Ph.D. Alumni

Eitan Alimi, Ph.D. 2004

Eitan Alimi is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hebrew University, located in Jerusalem, Israel. His research interests include social movements/contentious politics and conflict resolution.  He has numerous publications on the topics of cultural dynamics of protest politics, processes of radicalization, political violence and terrorism, and media discourse and peace building—as they apply to single cases and across cases. Alimi won the Emerald’s Outstanding Article Award of Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change in 2012 for his article, co-authored with Liora Norwich, “Learning from Failures: Why and How Scale Shift failed to Launch—Evidence from the Case of the Israeli-Arab Land Day” (published in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change in 2011) and an Outstanding Book in English on Israeli Politics Award in 2008 from the Israeli Political Science Association for his book Israeli Politics and the First Palestinian Intifada: Political Opportunities, Framing Processes, and Contentious Politics (Routledge 2010).

Will Attwood-Charles, Ph.D. 2018

Will is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Miami University in Ohio. His research has focused on efforts at organizational change and innovation as well as how people experience and understand the labor process. He is currently working on several studies exploring status dynamics in collaborative workplace environments, as well as dimensions of labor control on for-profit gig economy platforms. His research has been published in journals such as Theory and Society, Socio Economic Review, Poetics, Sociological Compass, and Research in the Sociology of Work. He was the first visiting fellow at the newly established Weisenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany.

Esteban Calvo, Ph.D. 2009

Esteban Calvo is an Professor and Director at the Society and Health Research Center at the Universidad Mayor in Chile. He has also served as a consultant for the United Nations, the government of Chile, Harvard School of Public Health, and the Center for Retirement Research. He has numerous articles on the topics of aging and the life course, social epidemiology, public policy, subjective well-being, and quantitative methods.  In 2009, he won the Retirement Research Foundation Laurence G. Branch Award from the Section on Gerontological Health of the American Association of Public Health, and in 2010, he won the Robert Dentler Award for Outstanding Student Achievement from the Section on Sociological Practice and Public Sociology of the American Sociological Association. Calvo’s work has been recognized in: La Tercera, U.S. News & World Report, Chicago Tribune, Business Week, CNN Chile, and CNN International.

Mehmet Cansoy, Ph.D. 2018

Mehmet is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fairfield University. His research, published in Socio-Economic Review, American Behavioral Scientist, and Theory and Society focuses on the relationship between technology and inequality, specifically the emergence of online platforms and the gig economy. His current work, with an interdisciplinary team, investigates the environmental impacts of the digital economy, using geolocation data and digital traces to estimate carbon emissions. He has also been working with many community partners in his work with the Center for Social Impact at Fairfield University, offering research expertise to organizations working on housing, food insecurity and gun violence in Connecticut.

Lindsey Carfagna, Ph.D. 2017

Lindsey (Luka) Carfagna, PhD, is the Executive Director of Learning Experience Strategy and Design in the Provost’s Office of Online Programs at Villanova University and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. Her research on the "Pedagogy of Precarity" examined the relationship between labor and learning among entrepreneurial young adults navigating a post-recession economy. She has also conducted collaborative research on the role of learning in the Connected Economy. After graduation, she continued to consult with the research network as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Dayton and remotely at the University of California, Irvine, while designing competency-based degree programs and piloting Thomas Edison State University's first Learning Experience (LX) design program. Dr. Carfagna currently uses insights from her academic research to critically re-imagine how universities operationalize the provision of online learning experiences, specifically in how choices about marketing, technology, and infrastructure can affect pedagogy. At Villanova, she is building the University's first LX Design team as part of the University's strategic priority to reduce reliance on for-profit Online Program Managers. As an independent consultant and founder of Magis Learning, Dr. Carfagna supports mission-driven organizations in designing formative learning experiences and infrastructure. In addition, she served on the Board of Directors for a non-profit startup that links military spouses to remote employment skill-acquisition opportunities. Dr. Carfagna is also a certified Spiritual Director from the Shalem Institute and supports faith-based organizations in the design and facilitation of contemplative retreats.

Jared Del Rosso, Ph.D. 2012

Jared Del Rosso is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver. His dissertation explored issues of culture and knowledge in recent U.S. political debates about detainee abuse, torture, and interrogation policy. He is particularly interested in the social processes by which political communities assign meaning to their own acts of violence and the suffering that it causes.

More broadly, his research and teaching interests are in cultural sociology, the sociology of knowledge, social control, state violence, and qualitative methods. His work has appeared in Social Problems, Symbolic Interaction, and Sexualities.  Rosso is the author of “The Textual Mediation of Official Denial: Congress, Abu Ghraib, and the Construction of an Isolated Incident,” which received the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Social Problems Theory Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2009.

Lauren Diamond-Brown, Ph.D. 2017

Lauren Diamond-Brown, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY Potsdam. She researches, writes, and teaches about topics such as reproduction, medical sociology, gender and feminist studies, human services, and qualitative methods. Her research on decision-making in childbirth has been featured in publications such as Social Science and Medicine and Advances in Medical Sociology. Lauren is a reproductive justice advocate and is doing applied research to improve perinatal health in her local community. She strives to be a transformative educator through empowering students and incorporating service-learning, research, and activism in her courses. She is an all season outdoor enthusiast and balances her work life having fun with family and friends.

Danielle Egan, Ph.D. 2000

Danielle Egan is the Dean of Faculty and the Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies at Connecticut College. Her recent book Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of Girls and Sexualization (Polity Press, 2013) was named book of the week by the Times Higher Education Supplement, and has been reviewed and/or featured in The Guardian and The Australian. She also authored Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships between Exotic Dancers and their Regulars (Macmillan, 2006); and co-authored Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (Palgrave-Macmillan 2010). Danielle has written numerous other publications on the topics of gender, youth, sexuality, and popular culture, and her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4 and on NPR’s Good Parenting Radio.

Jared Fitzgerald, Ph.D. 2019

Jared is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. He is interested in understanding pathways to sustainability that improve both human and ecological wellbeing. Using advanced quantitative methods, his current research projects investigate the relationships between working time, inequality and sustainability broadly defined. His research has been published in journals such as Social Forces, Socius, Sustainability and Environmental Sociology. In addition to his research interests, Dr. Fitzgerald is also committed to teaching high quality and engaging courses. Depending on the course, his primary goals as an educator are to introduce students to the value of sociological inquiry and to encourage students to engage critically with the world around them to better understand the causes and consequences of environmental degradation.

Michelle Gawerc, Ph.D. 2010

Michelle I. Gawerc is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Maryland. She is the author of Prefiguring Peace: Israeli-Palestinian Peace-building Partnerships (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), a study of peacebuilding among Israeli and Palestinian youths. Gawerc has also published several articles including: “Peacebuilding: Theoretical and Concrete Perspectives” in Peace and Change: A Peace Journal and “The Al-Aksa Intifada: Revealing the Chasm” (with Alan Dowty) in Middle East Review of International Affairs. She is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including a United States-Israel Educational Foundation Fulbright Fellowship, a Graduate Research Fellowship from Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation, and a United Nations Memorial Fellowship Award from the American Sociological Association's Peace War and Social Conflict Section. Gawerc’s intellectual work has been driven by her dedication to peace, justice, and understanding.  In the last fifteen years, she has been involved as a facilitator in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue with teachers and high school students in Israel-Palestine, in German-Polish-Jewish dialogue with young adults in Osweicim (Auschwitz), Poland, and in diversity dialogues with university and secondary school students in the United States.

Autumn Green, Ph.D. 2013

Autumn Rose Green is a Research Scientist at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, where she directs the Higher Education Access for Parenting Students Research Initiative. She is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Urban Institute, where she works with the Income and Benefits Policy Center and the Building America's Workforce Initiative. Her research and advocacy focus on college access and success for low-income, first-generation, and non-traditional students, especially student parents.  Her forthcoming book, Surviving, Striving and Thriving: Low-Income Mothers in Higher Education (co-authored with fellow BC sociology PhD Amanda Freeman) documents the experiences of low-income mothers pursuing higher education in ten states, situating their experiences within the systems and policy contexts that they must navigate to succeed in college. In her earlier life, Dr. Green was a young mother of two, working her way from GED to PhD. She has since earned a subsequent Master’s Degree in Education from Lesley University in 2018 for her work on the Two-Generation Classroom.

Maheen Haider, Ph.D. 2021

Dr. Maheen Haider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand the issues of citizenship and belonging from Muslim immigrant perspectives. She examines the contemporary contexts of High-Skilled Immigration and investigates the complex interplay of intersectional identities (i.e., Race, Religion, and Class) emphasized by the political contexts of the post-9/11 and the War on Terror Era. Additionally, her research also examines racialized representations of Muslim identities across popular media, contributing to the knowledge of race, ethnicity, and media studies. Her most recent work has been published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. She is also the Transatlantic Migration Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Birmingham (2021/2022) and was previously the Immigration Initiative Fellow at Harvard University.

Xiaorui Huang, Ph.D. 2022

Xiaorui Huang is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drexel University. Xiaorui’s research focuses on environmental sociology, climate change, global and transnational sociology, political economy, sociology of development, agrofood studies, human well-being, quantitative methods, and sustainability science. Xiaorui’s main research agenda examines the implications of economic development, international trade, renewable energy, and income inequality on climate change and human well-being. His work has appeared in disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Science Research, Climatic Change, Sociological Forum, Sociological Methodology, Sociology of Development, Ecological Economics, Energy Research and Social Science, and Human Ecology Review.

Anders Hayden, Ph.D. 2010

Anders Hayden is an Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at the Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University. He is the author of Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time and Consumption & Ecology (Zed Books, 2000). Hayden has numerous articles and book chapters on the topics of social and political responses to climate change, the successes and limits of the European Union and the United Kingdom as relative leaders in ecological modernization, and climate action policies and initiatives to reduce hours of work, which are a key part of a sufficiency-oriented political vision. He has worked with non-governmental organizations involved in issues of human rights, a reduction and redistribution of work time, social justice, and international development.

Kelly A. Joyce, Ph.D. 2001

Kelly A. Joyce is Professor of Sociology at Drexel University. Dr. Joyce has written many articles in the areas of medical sociology, science and technology studies, sociology of aging, and qualitative methods. She is author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency (Cornell University Press, 2008), which won the 2010 Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award from the Medical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. She is also co-editor of Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness through an Ageing, Technology, and Science Lens (John Wiley, 2010). In addition to various teaching awards, in 2007 Joyce won the Honorable Mention of the IEEE Life Members' Prize in Electrical History, sponsored by the Society for the History of Technology, for “From Number to Pictures: The Development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the Visual Turn in Medicine,” published in Science as Culture in 2006. In 2011, she won the National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Collaborative Integration for contributing to the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering Program.

Orla Kelly, Ph.D. 2020

Dr Orla Kelly is an Assistant Professor in Social Policy at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College Dublin. She engages social science perspectives and methods to understand pathways towards socio-ecological sustainability. Specifically, her research interests include sustainable development, gender equality and eco-social policies such as education, and reduced working time.  With funding support from the Worldwide Universities Network Dr Kelly leads an international consortium of academics working at the intersection of education and climate change. She is also part of an international research team investigating the economic, social and environmental impacts of reduced work time across a variety of national contexts.  Her research has been published in academic journals such as Social Forces, Sustainability Science, International Journal of Educational Development, and Human Rights Quarterly.

Isak Ladegaard, Ph.D.

Isak Ladegaard is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on economic sociology, technology and social change, and crime and deviance. His dissertation examined how drug market actors use information technology to build community, overcome crackdowns, and normalize drug consumption. He has published articles on topics like security practices among precarious workers, Airbnb hosting, and displacement effects in digital drug markets. His research utilizes computational methods to study online communities and markets.

Dr. Ladegaard's research on digital drug markets has garnered significant media attention, with coverage in outlets like Wired, Vice, Newsweek, and Reason. His work has also informed policy discussions, including an invited talk at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime about drug trade in the darknet.

Currently, Dr. Ladegaard has a book in progress titled "Open Secrecy: How Publicly Organized and Anonymous Groups Shape Our Digital Future."

At Illinois, he teaches courses in technology and society, economic sociology, and criminology.

Alfonso R. Latoni, Ph.D. 2000

Dr. Alfonso R. Latoni is Senior Advisor to the Director and Scientific Review Officer at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in the Division of Extramural Research and Training, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Prior to joining the NIEHS in 2013, Dr. Latoni was Deputy Chief of Review in the Scientific Review Branch of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2008 to 2013. From 2005 to 2008, he served in the Center for Scientific Review (CSR) at NIH, where he was a Scientific Review Officer in the Health of the Population Integrated Review Group, and later in the Biobehavioral and Behavioral Processes Integrated Review Group, where he was responsible for the Adult Psychopathology and Disorders of Aging Study Section. From 2002 to 2005, he served in the NIA Scientific Review Office as the Scientific Review Administrator of the Behavior and Social Science of Aging Study Section.

Betsy Leondar-Wright, Ph.D. 2012

Betsy Leondar-Wright is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lasell University. Her dissertation research turned into a book, Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures (Cornell University Press 2014), which analyzes how activists of different classes approach organizational problems. Working with the nonprofit Class Action (www.classism.org), she did a 30-event book tour in 14 cities over seven months; most of the events were participatory popular education workshops on bridging activist class cultures. Her previous non-academic book, Class Matters, also focused on the class dynamics of social movement organizations. Before returning to the graduate program in 2006, she was the Communications Director at United for a Fair Economy for nine years. She worked for Class Action as Program Director from 2010 to 2015, and remains a board member and senior trainer. She co-founded the Class Cultures Caucus of the Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA). Among her recent and forthcoming articles are chapters in Teaching Economic Inequality and Capitalism in Contemporary America (Spring 2018); Stepping Out of Academe (Rutgers 2019); and The Routledge International Handbook of Working Class Studies (Routledge 2019). At Lasell she teaches courses on social movement strategy, activist skills, research methods, race and racism, and educational inequality. Her most unusual course, Action for Social Justice, in which all the students agree on an issue and plan and carry out a campaign for change during the semester, was pioneered in the BC Sociology Department

Seil Oh, Ph.D. 2011

Seil Oh, S.J. is a Professor of Sociology at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea. Oh specializes in sociology of religion, spirituality, culture, and quantitative methods. His research interests include: spirituality and the tension between individualism and social integration, spirituality and social movements, as well as different modes of spirituality beyond the traditional distinctions of secular versus religious. He is co-author, with Natalia Sarkisian, of “Spiritual Individualism or Engaged Spirituality? Social Implications of Holistic Spirituality among Mind-Body-Spirit Practitioners,” published in Sociology of Religion in 2012.

Leah Schmalzbauer, Ph.D. 2004

Leah Schmalzbauer is a William R. Kenan Professor of American Studies and Sociology at Amherst College. She is the author of Striving and Surviving: A Daily Life Analysis of Honduran Transnational Families (Routledge, 2005). Dr. Schmalzbauer is also the author of many articles on international migration, transnational families, new migrant destinations, gender and migration, globalization, rural sociology, and race, class, and gender. She received the 2011 Rural Sociology Best Paper Award for her article entitled “Doing Gender, Ensuring Survival: Mexican Migration and Economic Crisis in the Rural Mountain West,” (published by Rural Sociology in 2011). Dr. Schmalzbauer has also won various teaching excellence awards including the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Montana State University (2012) and the Anna K. Fridley Distinguished Teaching Award, Montana State University (2012). She is currently completing a five year study of gender and family formation among Mexican migrants in the rural Mountain West, and is spending the 2012-2013 academic year as a visiting scholar at CIESAS in Oaxaca, Mexico.

John Shandra, Ph.D. 2005

John M. Shandra is an Professor of Sociology and former Chair of the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research examines how globalization shapes the natural environment and health in low- and middle-income nations with focus on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and African Development Bank lending. John has published over fifty articles since graduating from Boston College in 2005. His research has appeared in Social Science Research, International Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Social Science and Medicine. At Boston College, John co-authored many articles with faculty members especially Professor John B. Williamson. He has taken this model of mentoring to Stony Brook where he writes extensively with graduate and undergraduate students.

Elizangela Storelli, Ph.D. 2011

Elizangela Storelli is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the MA Program at George Mason University. Her research focuses on the interplay of social support, family support, and well-being among individuals and families in both local and global contexts. She advises graduate students, teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, and collaborates on research projects through George Mason’s Center for Social Science Research. She is currently working on collaborative research project with Fairfax County, VA leadership to develop a county-wide asset model for old adult well-being.

Jeffrey Stokes, Ph.D. 2017

Jeffrey Stokes is an Assistant Professor of Gerontology in the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also a Fellow at the Gerontology Institute at UMass Boston. His research program centers on social aspects of aging and health. This includes work on the effects of neighborhood context for older adults’ well-being, as well as analysis of the ramifications of intergenerational, marital, and social relationships for health and well-being in mid- and later life. His work has been published in journals such as The Gerontologist, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Aging & Mental Health. He is also a member of the editorial board for the journal Research on Aging. Stokes’ research has received media attention from Bloomberg News and Science of Relationships, as well as the Relationship Matters podcast.