Chair's Message
Christopher Uggen These are exciting times for Minnesota sociology. We have welcomed over 20 new colleagues since my arrival in 1995, with each year bringing a new wave of high-impact scholars and scholarship. This year, we are elated to welcome Joel Samaha, Yanjie Bian, and Joshua Page to our Department. These new faculty members will strengthen our five existing areas of specialization (Political Sociology and Social Movements, Family and the Life Course, Law, Crime, and Deviance, Inequality: Race, Class, and Gender, and Organizations, Work and Markets) and add authoritative new expertise in social stratification, East Asia, labor politics, punishment, and legal history. And we continue to grow: we are currently searching for another prominent senior faculty colleague, as well as a specialist in the burgeoning field of immigration studies.
Our faculty members are enormously productive, earning sizable research grants, national and international awards, and a steady stream of publications in the very best academic journals and university presses. Our graduate program is also flourishing. We have awarded roughly 125 Ph.D. and Master's degrees in the past decade, with our students garnering prestigious awards to support their dissertation research and job placements in great sociology departments throughout the world. We are especially proud of our strong and supportive graduate student culture and our tradition of student-faculty collaborative projects and co-authored publications. College of Liberal Arts funding has supported 46 faculty-graduate student research partnership projects during the past five years alone.
As my term as Chair commences this year, I am moved by the Department’s century-long history of remarkable sociology as well as its current vibrancy. We have much to celebrate, but I would like to call special attention to our commitment to a civic sociology. We are a community of scholars endeavoring to conduct research that matters. We are engaged in teaching at a great public institution, we are engaged in the communities around our campus, and we are first and foremost engaged in conducting sociological research of the highest quality. Engaged scholarship goes beyond doing work that is "interesting" or clever. Whether we are studying wars, families, prisons, ethnic relations, retirement, sexuality, or the food supply, we pursue questions and push for answers that will make a difference in the world. In recognition of this commitment, our Department was recently featured as an exemplar of "the engaged department" in the American Sociological Association’s brochure "An Invitation to Public Sociology."