Letter from the Department Head
Welcome!
The Department of Sociology at Illinois has been a center of excellence in research and teaching, ever since the University of Illinois created a professorship and department of sociology in 1907, just two years after the founding of the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association). Over the last century faculty in the Department have served as presidents and vice presidents of major professional organizations including the American Sociological Association and as editors of key sociological journals and series. Most notably, Florian Znaniecki, widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists in the 20 th century, presided over the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Urbana half a century ago.
Striving to be a vibrant intellectual center of the sociological imagination with a collegial environment, the Department faculty and graduate students today are actively engaged in theoretically informed, methodologically rigorous, and substantively important research, focused on a diverse range of issues in various regions of the world from the Americas to Europe and from Africa to Asia . See our Faculty and Graduate Students webpages for examples of current research projects. In recent years, our faculty have received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, and have been fellows or invited lecturers at world-class academic institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Edinburgh, Keio, Peking, Yonsei, Essex, Texas, Toronto, Princeton, and Max Planck Institute Berlin, among others.
Our teaching addresses key themes of the 21st century, ranging from globalization to immigration to non-traditional families. In addition to the conventional core courses in sociological theory and research methods, our course offerings include demography, organization, social networks, historical sociology, race, gender, and social inequality, global ethnography, post-colonial studies, environmental sociology, sociology of law, social movements, sociology of science and technology, and globalization. At the graduate level, our four main areas of specialization are transnational sociology; race and inequality; science, technology, environment and society; and social dynamics and structure: models and methods; and transnational sociology. You can learn more about our course offerings by looking under the Programs and Courses sections of our website. For more information about our undergraduate and graduate programs, please contact Dr. Nicole Holtzclaw (Director of Undergraduate Studies) or Dr. Assata Zerai (Director of Graduate Studies).
The Department is one of intellectual excitement and relaxed collegiality. I wish you a pleasant virtual trip to our Department, and hope at least some of you will join us in real time as a fellow student or a colleague.
Best wishes,
Tim Liao
Head of Department