Graduate News

Cleothia Frazier receives two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Duke Aging Center.

Dasom Lee receives an Assistant Professor position at the University of Twente.

Lacee Satcher receives an Assistant Professor position at Boston College.

Philip J. Pettis was awarded a research grant from the Tides Center for his project, titled “I feel like I have to be a Super Jew to Prove Myself”: The Role of Reflected Appraisals on Identity Work Among Jews of Color.

Cleothia Frazier receives a GLI Professional Development and Training Grant.

Dasom Lee receives a GLI Professional Development and Training Grant.

Darwin Baluran receives a GLI Dissertation Enhancement Grant.

Ryan Talbert receives an Assistant Professor position at the University of Connecticut.

Lacee Satcher receives Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

Yvonne Chen receives Summer Research Award from Vanderbilt University College of Arts & Science.

Ashley Kim receives 2020-2021 Mellon Graduate Fellowship from Vanderbilt’s Center for Digital Humanities.

Rachel Underwood receives 2020-2021 Mellon Graduate Fellowship from Vanderbilt’s Center for Digital Humanities.

Amanda Brockman receives Graduate Teaching Fellowship from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.

Megan Jordan received a scholarship to attend the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine Summer Intensive.

Whitney Frierson‘s paper titled “I Like…Red bone: Colorism, Rappers, and Black Sorority Women at a PWI” accepted for the 2020 ASA Annual Meeting.

Elizabeth Barna has been awarded a 2020-2021 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Vanderbilt’s Center for Digital Humanities. The fellowship is designed to support her ongoing work bridging academic sociology with the world of museums and public engagement.

Rachel Underwood has been awarded a 2020-2021 Mellon Graduate Fellowship from Vanderbilt’s Center for Digital Humanities.

Elizabeth Barna has been invited to participate in the 2021 Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship program, a three-week all expenses paid trip to Poland to study and discuss Holocaust memory, Jewish history, and memorial museum practices.

Elizabeth Barna secured a contract with Vanderbilt University Press to write a minibook tentatively titled Man of His Time? Teaching about Andrew Jackson in the Age of Trump, Truths, Lies, and Histories of Nashville as a part of Vanderbilt University Press’ “” trade series, designed to bridge the gap between what scholars and historians know about the city and what the public thinks it knows.

Hannah Ingersoll‘s paper tentatively titled “Diverging Paths: Higher Education Aid Policy in Tennessee and Georgia” has been accepted to the 2020 SSHA meeting in November.

Rachel Skaggs has been awarded a 2017-2018 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowships. The fellowship is designed to support innovation and excellence in graduate student research and funds full-time work on a dissertation.

Quan Mai, publishes: Quan D. Mai (2016). “All the Labor Problems News Fit to Print: The New York Times and the Cultural Production of the U.S. ‘Labor Problem, ‘ 1870-1932.” Labor History

Allison McGrath has been awarded a 2016-2017 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowships. The fellowship is designed to support innovation and excellence in graduate student research and funds full-time work on a dissertation.

Kanetha Wilson has been awarded a 2016-2017 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowships. The fellowship is designed to support innovation and excellence in graduate student research and funds full-time work on a dissertation.

Kate Pride Brown accepts a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jonathan Coley accepts a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Sociology at Monmouth College.

Helena Dagadu accepts a tenure-track Endowed Assistant Professor position in Sociology at Loyola University-Chicago.

Courtney Thomas accepts a tenure-track faculty position in Sociology and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Courtney Thomas’ “The Black Middle Class: New Insights for the Study of Racial and Ethnic Inequality in the United States” was accepted for publication at  Sociological Focus.

Rachel Skaggs has been accepted to Vanderbilt’s STEM Policy and Advocacy Program.  The program takes her and 24 other grad students, undergrad students, and postdocs to Capitol Hill to learn first-hand how federal STEM policy is made and the role of advocacy by various stakeholders in achieving policy goals.

Taylor Hargrove received an independent research grant from Meharry’s Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy.

Rachel Skaggs received a Curb Public Engagement Grant.

Peter Vielehr received the 2014 Scholarly Activity Award from the ASA’s Sociologists’ AIDS Network.

Anne Grant’s “Adonai/Adidas T-Shirt” was published in Conversations: An Online Journal of the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion.

In 2014, Kate Pride Brown received funding from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy to support her dissertation: “Saving the Sacred Sea: Lake Baikal Environmental Activism from the Soviet Union to Globalized Modernity.”

In 2014, Anne Grant’s project, “T-Shirt Talk: The Art of Reimagining Cultural Jewish Identity,” was exhibited at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. The Jewish Daily Forward recently reviewed the project on its website.

Katherine Everhart was selected as one of the 16 graduate students to present her dissertation research at the 2014 Young Scholars in Social Movements conference at University of Notre Dame.

Carly Rush received a 2014 Dissertation Enhancement Grant from the Graduate School for her dissertation, “Outsiders Within: Cochlear Implants, Oralism, and the Deaf Community.” The funds will expand her research to include interviews and observations of the Gallaudet University all alumni reunion this July. More information about her research can be found on her blog.

Sandra Arch received a 2014 Dissertation Enhancement Grant from the Graduate School for her dissertation, “Independent Together: The Formation of Community among Independent Workers in Coworking Spaces.” The grant will fund her attendance at a coworking conference in Kansas City, Missouri.

Allison McGrath received a 2014 Summer Research Award from the College of Arts and Sciences for “Bare Breasts for Action: The Role of Organizational Identities and Strategic Logic in Movement’s Tactical Choices.” The award funds collection of preliminary data for her dissertation, investigating the factors that influence feminist organizations’ tactical choices.

Carly Rush received one of seven 2014-15 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowships. The fellowship is designed to support innovation and excellence in graduate student research and funds full-time work on a dissertation.

In February 2014, Blake Sisk successfully defended his dissertation, Playing Catch-Up: Legalization and the Labor Market Trajectories of Unauthorized Latin American Immigrants. Next year, he will be an Undergraduate Advising Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University.

Carly Rush was selected as a 2014 Fahs-Beck Scholar and received funding for “Outsiders Within: Cochlear Implants, Oralism, and the Deaf Community in the 21st Century.”

In 2013, Samuel Shaw successfully defended his dissertation, Off Center: Art Careers in Peripheral Place.

In 2013, Kate Pride Brown gave an invited talk at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Jackson, Mississippi titled “Saving the Sacred Sea: Environmental Activism around Lake Baikal.”

Whitney Laster received the Stanford M. Lyman Dissertation Scholarship from the Mid-South Sociological Association in 2013.

Whitney Laster was a 2013-14 Robert Penn Warren Dissertation Fellow. The fellowship is designed to support innovation and excellence in graduate student research and funds full-time work on a dissertation.

In 2013, Samantha Perez and Courtney Thomas were awarded a Robert Penn Warren Grant to lead a seminar titled, “Exploring Boundaries: Race and Ethnicity in the 21^st Century United States.” The seminar ran from August 2013 to May 2014.

In 2013, Katherine Everhart was selected to attend, with a full scholarship, the International Sociological Association’s PhD Laboratory in Sydney, Australia.

In 2013, Kate Pride Brown returned from a 10-month fieldwork trip to Irkutsk, Russia, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship.

Quan Mai won the Marion T. Loftin Award with the Department of Sociology at Vanderbilt University for Best Graduate Student Paper in 2013.

Erin Bergner was awarded a 2013 Summer Research Award from Vanderbilt’s University College of Arts and Science to attend an international medical conference on intersex conditions in Glasgow, Scotland for her dissertation, “Organizing (Dis)Order: The Biomedical Boundaries of Intersexuality.”

In the summer of 2013, Bhumika Piya attended a summer course on environmental demography with a full scholarship for all expenses, at the University of Colorado Population Center in Boulder, Colorado.

In 2012, Blake Sisk, PhD candidate in Sociology, received one of three Young Researcher awards in the 2012 BORDERS Awards in Immigration Research national competition.

Erin Rehel received one of two Board of Directors Scholarships for the 2011 American Men’s Studies Association conference. Erin’s paper, “Welfare States and Play Dates: Fatherhood and Masculinity in the New Economy,” was presented at the AMSA conference.

Sarah Glynn and Dan Morrison received the 2010-11 College of Arts and Science Social Science Dissertation Fellowship.

Blake Sisk won a fellowship to the 2010 Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in European Studies on International Migration, held at the University of Minnesota.

Yang Gao, a fourth year PhD student, was the recipient of a Social Science Dissertation Fellowship from the College of Arts & Science for 2009-10. The SSDF supported Yang’s research on how Chinese university students view, make sense of, and critique US televison shows.

Six PhD students in Sociology held dissertation fellowships on campus between the years of 2007 and 2009: George Sanders (Warren Center for the Humanities, 2007-08), Heather Talley (Warren Center for the Humanities, 2007-08), Courtney Muse (SSDF, 2007-08), Harmony Newman (SSDF/VCNS, 2008-09), and Emily Tanner-Smith (SSDF, 2008-09).

Harmony Newman was quoted about the field of Social Sciences on MSN Encarta in 2007.

Teresa Terrell received a National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant for 2006-2007 for her research on “Community Participation in Neighborhood Organizations: An Investigation of Local Participation in Two Inner-City Neighborhoods.”

Amy Beth Cooter won first place in the 2005 sociology honorary society Alpha Kappa Delta’s national Undergraduate Student Paper Competition for her paper, which was then published in AKD’s journal, Sociological Inquiry. The award carried with it a $600 stipend and travel expenses to the 2005 annual convention of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia.

Ranae Evenson won an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Graduate Student Paper Award competition of the Health Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems for her paper, “Co-Occurring Physical Health Problems and Psychiatric Disorders in the General Population.”

Graduate School 2005 Summer Research Fellowships from the College were won by Soma Chaudhuri, Lyndi Hewitt, and George Sanders.

Steve Lee was a Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Fellow in 2005.  Steve also served as Editor for the scholarly quarterly, Work and Occupations.

Ashley Thompson received a Dissertation Enhancement Grant from the Graduate School in 2005.

Koji Ueno (Ph.D. 2004) and Melissa Sloan (Ph.D. 2005) won the 2004 Odum Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper from the Southern Sociological Society.

Melissa Sloan received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the National Science Foundation for 2004-2005. Melissa was also Deputy Editor of the scholarly quarterly Work and Occupations.

Laurie Woods received a Graduate School Summer Research Award in 2004.

In 2004, Lyndi Hewitt and Professor Holly McCammon’s co-authored article was published in the journal Mobilization. Their paper, “Explaining Suffrage Mobilization: Balance, Neutralization, and Range in Collective Action Frames, 1892-1919,” was reprinted in 2005 in Frames of Protest: Social Movements and the Framing Perspective by John A. Noakes and Hank Johnston.

Melissa Sloan published an article in Work and Occupations, February, 2004, entitled, “The Effects of Occupational Characteristics on the Experience and Expression of Anger in the Workplace.”

In 2004, Ken Spring was interviewed for Bravo’s documentary, “More that Music: Songs That Changed Our World.”