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In an opinion piece on the USA Today website, Associate Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons focused on two of the most significant predictors of gun deaths, income inequality and the percentage of the population identified as black. “But for the Grace of Class and Race,” posted on the publication’s site on Sept. 30, Irons expanded the conversation beyond legislation as a solution. “We should look more deeply into the roll race and class play in gun violence in the United States."

Both the NBC News site and the The Christian Science Monitor quoted Professor of Sociology Dennis Gilbert on issues related to the release by the U.S. Census Bureau of the nation’s real median household income. The NBC article appeared in dozens of additional publications across the country.

Like so many other Hamilton students who take advantage of the academic freedom the open curriculum offers, recent graduate David Schwartz ’13 sort of accidentally fell into his major and academic passion: sociology.

Hannah Tessler ’14 is connecting with children adopted from China to learn about their unique experiences being “raised American,” in her project funded by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.  With Associate Professor of Sociology Steve Ellingson, she will listen to others’ stories and “search for relationships between a child’s environment and their outlook on a variety of topics and issues.”

Associate Professor of Sociology Stephen Ellingson is the author of a chapter in Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers, and Markets.  In his chapter, "Packaging Religious Experience, Selling Modular Religion: Explaining The Emergence and Expansion of Megachurches," Ellingson shows  how the growth and success of megachurches has been fueled by their ability to create new religious practices that are easily adapted across theological and denominational boundaries.

An InsideHigherEd article titled “Majoring in a Professor,” focused on a paper, “Faculty Gatekeepers and Academic Taste in Undergraduate Students’ Choice of Major,”  co-authored by Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology,  and his former student Christopher G. Takacs, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago.  Takacs presented the paper on Aug. 10 at the American Sociology Association meeting in New York City.

What is the best advice one can give to a new student at Hamilton College? This was the open-ended question posed by Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at this year’s final installment of the popular “Tell Me What You Know” lecture series hosted by the Emerson Literary Society.

At the recent annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, (April 24-28), Associate Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons presented as part of a panel she co-organized with a colleague, University of Louisville Professor Karen Christopher.

Associate Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons reacted quickly to a serious error made by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart last week when, in Iron’s words, he “lampooned Dick Molpus.” The white former Secretary of State and civil rights champion, Molpus was responsible for registering Mississippi’s 1995 decision to ratify the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. Irons, who had worked for Molpus in the 1990s, wrote an opinion piece in the Huffington Post titled “Civil Rights Champion Falsely Accused by Jon Stewart” in which she corrected Stewart's mischaracterization.

In in the wake of an exam boycott recently at Johns Hopkins University, InsideHigherEd reported on a different boycott 25 years earlier on Hamilton's campus.  "Game of Theories," the story of Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology Dan Chambliss’ challenge to students in his introductory sociology courses and how first-year student John Werner '92 successfully  met it, was retold on Feb. 22.