Man Yao is a PhD candidate of sociology at Ohio State University. Her research interests include gender inequality, cultural sociology, and sociology of education. Her dissertation uses the culture and cognition perspective to examine how people in the U.S. perceive the gender meanings of unfamiliar Chinese names and its real-life consequences. In another line of research, she uses large-scale survey data to document progress and impediment of gender equality in education and work.

Elizabeth Trudeau is a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame. She will be a visiting assistant professor of Sociology at Carleton College beginning in the fall of 2022. Her publications and research investigate sex, gender, and cultural conflicts with an emphasis on organizations and criminal justice. She is currently studying the movement to end Human Trafficking in the United States. 

Manning Zhang is a rising third-year PhD student at Brandeis University. She is in the joint PhD program of sociology and health policy. Her research interests are cultural sociology, health and sports. Currently she is working on an independent mixed-method research project on college-age students’ motivation to do weight training in the university gym. She is curious about how people from different cultural contexts understand fitness and make sense of their weight training practices.

Anne Marie Champagne (Culture Section Web Manager) is a junior fellow with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, where she is a doctoral candidate in sociology. Her thesis examines how mastectomy informs perceptions of gender identity and wellness in American law, medicine, and society. She is the editor (with Asia Friedman) of Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (BUP, June 2023) and the author of “Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment” (forthcoming). Her research interests include aesthetic power in social life, materiality and culture, body and embodiment, interpretive sociology, and the cultural codes of civil society.