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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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.

Areas of specialization: political sociology, urban studies, environmental sociology, globalization and development, qualitative methods, inequality, Brazil, and natural resource management. Author or coauthor of The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life; “Accessing Scarce Resources in the Brazilian Amazon,” in Latin American Research Review (forthcoming); “Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism,” in American Journal of Sociology; and “Co-Designing and Co-Teaching Graduate Qualitative Methods: An Innovative Ethnographic Workshop Model,” in Teaching Sociology. Conference presentations—on subjects ranging from contested development and Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam to inequality in American civic life—before such organizations as the American Sociological Association, Eastern Sociological Society, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton, England. Has previously taught at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil; and Brown University. Has also served as special lecturer at Providence College and as consultant and mentor at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, Rhode Island. At Bard since 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).