mobility. She is also interested in the internationalization of higher education on campus diversity and issues related to immigrant and minority higher education. Jayanti is a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Michelle Phelps,
Michelle received her B.A. in Social Psychology from U.C. Berkeley in 2005. While attending U.C. Berkeley, Michelle interned at the Wiley Manual Courthouse in the pre-trial services department, tutored inmates at San Quentin State Prison, and worked for one year at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, where she authored a paper on the prison and parole systems in California for women. After leaving U.C. Berkeley, Michelle spent two years at the Center for Court Innovation in New York City, working on grant-writing and project reporting. She was also a math teacher/tutor at the Fortune Society. Michelle is currently interested in social control and deviance, legal sociology, the criminal justice system, and inequality.

LiErin Probasco,
B.A., Sociology/Anthropology, Swarthmore College. LiErin's research interests include organizations, inequality, culture, race/ethnicity, gender, and religion. Before attending Princeton, she worked at the Community Development Institute in East Palo Alto, CA, doing community-grounded research.

Alejandro Rivas, Jr.,
B.A. Human Biology (Health Policy), Stanford University, 2006. M.A. Sociology (Stratification and Inequality), Stanford University, 2006. Alex plans on studying immigration, in particular how both governmental and non-governmental institutions and organizations and their policies facilitate or hinder immigrants' ability to make the most of the resources America has to offer (education, health care, employment, housing, justice). In list form, he would probably say his interests are "immigration, social policy, mobility, demography, poverty, stratification, inequality, race and ethnicity, and making lists." Alex is a vegetarian, opened for The Who once (sort of), co-founded the Stanford University chapter of the Mexican Youth Durkheim Society (membership of 2), and when he grows up, he would like to be a sociology professor or an investment banker, whichever his doctoral work best prepares him for.

Daniel Schneider,
A.B. Brown University (Public Policy). Daniel's interests include social demography, economic sociology, and social policy. He is particularly interested in looking at the role of economic factors in family formation. Prior to coming to Princeton, Daniel worked for several years as Research Associate at Harvard Business School.

Michael Schlossman,
B.A. Anthropology and Sociology, Amherst College. M.Phil, Criminology, University of Cambridge. Michael's interests include deviance, criminal justice, inequality, culture, gender, and ethnography. He previously conducted ethnographic research on culture and decision-making in a juvenile drug court and historical research on trends in violence in Europe.

Mahesh Somashekhar,
B.S. Engineering Management Systems, Columbia University. Mahesh's research interests include the sociology of knowledge, culture, and organizations, and community sociology. His research in college analyzed the structure and evolution of social networks, and he hopes to further this research in graduate school using mixed methods. He has served as a research assistant in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political science, and demography. Prior to coming to Princeton, Mahesh built a word-translating database for Human Rights Watch, ran air pollution forecasting models for the Environmental Protection Agency, and studied the expense and compensation patterns of American foundations for the Urban Institute.

Liza Steele,
B.A. Political Science and Master of International Affairs, Columbia University; Liza's primary research interest is the role of religion in governance in Asia and Latin America. Before coming to Princeton, Liza worked as a project manager for primary research projects on media in Southeast Asia.

Naomi Sugie,
B.A. Urban Studies, Columbia University. Naomi's interests include race, inequality, and the criminal justice system. Previously, she worked at the Vera Institute of Justice on a variety of studies related to foster care, mental illness, jail reentry, and policing. She is co-author of a book of case studies profiling mothers living in New York City shelters entitled, Beyond the Shelter Wall.

LaTonya Trotter,
BA Williams College in Sociology and American Studies; MPH University of Washington. LaTonya's general interests include health disparities, social demography, and social stratification. Her work at the University of Washington focused on place level effects on health behaviors and health outcomes. Her work at Princeton will investigate how specific social policies have shaped "place" and try to understand how they create, replicate, or potentially intervene on the mechanisms that negatively impact health in poor and minority communities.

Monica Trujillo,
B.A. Sociology (University of Pennsylvania). Monica's broad interests include education, immigration, race and ethnicity, inequality, and stratification. Her previous research has looked at the effects of bilingual students on public schools in California and how high achieving minority students differ from the less achieving at elite universities.

Erik Vickstrom,
Erik Vickstrom graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Sociology and American Studies. After working at the Murray Research Center at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, he spent almost five years living and working in West Africa. He served as a Peace Corps English teacher in Guinea and then worked in Senegal as Assistant Director of an NGO devoted to cross-cultural training and resource development. After returning to the US, Erik worked on the USAID funded Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) project in Washington, DC. Erik's interests include international migration and development, inequality, social networks, and West Africa.

Kevin Woodson,
B.A., Political Science (Columbia University); J.D. (Yale Law School). Kevin's interests include legal sociology, gentrification, the American civil rights movement, American socio-economic stratification, the black middle-class, and urban poverty. Prior to coming to Princeton, Kevin worked for three years as a corporate litigator in Washington, D.C.

Sofya Aptekar,
B.A. in Sociology, Yale. Sofya's main areas of interest include culture, migration, and stratification and inequality. She has successfully completed the demography sequence at Office of Population Research. Sofya is currently working on her dissertation, which is a mixed methods examination of tensions in the social construction of nationhood at the critical juncture of citizenship acquisition by foreigners. She also studies immigrant organizations in Edison, New Jersey, and migration from the Baltic countries to Ireland. Before coming to Princeton, Sofya taught first grade in Austin, Texas.

Devra Jaffe-Berkowitz,
B.A. University of Pennsylvania, M.A. Rice University (Sociology of Religion)

Debbie Becher is completing a dissertation on the City of Philadelphia's use of eminent domain. To support growth and investment, U.S. city governments annually pursue thousands of private property "takings" and provide "just compensation" in return (5th Amendment, U.S. Constitution). This dissertation will offer the first comprehensive scholarly study of how ideas to use eminent domain develop; what processes a government uses to pursue these ideas; and what kinds of negotiations, conflicts, and justifications result. The project will develop theory on how the practice of property and the law support cooperation and enforce separation of government and business. Debbie's dissertation has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Center for Human Values (Princeton), Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars (Princeton), Hauser Foundation for Nonprofit Organizations (Harvard), the American Studies Program (Princeton), the Arthur Liman Fellowship (Princeton/ Yale Law School), and the Policy Research Institute for the Region (Princeton). Before coming to Princeton, Debbie earned a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia and worked for over a decade in community development and residential construction in Tucson, Arizona. (Dissertation Committee: Paul DiMaggio, Kim Lane Scheppele, Viviana Zelizer, Hendrik Hartog, Wendell Pritchett)

Michael O. Benediktsson,
B.A. Wesleyan. Michael's interests are in political sociology, urban sociology and globalization. After graduating from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in American Studies, he worked in political journalism and international humanitarian aid and advocacy.

Bart Bonikowski,
B.A. Queen's University (Canada); M.A. Duke University. Bart's researchinterests include the effects of social networks on the population distribution of tastes and attitudes, the cultural consequences ofindividuals' interactions with state institutions, and the relationship between the possession and use of cultural resources and social inequality.His past work has examined the generation of risk-based social classification schemata by state surveillance practices, ecological nichecompetition among musical genres, and the impact of trade networks on cross-national attitudinal similarity. He is currently conducting researchon the institutional bases of national identification in the United States and Canada.

Donnell Butler,
M.A., Sociology, Princeton University, 2001. Interests: higher education, gender/class/ethnicity, diversity and multiculturalism, social policy. Donnell is the Campus Life in America Student Survey (CLASS) project director. The Ford Foundation has granted the CLASS project (http://class.princeton.edu) two additional years of funding to continue this important study on diversity and higher education. The primary focus of the project over these next two years will be on (1) longitudinal data collection; (2) data analysis; and (3) outreach and dissemination. In addition to serving as the project director for CLASS, Donnell is also a data analyst for the Princeton University Program in Teacher Preparation and Forum Coordinator and Evaluation Specialist for the Princeton University Preparatory Program. Back when he had a life, Donnell's personal interests included photography, sabermetrics, tennis, and all things related to the 1980s. For more information on Donnell Butler, including his curriculum vitae, please visit his webpage at http://www.djbutler.org.

Sharon Bzostek,
B.A. Rice University (Sociology and Policy Studies). Before coming to Princeton, Sharon worked for several years in the Social Indicators content area at Child Trends in Washington, DC. Her research interests include demography, inequality, family, poverty, and health.

Rebecca Casciano,
Rebecca's interests include urban sociology, poverty, family demography, social policy, and the welfare state. Her dissertation is a case study of a nonprofit social service agency that uses machine politics to gain access to resources and opportunities for a poor, predominantly Hispanic community in New Jersey. The dissertation focuses on whether and how the practice of machine politics influences the distribution of resources across this community.

Nick Ehrmann,
received his BA in American Studies and History from Northwestern University in 2000.  While working as a Teach For America corps member in Washington D.C. for two years, Nick founded "I Have A Dream" -Project 312.  Project 312 (www.project312.org) is a long-term youth development organization that empowers thirty of his elementary students to achieve while providing a guaranteed opportunity for higher education.  At Princeton, Nick works from within sociology, OPR, and the Woodrow Wilson School on issues of inequality, urban sociology, poverty, and public policy.  He can be reached at ehrmann@princeton.edu.

James Gibbon,
BA Wheaton College. James' main interests include religion, migration and the Near East, with special emphasis on the role of Islam in modern Turkey and the experiences of Muslim immigrants in the U.S. Before attending Princeton, James spent three years in Istanbul, initially working as the finance manager for a disaster relief project and later teaching English as a foreign language.

Alice Goffman
Alice Goffman is interested in ethnography, race, the city, and social interaction. Her current project looks at the impact of the prison boom on the daily lives of a group of poor young men in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Her next project will be a study of middle class domestic interaction, with a focus on hosts and guests.

Amir Goldberg,
B.A Computer Science and Film & Television (Tel Aviv University), M.A. Sociology (Goldsmiths College, University of London). Amir is interested in the intersection of technology and culture, and the ways in which our so-called 'network age' is reflected in organizational changes and patterns of work, leisure and urban development. His M.A. thesis explored the emerging iPod culture using the concepts of complexity theory. Prior to joining Princeton, Amir worked, amongst other things, as a telecoms consultant, a software programmer, and a writer for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz.

Conrad Hackett,
B.A. Seattle Pacific University, M. Div., M.A. Princeton Theological Seminary. Recently Conrad has been studying the limited appeal of mainline Protestant campus ministries. At Princeton Seminary he conducted research on globalization's impact upon American teenagers. In recent summers he has been researching the interreligious relationships and attitudes of denominations and individuals for Robert Wuthnow's Public Role of Mainline Protestantism project. Conrad is particularly interested in how individuals and institutions are responding to, and being shaped by, religious pluralism in America.

Sara Nephew Hassani,
B.A. Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. Sara's interests include communications, economic sociology, and the sociology of law. Her present work deals with issues related to Internet accessibility as well as with political struggles around new information technologies. She is also interested in environmental sociology and has been collaborating with three other students on a project that explores the way ranching communities in the American West have been affected by and deal with coalbed methane extraction, strip mining, and oil drilling.

Becky Yang Hsu,
B.A. Sociology, Yale University. Becky's dissertation examines the effect of religion and ethics on the delivery of international social services and development efforts such as microcredit programs in rural areas. Her research interests include religion, international organizations, and development. She has written papers on faith-based social services, religion and economic development, social capital, and trust.

Kenneth Jamison,
B.A. English Literature (Washington University in St. Louis). Kenneth's research interests include sociology of culture, race, mass media and regional sociology, with a focus on the influence of U.S. popular culture in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Prior to attending Princeton, Kenneth spent two and a half years in Taipei, Taiwan, studying Chinese at Chung Hua University and Japanese at Eikan Language School. During that time, he also trained teachers and taught English as a foreign language.

Pierre Antoine Kremp,
BA, Economics, MA Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. Pierre graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure in 2004, after completing his master's thesis on the diffusion of stock ownership in France. His main research interests include economic sociology, inequality and sociology of culture.

Hilary Levey graduated from Harvard University (AB, 2002), magna cum laude, with highest honors in Sociology, and from Cambridge University in 2003 with an M.Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformations (Faculty of Social and Political Sciences) as a Gates-Cambridge Fellow. A 2007-8 Spencer dissertation fellow and a 2006-7 honorific Harold W. Dodds Fellow, her dissertation is about competitive children's activities in the United States during the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the contemporary period. The fieldwork for the dissertation is based on three case studies-- one academic (chess), one athletic (soccer), and one artistic (dance) and this research was funded by various Princeton centers including the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, the program in American Studies, and the Center for Health and Well-Being. Hilary's other research projects include a six year study of child beauty pageants, a shorter study of Kumon Learning Centers, and a large-scale quantitative study about university commencement speakers from 1945-2003 (using original data to look at social and cultural change in the US). Her areas of specialization within the discipline are in childhood and family, culture, and qualitative methods, with interests also in economic sociology and gender.

Valerie Lewis,
B.A. Sociology, Rice University. Valerie's interests include race and ethnicity, urban sociology, inequality, and networks. Her work thus far has examined racial segregation in several spheres, including neighborhoods, social networks, schools, and higher education. Valerie is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient.

Carol Ann MacGregor,
BA, Political Studies/History (Queen's University); MA, Sociology (McGill University). Carol Ann's broad interests are in sociology of religion, sociology of the family, and political sociology. Current projects include a mixed-methods examination of women who return to school after having children and corresponding outcomes for the children of mothers who return, a textual analysis of children's Sunday school resources, and several works on religion and public life in Canada. camacgre@princeton.edu

Emily Marshall,
B.A. in Russian Studies and Mathematics, Pomona College. Emily's interests in sociology include inequality, economic sociology and networks. Before coming to Princeton she worked for the International Research and Exchanges Board in Washington, D.C. and in Russia on programs for educational exchange and small business development.

Rebekah Massengill,
Areas of interest: Religion, organizations, culture and cognition, poverty. Rebekah is currently writing her dissertation about moral language in the public debate about Wal-Mart. The project seeks to describe economic morality in the public sphere, using as a point of comparison the differences between civic discourse (e.g. legal and rights-based arguments) with the language of morals, in which actors appeal to shared notions of right and wrong to ground their claims. Using data drawn from several different sources -- including media articles, activist groups' publications, workers' stories, and public hearings -- she also considers the social conditions which may encourage actors to adopt one mode of discourse over another. With Katherine Newman, she recently published an article in the Annual Review of Sociology on the qualitative sociology of poverty.

G. Cristina Mora-Torres - Cristina is originally from Los Angeles and received her B.A. in Sociology from UC Berkeley (2002). During the 2002 academic year Cristina was a visting scholar in the Sociology Department of La Universidad de La Habana, Cuba. Cristina is interested in the Latino media, Culture, Sociology of Religion, Economic Sociology, Sociology of the Professions, Classical Theory, Gender and the study of Social Inequality. In 2004 she received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Alexandra K. Murphy
Alexandra K. Murphy is a doctoral candidate in the department of Sociology at Princeton University. Her research interests include ethnography, urban sociology, inequality, race and ethnicity, and culture. Murphy's work includes a study of the indoor sex trade in New York City, the transformation of public housing in Chicago, research on informal economies in New York and Chicago, and a quantitative analysis of suburban/urban differences in the organizational capacity of high poverty neighborhoods. She is currently working on her dissertation, which is an ethnographic study of daily life among the poor in a recently impoverished American suburb. Murphy is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. You may find out more about her work as well as access her publications by visiting her at http://www.princeton.edu/~akmurphy

Petra Nahmias,
BSc Environmental Science, University of London. MA Demography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Petra's research interests lie in social demography, particularly fertility, reproductive health, and maternal and child health. She is especially interested in the intersection of the effect of ethnicity, religion and race on fertility such as the effect of ethnicity on demographic behavior in Africa and the sociology of maternal mortality and morbidity.

Alexandria Walton Radford,
B.S. Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Alexandria researches and writes about higher education, immigration, and race and ethnicity. She and Princeton Professor Thomas J. Espenshade are co-authors of a forthcoming book about the race and class dimensions of college admissions and campus life. For her dissertation, Alexandria is launching The High School Valedictorian Project, in which she examines how academic ability, family background, high school, neighborhood, and local college options shape high school valedictorians' post-secondary school outcomes.

Amy Reynolds,
AB, 1999, Harvard University. Interests include religion, economic development, globalization, and statistics. Before attending Princeton, Amy taught at a charter school in DC and worked in El Salvador on coffee and fair trade issues.

Rania Salem,
BA Political Sciences (American University in Cairo), MSc Sociology (University of Oxford). Rania's interests include sociology of marriage and the family, gender, and migration. Before attending Princeton, Rania worked at the Cairo office of the Population Council, where she carried out research on youth transitions from school to work, and evaluated an intervention for disadvantaged adolescents.

Hana Shepherd,
BA Humanities: Culture & Politics, & MA Sociology (Stanford University). Hana is primarily interested in the mechanisms involved in the maintenance of group-based inequalities, especially racial inequalities. She is particularly interested in how cognitive and cultural sociology, social networks and complex systems theory, sociology of knowledge and data, and sociology of organizations can contribute to an understanding of those mechanisms. She is currently working on a set of projects using network analysis to understand social aspects of cognition.

Lori D. Smith,
B.A. Indiana University 2005. Lori's interests include development, political economy, organizations, and political sociology. More specifically she is interested in how organizational and institutional theories may be used to understand economic performance and interactions between macroeconomic and microeconomic processes, and to account for variation in organizational arrangements and practices. Her next project will explore the "supply-side" of democratization cross-nationally.

Craig Barton Upright,
B.A. Saint Olaf College, Mathematics and English Literature. (Organizational and Cultural Sociology) Craig came to Princeton with ten-plus years of experience in the restaurant industry, including 4 years as the co-owner of a small cafe in Saint Paul that held punk rock concerts in the basement every weekend. His dissertation explores the development and transformation of the Organic Food industry in the United States from 1970 to 2002, as a product has progressed from alternative to mainstream markets. Culminating in the adoption of the first National Organic Standards, its primary focus is the changing definition of the term "organic" in agricultural, political, and cultural realms of society.

Charles Varner,
A.B., Harvard University. Charles is interested in patterns of social stratification and inequality. He studies the effects of racial and ethnic heterogeneity on both individual attitudes and broader social policy outcomes. He is also interested in organizational and economic sociology.

Scott Leon Washington,
B.A. University of California, Berkeley (Sociology and Philosophy). Interests: Race and Ethnicity; Social Classification; Social Stratification; State Formation and State Information; Science; Culture; Epistemology; Education; Politics; Violence; Social Psychology; Historiography; Comparative Methods; Extreme Systems of Social Control, Confinement, and Supervision; Migration and Development; Classical and Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory.

Sharon Yoon,
B.A. Senior Fellow and Asian Studies, Dartmouth College. Sharon is interested in understanding racial identity construction of marginalized groups in East Asia. At Dartmouth, she was able to attend several study abroad programs in China and Japan to learn the language and culture. For her Senior Fellowship, she conducted an ethnographic study of Korean minorities in Japan and Chinese minorities in Korea. Before coming to Princeton, she spent a year consulting for an educational firm in Seoul.

Cristobal Young,
BA in Economics and Sociology (U. Victoria), MA in Economics (UVic). Cristobal's main interests lie in economic sociology, information theory, and the sociology of economics. His MA thesis was titled The Emergence of Sociology from Political Economy in the US: 1880-1940. This paper shows how economics departments sponsored the entrance of sociology into the university system, and seeks to explain the breakdown of collaboration between the two disciplines. His essay in the Socio-Economic Review focuses on the mathematical reformation of economics (circa 1930-1950), and its socialist political origins. In the world of broader theory, Cristobal is interested in the dynamics of information, drawing on the work of Erving Goffman (impression management), Thorstein Veblen (status rivalry), and George Akerlof (the market for lemons).