Message from Professor Mitchell Duneier, Director of the Sociology Concentration
Sociology at Princeton offers a cutting edge undergraduate concentration for people interested in the social dimensions of politics, economics, history, psychology, and demography.
Our graduates are admitted to the leading medical, law, and business schools , and they take a variety of jobs from Wall Street to social activism.
Our faculty do research and teaching on important topics of concern in the “real world” from social networks, immigration, and inequality to globalization, politics, and economic sociology. But the best way to learn about what we do is from our students themselves in the video below.
Before deciding on the concentration, we recommend that you take a Soc course or a freshman seminar taught by one of our faculty. If you have come to the decision late without a background in our department, please talk to me in advance.
Graduates from Princeton's Sociology program have successfully pursued careers in the non-profit and private sectors, government, and academia. Some examples follow:
First Lady Michelle Robinson ObamaFormer Vice President at the University of Chicago Hospitals
Michelle Obama grew up in a working class family on the South Side of Chicago and attended Whitney Young High School. At Princeton, she discovered sociology during her freshman year, excelling in the department's courses from the outset. For her senior thesis, she completed a questionnaire survey of Black alumni of Princeton University and life-cycle changes in their orientations toward the black community and toward the white community. Her course work and independent work earned her honors in the major and she went on to Harvard Law School. Later, she returned to Chicago and had a successful career practicing law at the corporate firm of Sidley and Austin.
It is not uncommon for people who study sociology to have a social conscience: Michelle ultimately decided to leave corporate law, and to bring her legal and advocacy skills to bear on community and urban problems in her local neighborhood of Hyde Park. She took a job at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she works on community and external affairs. While raising two children, she also has become an important force in democratic politics, particularly on the campaign trail for her husband Senator Barack Obama.
Legrome D. Davis ‘73
Judge, United States District Court
Legrome D. Davis was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He entered as a member of the pioneer generation of African American students who were for the first time admitted to the University in substantial numbers in the late sixties. He says that even as an undergraduate he exhibited a commitment to a balanced version of cultural pluralism that avoided the extremes of ethnocentrism or the loss of identity. He graduated with a B.A degree in Sociology in 1973, earned a J.D. from the Rutgers University School of Law in 1976 and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar a year later. During the subsequent decade, Judge Davis served as an Assistant District Attorney and later as Assistant Deputy District Attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. He joined the General Counsel’s Office of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 where he acquired first hand knowledge of the changing problems confronting American higher education.
Judge Davis sat in the Court of Common Pleas, First Judicial District of Pennsylvania (1987-2002) and was endorsed by the American Bar Association and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate in April 2002 for the federal judiciary in his present position as a judge in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Among his other honors Judge Davis received an award (2004) from the prestigious Foundation for Improvement of Justice, Inc. for improving Philadelphia’s criminal court system by implementing many changes including treatment for offenders with drug programs and new pretrial release guidelines.
Judge, United States District Court
Legrome D. Davis was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He entered as a member of the pioneer generation of African American students who were for the first time admitted to the University in substantial numbers in the late sixties. He says that even as an undergraduate he exhibited a commitment to a balanced version of cultural pluralism that avoided the extremes of ethnocentrism or the loss of identity. He graduated with a B.A degree in Sociology in 1973, earned a J.D. from the Rutgers University School of Law in 1976 and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar a year later. During the subsequent decade, Judge Davis served as an Assistant District Attorney and later as Assistant Deputy District Attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. He joined the General Counsel’s Office of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 where he acquired first hand knowledge of the changing problems confronting American higher education.
Judge Davis sat in the Court of Common Pleas, First Judicial District of Pennsylvania (1987-2002) and was endorsed by the American Bar Association and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate in April 2002 for the federal judiciary in his present position as a judge in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Among his other honors Judge Davis received an award (2004) from the prestigious Foundation for Improvement of Justice, Inc. for improving Philadelphia’s criminal court system by implementing many changes including treatment for offenders with drug programs and new pretrial release guidelines.
David Van Zandt ‘75Dean and Professor, Northwestern University School of Law
When David Van Zandt graduated from Princeton’s sociology department in 1975, he was awarded the Isidore Brown Thesis Prize and went on to study for his doctorate at the London School of Economics as well as his J.D. at the Yale Law School. At Yale, he became Managing Editor of the Yale Law Journal and then went on to become a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Van Zandt became dean of the Northwestern University School of Law in 1995. He is an expert in corporate law and international finance. He has published articles on the regulation of international financial markets, the sociology of religon and deviance, social theory, and the economics of common sense. He is a director of the American Bar Foundation and several private companies.
Sylvia HurtadoProfessor and Director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA
Sylvia Hurtado has published numerous articles and books related to her primary interest in student educational outcomes, campus climates, college impact on student development, and diversity in higher education. She has served on numerous editorial boards for journals in education and served on the boards for the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), the Higher Learning Commission and is president-elect of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). Black Issues In Higher Education named her among the top 15 influential faculty whose work has had an impact on the academy. After receiving her B.A from Princeton, Hurtado received her masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her Ph.D. in Education from UCLA. has coordinated several national research projects, including a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored project on how colleges are preparing students to achieve the cognitive, social, and democratic skills to participate in a diverse democracy. She is launching a National Institutes of Health project on the preparation of underrepresented students for biomedical and behavioral science research careers. She has also studied assessment, reform, and innovation in undergraduate education on a project through the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement.
