Debbie Becher
Assistant Professor
Milbank 329; 851-9480
Debbie Becher's research links political culture to legal, urban, and economic sociology. She is currently writing about local government powers over land in urban neighborhoods, through a study property takings in Philadelphia. Debbie came to Barnard with a decade of professional experience in social work and neighborhood development. She received her B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Debbie will be an Assistant Professor at Barnard beginning in 2011-2012. Debbie teaches classes on law, urban studies, and social theory.
Elizabeth Bernstein
Associate Professor (on leave)
208 Barnard Hall; 854-3039
Elizabeth Bernstein’s research and teaching focus upon the sociology of gender and sexuality; the sociology of law; and contemporary social theory. She is co-editor of Regulating Sex: the Politics of Intimacy and Identity (Routledge 2005), and author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press 2007). Her current research explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary U.S. policies around the traffic in women.
Christel Kesler
Assistant Professor
Milbank 330; 851-9481
Christel Kesler holds a B.A. degree in sociology and German literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Barnard, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Professor Kesler's research and teaching interests include social stratification and inequality, international migration, welfare states, and cross-national research. She has recently completed a project that compares immigrant socioeconomic incorporation and exclusion in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Other recent and ongoing projects examine immigration-driven diversity's effects on civic and political engagement in cross-national perspective; immigration and the dynamics of occupational segregation in the European Union; ethnic entrepreneurship across U.S. labor markets; and ethnic identification across immigrant generations in the U.K.
Jennifer Lena
Visiting Assistant Professor
Milbank 332B; 854-5910
Jennifer Lena is a sociologist of culture who studies classification systems, specifically the conditions that facilitate the proliferation or contraction of categories into which art works are sorted. In her work she examines the economic, aesthetic, racial, and organizational conditions for category emergence, primarily through the study of genres and sub-genres within American music.
Peter Levin
Assistant Professor
Milbank 331; 854-2868
Professor Levin's research spans organizations, economic sociology, and gender. His most recent work is an ethnographic comparison of futures traders in two institutional contexts: face-to-face or "open outcry" and screen-based electronic trading. His next project attempts to understand how value is made in markets, through an investigation of appraisers of fine arts. He is also affiliated with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy.
Debra C. Minkoff
Professor (on leave)
Milbank 332D; 854-2279
Professor Minkoff's general areas of interest include social movements, political sociology, and organizational theory and research. She is most directly concerned with the relationship between the development of contemporary citizens organizations and social movement dynamics at the national level in the U.S. Professor Minkoff teaches courses on social movement, political sociology, and general methods of social research.
Jacqueline R. Olvera
Assistant Professor
Milbank 332A; 854-3663
Jaqueline Olvera received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Illinois-Chicago, holds an M.S. in Public Management and Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University. Her current research explores inter-ethnic relations between Mexican migrants and Puerto Ricans in new destination cities. She is also conducting a study of marriage and cohabitation among native and foreign born Latinos using dyadic analytic techniques. Among the awards she has received are: the Ford Foundation Poverty Research and Training Postdoctoral Fellowship(2000-2003), Visiting Scholar Award at the Institute for Research on Poverty (2004), and a grant to visit the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science at the University of California Santa Barbara (2006). She has taught at Connecticut College, University of Michigan, and Stanford University. At Barnard she will be teaching Introduction to Sociology, Communities and Social Change, as well as courses on immigration and poverty and public policy.
Jonathan Rieder
Professor (on leave)
Milbank 332C; 854-4359
Jonathan Rieder came to Barnard from Yale in 1989 and served as chair of the Barnard Sociology department from 1989 to 2004. His scholarly research spans the areas of sociology of culture; race, pluralism and ethnicity in the United States; and politics and language. The author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism and the editor of The Fractious Nation: Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life, he is completing a book on the social organization of moral argument that focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr. as a crossover artist who defined a new vision of citizenship as he shifted between performances of "white" and "black" talk. Between 1995 and 2001, he was the founding Co-Editor of CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations, which won national acclaim for the fresh way it explored a broad array of racial, ethnic and religious conflicts in the United States and beyond. He has been a contributing editor of The New Republic and is a regular contributor to the New York Sunday Times Book Review. His teaching interests include the sociology of culture; race, culture and identity; unity and division in the United States; culture in contemporary America; politics and culture; and sociology theory.
J.C. Salyer
Adjunct Lecturer
J.C. Salyer is a lawyer and an anthropologist whose work focuses on law and society, immigration law, and social justice. He is the staff attorney for the Arab-American Family Support Center, a community-based organization in Brooklyn, and runs the organization’s immigration clinic. His research focuses on the legal formalism of deportation decisions and how the exclusion of social factors and personal history effect determinations of immigration status. In addition to his work on immigration, he received the William J. Brennan First Amendment Fellowship to work at the American Civil Liberties Union national legal department and was a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Jersey. His teaching focuses on the relationship between social science, law, and public policy.
Affiliated Faculty
Guobin Yang
Associate Professor, Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Acting Chair (Sociology)
321 Milbank; 854-9538
Guobin Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature (with a specialty in Literary Translation) from Beijing Foreign Studies University (1993) and a second Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University (2000). His research focuses on social movements, new media, and civil society.
