 | Jeffrey C. Alexander |
Jeffrey C. Alexander, who was recently appointed the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, works in the areas of theory, culture and politics.
An exponent of the "Strong Program" in cultural sociology, Alexander has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform such diverse areas as computer technology, environmental politics, war-making, the Watergate crisis and civil society. In the field of politics, he is finishing a theory of the civil sphere and its contradictions, and in the field of theory, his work moves between the history of social thought, interpretive disputes and the construction of systematic models.
In addition to numerous papers, his publications include the four-volume "Theoretical Logic in Sociology," "Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two," "Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis," "Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason," "Neofunctionalism and After," "The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology," "Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity" (with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka) and "The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim" (edited with Philip Smith). His most recent publication is "The New Social Theory Reader" (edited with S. Seidman). His works have been widely translated.
Alexander earned his B.A. cum laude at Harvard University in 1969 and his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. He served on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles 1976 to 2001, when he was named professor emeritus.
He came to Yale in 2001 as a professor of sociology, and currently chairs the department. He is also co-director (with Ron Eyerman) of the Center for Cultural Sociology, which focuses on institutional life and how culture and social structure influence each other. This spring, he is leading the Whitney Lectures in the Humanities on the theme "Cultural Performance in the Social Science and Humanities."
The sociologist has held visiting professorships at universities throughout the world, and is a permanent guest professor at Konstanz University in Germany. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and the School of Social Science at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies.
He is a member of the American Sociological Association, the Sociological Research Association and the International Sociological Association. He has served as associate editor on numerous scholarly journals, and is currently co-editor of Sociological Theory, and Theory. His honors include Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships and UCLA's Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence.
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