College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
A Message From Our Chair
Dear Friends,
The trees and spring flowers are in full bloom in Iowa City and it is lovely! I hope that your spring is equally pleasant. We are happy to bring you an update on the activities of our department, in a new and improved format. I would like to thank Professors Marina Zaloznaya and Jennifer Glanville, who have been chairing our communications committee, for moving us into this new format and creating such a wonderful newsletter.
Since we wrote to you last year, the department has continued to develop new initiatives and build on our established undergraduate programs, directed by Professor Mary Noonan. Beginning in the fall of 2016, we will be offering two majors in the department: We will continue to offer our major in Sociology and will add a new major in Criminology, Law and Justice. You will read about the new major in this newsletter. We are offering two new tracks in the Sociology major -- Family, Health and Well-Being and Organizations, Networks and Careers. We are at the end of our first year of participation in a new certificate for undergraduates in Social Science Analytics, and this program is growing, as well. Also, we recently hosted the Iowa Sociological Association annual meeting, and as the article in this newsletter notes, it was a smashing success. Professor Michael Lovaglia, the current president of ISA, coordinated the organization of this event, which was attended by undergraduates and faculty from our own department as well as from other colleges and universities around the state.
We also are proud of our strong graduate program, under the directorship of Professor Steven Hitlin. Our students continue to be active in research, publishing papers, presenting at conferences, and winning awards. Please read the article featuring some of our graduate students’ research in this newsletter. Once again we have recruited a fantastic new cohort of graduate students who will begin our program this fall. We look forward to helping our current students continue to soar and to welcoming our new students this fall.
In addition to being strongly committed to our teaching mission, our faculty continue to publish and present top scholarly work on a range of diverse topics. I invite you to read the articles in this newsletter about some of this exciting research. Also, please visit our department webpage at http://clas.uiowa.edu/sociology/ and read news about the other recent accomplishments of our faculty, as well as take a look at our faculty page where you can find information on each of our faculty member’s current research and teaching activities. The range of research projects underway in the department truly is impressive, and we are incorporating graduate and undergraduate students in many of these projects. One current highlight is that the department is the home of one of the American Sociological Association’s journals, Contemporary Sociology, which is edited by Professor Michael Sauder (http://csx.sagepub.com/).
I hope that you enjoy reading more about our department’s activities over the past year in this newsletter. Once again, I thank you for your past generous donations. These gifts allow us to expand and move forward in new and creative ways. We greatly appreciate all continued and new support!
Please feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you.
Very best regards,
Karen Heimer, Professor and Chair