Current Officers & Council Members
Shai Dromi
Chair
Shai M. Dromi is an Associate Senior Lecturer on Sociology at Harvard University. Shai is a cultural and comparative-historical sociologist with research on international humanitarian organizations, social movements, and religion. His research looks at the intersection of cultural beliefs about morality, civil society organizations, and knowledge production. Shai is the author of Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science, (co-authored with Samuel D. Stabler), and Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Construction of the Humanitarian Relief Sector, and is co-editor of Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, vol. 2 with Steve Hitlin and Aliza Luft. |
Jeffrey Guhin
Chair-Elect
Jeff Guhin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD in sociology from Yale University, and his specialties include education, religion, theory, and culture. His first book is titled Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools (Oxford University Press, December 2020). He has studied in Damascus, Syria, and Mexico City, Mexico, and he holds a Modern Middle East Studies Certificate from Yale University. He has various published various articles in the sociology of religion, including an insistence that religion is best considered by sociologists as a site rather than as a category. He is also working on a project about secularism in American public schools. |
Dana Moss
Past Chair
Dana Moss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on collective resistance against repression and injustice, including the transnational repression of diaspora and refugee communities by authoritarian regimes. Her award-winning book, The Arab Spring Abroad: Diaspora Activism Against Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge, 2022) explains how and to what extent anti-regime diaspora members mobilized to support the 2011 uprisings in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Her next book project will examine how and why members of military institutions rebel against participation in state-sanctioned violence. To date, her work has been published in venues such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Mobilization: An International Journal, and Comparative Migration Studies. |
Joshua Doyle
Secretary/Treasurer
Joshua Doyle is an Assistant Professor of sociology at Purdue University. His research examines how culture influences decision-making. Currently his research focuses on social trust as a predictor of cooperative behaviors and support for environmental protections. Joshua uses a mixture of experimental methods and statistical analysis of observational data in my research. His research has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Advances in Group Processes, and Social Science Research, among other outlets. |
Hajar Yazdiha
Council Member
Hajar Yazdiha is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute, USC Black Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights. She is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and is a former Racial Justice Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights, Global Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Ford Fellow. Hajar researches the politics of belonging, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. In addition to award-winning articles, she is author of the book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement with Princeton University Press. She is also a public scholar whose writing and research has been featured in outlets including The LA Times, NPR, Time Magazine, BBC News, The Hill, The Guardian, and The Grio. |
Ashley Harrell
Council Member
I am Assistant Professor of Sociology (and, by courtesy, Psychology and Neuroscience) at Duke University. My research is centered on structural and social-psychological solutions to problems of cooperation, collective action, and social order. Much of my work is motivated by my interest in understanding the roles of micro-level attitudes and behaviors in shaping macro-level outcomes. My methodological approach is quantitative and relies largely on experimental data. I direct the SSoC Lab at Duke. |
Larry Au
Council Member
Larry Au is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The City College of New York, CUNY. My research examines the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the production of biomedical knowledge, and asks how clinicians and scientists can better serve their patients and the public. Part of this work examines the globalization of precision medicine—or the use of genomics and other forms of big data to improve diagnosis and treatment—as a policy idea and scientific project, focusing primarily on its rise in China. Another part of this research looks at the politics of expertise around Long Covid, in particular, the experience of patients as they navigate uncertainties around their condition. |
Lauren Valentino
Council Member
Lauren is an Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on culture & cognition and inequality & stratification. Specifically, Lauren uses a cognitive approach to culture in order to understand how people form diverse beliefs and perceptions about important stratifying institutions in society — like discrimination, occupations, social movements, and schools and universities — to show how these beliefs and perceptions in turn shape inequality. Lauren’s work employs a wide variety of methodological approaches, including survey-experiments, interviews, and analysis of secondary survey and administrative data. Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Poetics, and Social Problems, among other outlets. |
Paul JoosseCouncil Member
Paul Joosse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. His work examines Weber’s theory of domination as it interacts with social movement theory and (critical) criminology. Recent projects have included theorizing the link between gender and charismatic power, using the example of Trump to develop a typology of charismatic counter-roles, and weaving Stanley Cohen’s concept of moral panic with Weber’s theory of charisma to show how charismatic acclamation is intimately linked to the aspersion of ‘folk devils.’ This work has been published in Social Forces, Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Journal of Classical Sociology, and Sociology of Religion, among others. In connection with his sociological work, he is Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section for the History of Sociology and Social Thought and he currently serves on the executive board of the International Sociological Association’s Sociological Theory research cluster (RC16). |
Max Besbris
Council Member
Max Besbris is Associate Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Max studies how individuals make decisions in economic markets, how these decisions are affected by interactions with others, and how these decisions, in turn, affect racial and socio-spatial inequalities. His research questions tend to focus on housing and neighborhoods, and he is increasingly interested in how climate change is impacting real estate values, residential decision-making, and inequality more generally. His is the author of Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality, and with Anna Rhodes, of Soaking the Middle Class: Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster. His research has been published in the Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Social Problems, and Social Forces, among other outlets. |
Lingxiao Chen |
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Student Representative
Lingxiao Chen is a graduate student in sociology at Emory University. Lingxiao is interested in nationalism and propaganda in authoritarian contexts. Lingxiao’s current work investigates the impact of Chinese celebrities’ nationalistic actions on their public perception in China. |