The following brief essay appeared in the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section Newsletter.  There’s no promotion like a self-promotion!  Of course, given the audience, the essay makes a particular case from a particular angle, and the story of our department could surely be told from other perspectives.  I hope we will do so in the future!

The history of sociology at the University of Virginia is yet to be written.  But surely any such account would include the centrality of culture in the past work of the department as well as the importance of UVA to cultural sociology as a whole. James Hunter’s Culture Wars, Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Murray Milner’s Status and Sacredness: these major, prize-winning contributions were all written in Charlottesville. Other cultural sociologies produced in the department include: Sarah Corse’s Nationalism and Literature, Allison Pugh’s Longing and Belonging, Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity, Rachel Rinaldo’s Mobilizing Piety, and my own The Politics of Regret, among others with cultural relevance.

We are a small to midsized department that nonetheless tries to cover a variety of areas, including education, inequality, law, religion, family, immigration, development, and economic sociology.  But our identity has always included a strong interest in, and contributions to, cultural sociology, and culture has long been a central focus of our departmental plans.

Sociology and anthropology at UVA were separated in the early 1970s, when Ted Caplow led the department, and Ted’s follow-ups to the Lynd’s Middletown studies, among his enormous number of other works, focused on community and culture.  In the seventies and eighties, Jeff Hadden’s work on religion, and in particular on cults, was of obvious relevance to cultural sociology.  For a short number of years, Lewis Feuer’s philosophical perspectives shaped the work of a number of graduate students and colleagues.  While he is not a cultural sociologist by any strict definition, Gianfranco Poggi’s Weberian state theory was also important to the life of the department in the late 80s and early 90s.

Since the early 1990s, culture has been an overriding concern for the department, and various mission statements have made this explicit.  For years, all graduate students were required to take either culture or stratification, and while the historical data are not at hand, it is likely more graduate students have taken comprehensive exams in culture and have identified as cultural sociologists than any other subject.  And the interest in culture has shaped our hiring over the last two decades as well.  Following my own arrival nearly ten years ago, we have been joined by Andrea Press, Allison Pugh, Simone Polillo, Rachel Rinaldo, Sabrina Pendergrass, and (in the Fall) Miranda Waggoner, in addition to Josipa Roksa and Adam Slez beyond culture. Coupled with new financial support from the University in recognition of our growing achievements, cultural sociology at Virginia is on an upward trajectory.

Cultural sociology, of course, like sociology itself, is hardly a unified enterprise.  So it is perhaps most accurate to say that members of the department pursue a wide variety of exciting cultural sociologies. Sarah Corse focuses on the sociology of art and literature; Simone Polillo works at the intersection of cultural and economic sociology; Katya Makarova works on cities and culture, as well as on consumption; Allison Pugh investigates the interplay of culture, family, and economic activity; Sabrina Pendergrass works on race, region and symbolic boundaries; Rachel Rinaldo is an ethnographer of women’s agency; James Hunter has an extensive research program on character and culture; Stephan Fuchs has worked on science and knowledge as well as on the intersections among cultural, network, and systems theory; Krishan Kumar has recently been working on empire; and my own work has focused not only on collective memory, but more recently on suffering and the origins of meaning.

But we are more than just a collection of individual cultural scholars, we have also been actively cultivating the synergies that make for a vibrant intellectual atmosphere.   With the support of the UVA provost, among other places, Allison Pugh has been running an interdiscplinary field methods workshop with colleagues from anthropology, music, and education, which hosted Sherry Ortner this year, and will welcome Annette Lareau next year.  In the past two years, Jeff Alexander, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Abigail Saguy, Jonathan Rieder, Stephen Vaisey and Isaac Reed have also visited as part of our seminar series, and Isaac will be spending part of the coming year visiting the department.  With Andrea Press and two anthropologists, Allison is also organizing a year-long series of lectures on intimacy, which will include sociologists like Paula England, and cultural theorists such as Eva Illouz and Rosalind Gill.  We have an active work-in-progress seminar featuring work by faculty and students that meets periodically to exchange ideas, and students meet monthly in an ethnography workshop to present and support interpretive research.

A particularly important resource for the department is the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture run by James Hunter, along with Joe Davis.  The Institute is an extraordinarily well-endowed interdisciplinary center exploring “contemporary cultural change and its individual and social consequences,” as its mission statement puts it; IASC not only supports a large number of pre-doctoral, doctoral, and post-doctoral fellows, but also publishes The Hedgehog Review, as well as hosting internationally renowned sociologists like Hans Joas, Richard Sennett, and Phil Gorski (all just in the last two years).  The department and the Institute work closely together on these and other events, and the department benefits from the Institute’s unusual resources and connections, to say nothing of its gorgeous space.

Another significant institutional structure worth mentioning is the sociology department’s strong collaboration with the Media Studies department.  The most direct connection in this regard is Andrea Press, who holds a partial appointment in both units, and who works with a large number of students, in particular on media audiences.  Media Studies does not currently have a graduate program of its own, so it has often hired sociology students as teaching assistants, as well as supported their interests in media.  In the next couple of years, we may well pursue a joint program in media sociology, which is already represented by a graduate seminar Andrea offers.

Overall, the graduate program in sociology at UVA is doing extremely well, thanks in part to a major revamping a few years ago, in which we stopped admitting unfunded students, and increased our support to the individuals we do admit.  Now we fund between six and eight new students a year going forward; our funding package is competitive with—and in many cases superior to—our public competitors.   This institutional change has also had important cultural ramifications, as Virginia graduate students have fostered a markedly collaborative atmosphere of solidarity that counters the storied alienation of graduate student life.  Put simply, our graduate students support each other.

The major reason we were able to convince UVA’s administration to provide us with increased resources was that our record of student achievement has indeed been extraordinary over the last decade.  Our students have published sole-authored papers in journals included The American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, Social Forces, Gender and Society, Poetics, and Sociological Forum, among many others.  They secure funding from national sources for their work, such as the National Science Foundation (twice for cultural projects). In regard to culture, it is important to note that both first place in the Culture Section’s student paper prize last year went to our student (now Ph.D.) Christina Simko, while the honorable mention went to another of our students, Ben Snyder (now also Ph.D.).  Both Christina and Ben’s dissertation books have already been accepted for publication with Oxford University Press.  Jen Silva, another of our extraordinary graduates, has published her work in ASR and elsewhere, as well as had her book, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, published by Oxford.  Matthew Hughey, now associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, published his dissertation book, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race, with Stanford.  And this list just scratches the surface of a very deep pool of extraordinary graduate student achievements.

Part of this record of impressive graduate student achievement reflects our improved support, but, again, part of it is also due to a palpable culture of intellectual cooperation. We have a departmental culture that works in myriad ways to support cultural sociology, including workshops, guest speakers, and a spirit of collegiality among faculty and students. Faculty co-author with graduate students, students collaborate on independent research projects, scholars serve as co-PIs on grants, there is an active flow of papers among scholars commenting on each other’s work – the intellectual life is bubbling here, with much of it centered on cultural sociology in its many forms.

Virginia, in sum, is a terrific place to do cultural sociology, for both faculty and graduate students.  Yes, Cultural Sociology, there is a Virginia!