Welcome

Welcome to the Yale Sociology Department

Sociology – the systematic study of social life and social transformation – is flourishing at Yale. In 1875, Yale professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) offered the first American course titled “Sociology.” Today’s department spans a wide array of areas and specialties, balanced with an emphasis on the core concepts, theory and methods of the discipline. Much is new since Sumner’s day, but the Yale department still offers an overarching vision of the field, its future, and its relationship to knowledge of our changing world.

News

July 3, 2024
Keitaro Okura’s paper “Americans without Americanness: The U.S. National Hierarchy and Racialized Boundaries of Authentic Belonging” received an Honorable Mention for...
June 14, 2024
Professor Alka Menon’s book, Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards, received the 2024 Book Award from the Section on the Sociology of the...
May 30, 2024
Assistant Professor Ramina Sotoudeh is featured in the current newsletter of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The series “Meet the FAS faculty” provides a way for the Yale...
May 29, 2024
Alka Menon was a Finalist for the 2024 Ludwik Fleck Prize, awarded annually by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) for an outstanding book in the area of the...
May 20, 2024
Alex Manning, Ph.D., a lecturer in the Yale Sociology Department, who teaches courses on racism, sports, families, and abolition, was quoted in a recent New York Magazine...