Sociology Publications: 2015

Faculty in the Department of Sociology shared thoughts about their recent work.

Carlos Forment

Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology, recently published “Ordinary Ethics and the Emergence of Plebeian Democracy across the Global South: Buenos Aires’ La Salada Market” (Current Anthropology, 2015). He remarked about this new work:

“While working on this essay on South America’s largest informal market, after publishing recently a second essay on worker-occupied factories, and preparing myself to study urban scavengers in Buenos Aires, it dawned on me that these and the other cases-chapters of my next book are emblematic of a novel and heterodox form of democratic life that is emerging across the global south and which I now call plebeian citizenship.”

Other publications include Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience (Brill, 2012) and Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Choose a publication below to learn more.


Bio | Forment received his PhD from Harvard University. His research interests include governmentalized populations and plebeian citizenship across the global South; neoliberalism and public life today; civil society across the post-colonial world; citizenship: ancient, modern and contemporary; and, nationhood and selfhood in 19th-century Latin America. Currently Forment serves as Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies.


Virag Molnár

Virag Molnár, Associate Professor of Sociology, recently published Civil society, radicalism and the rediscovery of mythic nationalism (Nations and Nationalism, 2015). About this work, Molnár shared:

“This piece is part of a larger project that examines the anatomy of new nationalism in postsocialist Eastern Europe. I explore three areas, civil society, economic nationalism and geopolitical reorientation to trace the rise of new forms of nationalism in the postsocialist context. I focus on Hungary because Hungary went from being the most politically liberal of the former Eastern Block countries in the 1990s to the most populist nationalist regime, and I’m interested in understanding the reasons behind this radical shift.”

Other publications include the book Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe (Routledge, 2013), which received the Mary Douglas Prize for the Best Book in the Sociology of Culture from the American Sociological Association in 2014.

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Bio | Molnár received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Her research explores the intersections of culture, politics, social change and knowledge production with special focus on urban culture and transformations of the built environment. She has written about the relationship between architecture and state formation in socialist and postsocialist Eastern Europe, the post-1989 reconstruction of Berlin, and the new housing landscape of postsocialist cities. Currently Molnár serves as the Sociology department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies at Eugene Lang College.


Other publication updates from the department:

Terry Williams

Terry Williams, Professor of Sociology, recently published a new book, Con Men: Hustling in New York (Columbia University Press, 2015). To learn more about Williams’ book, see his recent blog post for the Press.

Other publications include Uptown Kids: Hope and Struggle in the Projects (Putnam Books, 1994) and Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line (Penguin Books, 1993).

Choose a publication below to learn more.


Bio | Williams received his PhD from City University of New York in 1978. He specializes in teenage life and culture, drug abuse, crews and gangs, and violence and urban social policy. In addition to his scholarly work, Williams is the founder and director of the Harlem Writers Crew Project, a multimedia approach to urban education for center city and rural youths.


Selections of NSSR publications from 2015:

Anthropology | Economics | Historical Studies | Liberal Studies | Philosophy | Politics | Psychology | Sociology