Department Faculty

Frederick Wherry is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Before coming to Columbia, he was Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan and served as the Interim Associate Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Michigan. He serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. He has also been invited to serve on the editorial board of the American Sociological Review. He remains a Faculty Fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology.

He is the author of The Culture of Markets (Polity, 2012), The Philadelphia Barrio (University of Chicago Press, 2011),  and Global Markets and Local Crafts (Johns Hopkins, 2008). He is also co-editor (with Nina Bandelj) of The Cultural Wealth of Nations (Stanford University Press, 2011). He has conducted ethnographic research in Philadelphia (USA), Thailand, and Costa Rica. His work examines how value is accounted for and how it is generated, contested, and transformed. His new research explores how people of color understand and use money.

 Thomas A. DiPrete is Giddings Professor of Sociology, co-director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University, and a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center.  DiPrete holds a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.  He has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Duke University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as Columbia. DiPrete’s research interests include social stratification, demography, education, economic sociology, and quantitative methodology.  A specialist in comparative research, DiPrete has held research appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the Social Science Research Center – Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the University of Amsterdam.  His recent and ongoing projects include the study of gender differences in educational performance, educational attainment, and fields of study, the determinants of college persistence and dropout in the U.S., a comparative study of how educational expansion and the structure of linkages between education and the labor market contribute to earnings inequality in several industrialized countries, and the study of how social comparison processes affect the compensation of corporate executives.

Jonathan Rieder, Professor of Sociology, joined the faculty of Barnard College in 1990 and chaired the department from 1990 through 2003.  In addition to his teaching in the Department of Sociology, Professor Rieder directs Barnard’s Civic Engagement program. He is affiliated with Barnard's programs in American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Human Rights Studies, and is a member of the graduate faculty of Columbia University. Professor Rieder teaches courses on contemporary American culture and politics, unity and division in the United States, the sociology of culture,  race, ethnicity and American pluralism, and has taught “The Shapes and  Shadows of Identity” in the First Year Writing Program.

His 2008 book, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2008), was the subject of comment and review in The Washington Post, The New York Sunday Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, Harpers Magazine, Newsweek, the Nation and Christian Century. Rieder has discussed King on Michel Martin’s National Public Radio show “Tell Me More,” on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS, on the Brian Lehrer show, in the Washington Post-Newsweek magazine “On Faith,” on CNN, and many other places.  His article “‘I’m Going to Be a Negro Tonight’: Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and Postracial Paradoxes” appeared in the summer 2009 issue of The Michigan Review. The Huffington Post featured Rieder’s  "Too Black or Not Black Enough?: Final Thoughts on Beer Summits and Postracial Paradoxes” in Fall of 2009. 

Rieder is currently working on two projects. The first, Authority and Indignation in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is a reinterpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic letter in the light of King’s performances in black venues during the Birmingham insurgency. Rieder received a fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton to work on that project in 2011-12. The second project, Crossing Over, an analysis of the birth of the contemporary world of racial crossover culture, explores the complex interplay of blacks and whites in the transformation of rhythm and blues into soul music (and rock n roll) and traces out the ripples of crossover culture in various modern incarnations, including the 2008 triumph of Barack Obama.

Between 1995 and 2001, Professor Rieder was founding coeditor 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 regular contributor to The New York Times Sunday Book Review and a contributing editor for The New Republic, where his cover stories on black-Korean conflict in Brooklyn, the Crown Heights riot, and the Howard Beach affair chronicled racial and ethnic tensions in New York City during the late 1980s and early1990s. Professor Rieder has been awarded fellowships by the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Russell Sage Foundatio, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton.

Diane Vaughan received her Ph.D. in Sociology, Ohio State University, 1979, and taught at Boston College from 1984 to 2005.  During this time, she was awarded fellowships at Yale (1979-82), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford (1986-87), The American Bar Foundation (1988-1989), The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1996-1997), and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003-04). She came to Columbia in 2005.

Her interests are the sociology of organizations, sociology of culture, deviance and social control, field methods, research design, and science, knowledge, and technology.  The prime theoretical focus of her research is how the social - history, institutions, organizations - affect individual meanings, decisions, and action. Culture is the important mediator in this process, making ethnographic methods, supplemented by interviews, the best means of understanding these relationships.

Since 1980, she has been working on analogical theorizing: developing theory from qualitative data based on cross-case analysis.  The goal is to compare cases of similar events, activities or phenomena across different organizational forms in order to elaborate general theory or concepts.  This project has focused on the "dark side" of organizations:  mistake, misconduct, and disaster.  Her interest in how things go wrong in organizations has thus far resulted in Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior, Uncoupling, and The Challenger Launch Decision.  The product of this work is a book in progress, Theorizing:  Analogy, Cases, and Comparative Social Organization.

Her NASA analysis was awarded the Rachel Carson Prize, the Robert K Merton Award, Honorable Mention for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship of the American Sociological Association, and was nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. As a result of her analysis of the Challenger accident, she was asked to testify before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, then became part of the Board's research staff, working with the Board to analyze and write the chapters of the Report identifying the social causes of the Columbia accident.

The analogical theorizing project has led her now to an ethnography and interview-based study of air traffic control. In particular, she is examining it as a negative case: how controllers are trained to recognize early warning signs and anomalies as signals of potential danger and correct them, so that little mistakes do not turn into catastrophes.  Comparing four air traffic facilities, the focus is the work that air traffic controllers do and the interface between human cognitive abilities and technology in a highly standardized system in which risk and safety are their responsibility.  Much of the viability of air traffic control depends upon the human component, as individuals do boundary work, negotiating institutional, organizational, and air space boundaries in order to keep the system going.

Seymour Spilerman is the Julian C. Levi Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality. His research has examined the structure of work careers in corporate settings, focusing on the ways that educational attainment, labor market experience, race and gender influence work career features.  Spilerman is also involved in cross-national research on issues of income and wealth inequality, financial gerontology, and intergenerational transfers of resources.

Carla Shedd is Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Columbia University.  Shedd received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in June 2006 and her A.B. in Economics and African American Studies from Smith College.  Her research and teaching interests focus on: crime and criminal justice; race and ethnicity; law and society; social inequality; and urban sociology. 

Shedd is passionate about illuminating the plight of urban adolescents who each day confront the paradoxes of: a school system that can work to educate or criminalize them; a police department that can work to protect or harass them; and a justice system that can work to rehabilitate or damage them further. Shedd is currently finishing her first book, Arresting Development: Race, Place, and the End of Adolescence, which focuses on the city of Chicago. Centrally, the book examines the two institutions that prominently shape the lives of urban youth: the public school system and the criminal justice system. It also highlights the racially stratified social and physical terrain youth traverse between home and school.  Shedd’s exploration of the “carceral continuum” is extended in her new project analyzing the myriad legal and extra-legal attributes that impact juvenile justice processing and dispositions in New York City.

Shedd has been published in various academic journals and edited book volumes.  She has also received numerous competitive fellowships and grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Consortium on Violence Research, Columbia University, and Northwestern University.

Shedd is a 2010-11 Post-Doctoral Fellow for the Ford Foundation. She will be on sabbatical leave for the 2010-11 academic year as a visiting fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation.