Faculty

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Allison McKim, director

Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of the Sociology Program
B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Ph.D. New York University.

Professor Allison McKim specializes in gender, punishment & social control, criminology, the welfare state, and ethnographic research. She is particularly interested in the role of gender in the criminal justice system, social policy, and law.

Her recent book, Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers University Press), is an ethnographic comparison of two drug treatment programs for women, one in the criminal justice system and one in the health care system. In these rehabs, she found two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim’s book shows how addiction treatment reflects the race, class, and gender politics of mass incarceration. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that is serving to reorganize the link between punishment and social welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help empower women, McKim argues that using the concept of addiction to understand social problems further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gender inequality. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system of social control, bifurcated by race and class. Prof. McKim's research has also appeared in the journals Gender & Society and Signs. She teaches courses on gender; sexuality; punishment, prisons, and policing; deviance and crime; governance and the welfare state; drugs and society; and qualitative research.

Professor McKim's Academia.edu Page

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Karen Barkey

Karen Barkey’s research has been engaged in the comparative and historical study of the state, with special focus on its transformation over time. Her work has explored state society relations, peasant movements, banditry, and opposition and dissent organized around the state. Her main empirical site has been the Ottoman Empire, in comparison with France and the Habsburg and Russian Empires. She also pays attention to the Roman and Byzantine worlds as important predecessors of the Ottomans. Her book Empire of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2008) explores issues such as diversity, the role of religion in politics, Islam and the state as well as the manner in which the Sunni-Shi’a divide operated during the tenure of the Ottoman Empire—topics that remain relevant today. Barkey, who was born in Istanbul, is also coauthor of Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (Columbia University Press, 2014), which explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine/Israel, regions once under Ottoman rule. Recent publications include Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan and Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Shared Sacred Sites: A Contemporary Pilgrimage (City University of New York Publications, 2018). Barkey was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies, IMéRA, Marseille for 2021–2022, and has served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the Othering and Belonging Institute; director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and codirector of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. She also taught at Columbia University, where she was director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. BA, Bryn Mawr College; MA, University of Washington; PhD, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2021.
www.karenbarkey.com
 

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Yuval Elmelech

Associate Professor of Sociology; Research Associate, Levy Economics Institute
B.A., M.A., Tel Aviv University; Ph.D., Columbia University.

Fellowships: Public Policy Consortium (2000), Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (2000), Paul Lazarsfeld Fellowship (1995–2000), all at Columbia University. Grants: National Science Foundation (1999); Seed Grant, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University (2001); Russell Sage Foundation (co-investigator, 2005). Author, Transmitting Inequality: Wealth and the American Family (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). Articles and book chapters in Social Science and Medicine; Social Forces; Social Science Research; Housing, Theory and Society; Sociological Inquiry; Housing Studies; Oxford Bibliographies; Megamot (Hebrew); Russian Jews on Three Continents; Global Aging and Challenges to Families; Wealth Accumulation and Communities of Color in the U.S.

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Laura Ford

Assistant Professor of Sociology
B.A., Pacific Union College; J.D., Tulane University; M.P.A., Columbia University; LL.M., University of Washington; Ph.D., Cornell University

With a background in both sociology and law, Professor Laura Ford’s research and teaching areas include: law, religion and society, economic sociology, social theory, the history and development of intellectual property, and historical sociology. She has published in journals such as Theory & Society; Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal; Max Weber Studies; The American Sociologist; Socio-Legal Review; The Journal of the Patent & Trademark Office Society; and California Western Law Review. Professor Ford’s publications also include a chapter written for the edited volume, The Sacred and the Law: The Durkheimian Legacy (Werner Gephart & Daniel Witte, eds., 2017).  Ford’s in-progress book—The Intellectual Property of Nations: Sociological and Historical Perspectives on a Modern Legal Institution, under contract with Cambridge University Press—offers a macro-historical account of the emergence of intellectual property, as a new type of legal property. Professor Ford is an active member of the American Sociological Association, and was recently elected to serve as a Council Member for the ASA’s History of Sociology Section. She also maintains a close relationship with The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, where she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow from 2014 to 2016.

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Peter Klein

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental and Urban Studies
B.A., Drew University; M.A., Ph.D., Brown University.
 
Professor Peter Klein’s teaching and research focus on urban studies, environmental sociology, globalization and development, political sociology, and qualitative methods. He is engaged in research and community-based projects in both the United States and Brazil.
 
Peter’s research in Brazil focuses on public participation, urban and environmental change, and collective action in both Amazonia and Rio de Janeiro. His book manuscript, Flooded: Development, Democracy, and Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam (Rutgers University Press, 2022), provides an ethnographic account of the societal effects of the state’s attempt to mitigate the negative impacts of one of the world’s largest hydroelectric facilities with extensive social and economic resources. The book developed out of his PhD work, for which he won the best dissertation award in the Brazil section of the Latin American Studies Association. Peter continues to carry out research in the Brazilian Amazon, and his work extends to Rio de Janeiro. He engages with scholars, activists, and artists based in the city and the Global North, in efforts to reframe stigmatized understandings of Rio’s favelas, carry out research on environmental inequality, democratize academia, and rethink how knowledge is produced. Since 2019, Peter has been doing much of this work through Maré from the Inside, a visual and textual exhibit.  

Peter also engages in teaching- and community-based participatory research and engagement in the United States on civic participation, environmental inequality, and housing insecurity. He cares deeply about student engagement in the world beyond the classroom, so that they can see the value of the ideas they learn in courses and apply them to civic and political work that matters to them. Through his courses and special projects, he works with students to actively participate in efforts in local communities, particularly the city of Kingston, that address environmental, housing, and other social justice issues. 

Professor Klein’s published work appears in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Latin American Research Review, and American Journal of Sociology, among other academic journals. He is also co-author of The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life (2014).

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Joel Perlmann

Levy Institute Research Professor; Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute
B.A., Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Ph.D., Harvard University.

Research grants from NIMH, NEH, NSF, NIE, Spencer and Russell Sage Foundations, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Author of Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (winner of the Willard Waller Award, American Sociological Association); Woman's Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (with Robert Margo); Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress, 1890–2000. Coeditor, Immigrants, Schooling, and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference? and The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals. Papers in numerous journals, including Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, The Annals, Historical Methods, International Migration Review, The Public Interest.
 

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Emeritus Faculty: Michael Donnelly

Professor Emeritus of Sociology
A.B., Harvard College; Ph.D., Birkbeck College, University of London.

Member, School of Social Science, The Institute for Advanced Study (1990–91). Research grants: National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health) and American Council of Learned Societies. Author of Managing the Mind: A Study of Medical Psychology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (1983), The Politics of Mental Health in Italy (1992), and book chapters, articles, and reviews in History of the Human Sciences, Economy and Society, Contemporary Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, and others. Coeditor, Corporal Punishment in Theoretical Perspective (2005).