Biographical Note
Jack LaViolette is a PhD student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Entering sociology from the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, he is broadly interested in language and literature, cultural production, symbolic interactionism, semiotics, social theory, and the history of social science. His methodological interests include natural language processing, discourse analysis, and social network analysis. Combining historical, cultural, and computational sociological approaches, his dissertation uses an original dataset of hundreds of thousands of books to ask how the American literary field evolved and stratified from 1860-1900 in response to the social transformations of the Gilded Age.
Jack holds a BA with Honors in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MSc with Distinction in Social Science of the Internet from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar and member of Keble College.