2021 Award Winners
Winner of the 2021 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book- Fernando Domínguez Rubio. 2020. Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. Chicago University Press.
- Matthew Clair. 2020. Privilege and Punishment. How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. Princeton University Press.
- Erin Metz McDonnell. 2020. Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States. Princeton University Press.
- Anne Warfield Rawls & Waverly Duck. 2020.Tacit Racism. University of Chicago Press.
- Daniel DellaPosta, “Pluralistic Collapse: The ‘Oil Spill’ Model Of Mass Opinion Polarization” published in the American Sociological Review.
- Kevin Kiley and Stephen Vaisey, “Measuring Change and Stability in Personal Culture Using Panel Data” published in the American Sociological Review.
- Acosta, Laura. 2021. “Victimhood dissociation and conflict resolution: evidence from the Colombian peace plebiscite” published in Theory and Society.
- Hart, Chloe Grace. 2021. “Trajectory Guarding: Managing Unwanted, Ambiguously Sexual Interactions at Work” published in American Sociological Review.
2020 Award Winners
Winner of the 2020 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book- Orly Clergé. 2019. The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia. Berkeley: University of California Press
- Roi Livne. 2019. Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
2019 Award Winners
Mary Douglas Award (Best Book)
- Karida Brown, University of California, Los Angeles, for: Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press.
- Committee members: Clayton Childress (co-chair), Bin Xu (co-chair), Kelsy Burke, Eva Illouz, Richard Ocejo.
Clifford Geertz Award (Best Article)
- Karen A. Cerulo, Rutgers University, for: Scents and sensibility: olfaction, sense-making, and meaning attribution. American Sociological Review, 83(2), 361-389.
- Committee members: Paul Joosse (chair), Larissa Buchholz, Sam Friedman, Ellis Monk, Ori Schwarz.
Richard A. Peterson Award (Best Student Paper)
- Winner: Jacqui Frost, University of Minnesota, for “The Meaning of Uncertainty: Navigating States of Certainty and Uncertainty in Nonreligious Narratives”
- Honorable Mention: Yağmur Karakaya, University of Minnesota, for “The Conquest of Hearts: the Central Role of Ottoman Nostalgia within Contemporary Turkish Populism” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, (forthcoming).
- Committee members: Anya Degenshein (chair), Alison Gerber, Fiona Greenland, Svetlana Kharchenkova, Hannah Wohl.
2018 Award Winners
Mary Douglas Award (Best Book) Co-Winners: Clayton Childress Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. (Princeton, 2017) And Bin Xu The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China. (Stanford, 2017) Clifford Geertz Award (Best Article) Joosse, Paul. 2017. “Max Weber’s Disciples: Theorizing the Charismatic Aristocracy.” Sociological Theory 35(4): 334-358. Honorable mention: Frye, Margaret. 2017. “Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi.” American Sociological Review 82(5): 945-976 Richard A. Peterson Award (Best Student Paper) Winner: Anya Degenshein, Northwestern University “Strategies of Valuation: Repertoires of Worth at the Financial Margins” Honorable mention: Lily Liang, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison “No Room for Respectability: Boundary Work in Interaction at a Shanghai Rental” Honorable mention: Talia Shiff, Northwestern University “Evaluating the Case: Encounters of Schematic Accordance and Discordance in Asylum Adjudications.”Previous Award Winners
*work in progress* Mary Douglas Award (Best Book)- 2017, co-winner: Michaela DeSoucey, Contested Tastes. Foie Gras and the Politics of Food. (2017, Princeton University Press)
- 2017, co-winner: Nicole Gonzalez van Cleve, Crook County. Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. (2016, Stanford University Press)
- 2016: Lauren Rivera, How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton University Press
- 2015: Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009. Oxford University Press
- 2014: Virag Molnar, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State formation in Postwar Central Europe. Routledge 2013
- 2013: Lynette Spillman, Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations. University of Chicago Press
- 2012: Claudio Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession. University of Chicago Press
- 2011, co-winner: Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. University of Minnesota Press
- 2011, co-winner: David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Harvard University Press.
- 2010, co-winner: Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton University Press
- 2010, co-winner: Allison Pugh, Parents, Children and Consumer Culture. University of California Press
- 2017: Daniel Winchester, “A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action,” 2016. Social Forces 95(2): 585-606.
- 2017, honorable mention: Chana Teeger, “‘Both Sides of the Story’: History Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” (2015, in American Sociological Review 80(6): 1175-1200)
- 2016, co-winner: Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph, “Civic Action,” 2014. American Journal of Sociology, 120(3):798-863
- 2016, co-winner: Ruth Braunstein, Brad R. Fulton, and Richard L. Wood, “The Role of Bridging Cultural Practices in Racially and Socioeconomically Diverse Civic Organizations” 2014. American Sociological Review, 79(4), 705-725
- 2015: Matthew Norton, “Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System,” 2014. American Journal of Sociology, 119 (6): 1537-1575
- 2014, co-winner: Iddo Tavory and Nina Eliasoph, “Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation,” 2013. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4):908-942.
- 2014, co-winner: Arnout van de Rijt, Eran Shor, Charles Ward and Steven Skienaa, “Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media,” 2013. American Sociological Review, 78(2):266–289.
- 2013: Lauren Rivera, “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms,” 2012. American Sociological Review 77(6):
- 2017: Matthew Clair (Harvard University), “Resources, Navigation, and Punishment in the Criminal Courts”
- 2017, honorable mention: Mary Beth Fallin Hunzaker (Duke University), “Cultural Sentiments and Schema-Consistency Bias in Information Transmission”
- 2016: co-winner: Holly Campeau (University of Toronto) “‘The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the Blueville Way’: How Cultural Match Matters for Standardization in the Police Organization.”
- 2016: co-winner: Hannah Wohl (Northwestern University) “Community Sense: The Cohesive Power of Aesthetic Judgment”
- 2015: Monica C. Bell, “Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism.”
- 2014, co-winner: Hassan El Menyawi, “The Great Reversal”
- 2014, co-winner: Laura K. Nelson, “Enduring Cultural/Cognitive Structures: Political Logics as Cultural ‘Memory.’”
- 2013, co-winner: Charles Seguin, “The Mathematics of Superstars: Two Theories of Cultural Consumption”
- 2013, co-winner: Phillipa K. Chong, “Legitimate Judgment in Art, The Scientific World Reversed?: Critical Distance in Evaluation.”
- 2012: Christina Simko, “Rhetorics of Suffering: September 11 Commemorations as Theodicy.”
- 2011: Avi Astor, “Memory, Community, and Opposition to Mosques: The Case of Badalona.” Theory and Society.
- 2010: Iddo Tavory, “Everyday Morality–Street Danger and Moral Density in a Jewish Orthodox Neighborhood”
- 2009: Anna Paretskaya, “The Soviet Communist Party and the Other Spirit of Capitalism.”
- 2008: Gabriel Abend, “Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality.” in Theory and Society, 37(2):87-125.
- 2007: Hiro Saito, “Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma.” in Sociological Theory, 24(4):353-376.
- 2006, co-winner: Jason Matt, “The Cultural pragmatics of Event-ness: The Clinton/Lewinsky Affair”
- 2006, co-winner: Kim Babon, “Composition: Coherence, and Attachment: The Critical Role of Context in Reception”
- 2005: Gregoire Mallard, “Communities of Interpreters and Their Technical Instruments,” American Sociological Review. 70:992-1010.
- 2004: Virag Molnar, “Cultural Politics and Modernist Architecture: The Tulip Debate in Post-War Hungary”
- 2003: Karen Danna Lynch, “The Good Mother: Ideologies of Motherhood 1950-1998”
- 2002: Genevieve Zubrzycki, “We the Polish Nation: Ethnic and Civic Visions of Nationhood in Post-Communist Constitutional Debates”
- 2001, co-winner: Jamie Mullaney, “Like A Virgin: Temptation, Resistance, and the Construction of Identities Based on ‘Not Doings’”
- 2001, co-winner: Shyon Baumann, “Intellectualizing Discourse and Art World Development: The Case of Film in the United States”
- 2000: Gabriella Fried, “On Remembering and Silencing the Past: The Adult Children of the Disappeared of Argentina and Uruguay in Comparative Perspective”
- 1999: Kari Lerum, “Twelve-Step Feminism Makes Sex Workers Sick: How the State and the Recovery Movement Turn Radical Women into ‘Useless Citizens’”
- 1998: Kristen Purcell, “A League of Their Own: Mental Leveling and the Creation of Social Comparability in Sport”
- 1997: Wayne Brekhus, “Social Marking and the Mental Coloring of Identity: Sexual Identity Construction and Maintenance in the United States”
- 1996: Ronald N. Jacobs, “Civil Society and Crisis: Culture, Discourse, and the Rodney King Beating”
- 1995, co-winner: Bethany Bryson, “Anything but Heavy Metal: Identity and Exclusion in Musical Taste”
- 1995, co-winner: Stephen Ellingson, ”Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action: Public Debate and Rioting in Ante-bellum Cincinnati”
- 1994: Matthew P. Lawson, “Free to Choose: Submission in the Lives of Catholic Charismatics”
- 1993: Timothy Dowd, “The Song Remains the Same? The Musical Diversity and Industry Context of Number One Songs, 1955-1988”
- 1992: Christiana Nippert-Eng, [unknown]
- 1991: Ann Bowler, [unknown]
- 1990: Ken Dauber, [unknown]