Welcome to the Sociology Department Blog

Welcome to the Sociology Department at the University of Illinois! Our students and faculty study some of the most pressing questions facing society today -- the challenges of globalization, the persistence of racism in social arrangements, the experiences of immigrants, and the complexity of social factors that affect health and the environment. And we'll be using this blog to keep you up to date with faculty research, developments in our curriculum, and our students' accomplishments.

This week, we're excited about welcoming prospective graduate students to campus. Graduate students are crucial to the intellectual life of our department. Their scholarly interests and energy often inspires us to press our own research in innovative directions. Undergraduates across campus benefit from our graduate students' skills as teachers. So we look forward to meeting the next wave of graduate students and welcoming them to the department.

For our part, we offer our graduate students a unique environment where they can develop a rich scholarly agenda. Our graduate students learn the breadth of research methodologies that sociologists rely on. We have many interdisciplinary connections -- our faculty have positions in every area studies center on campus; they have appointments in units including Gender and Women's Studies, the Law School, the Center on Health, Aging, and Disability, the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, and other departments, including History, Geography, African-American Studies, and Latino/a Studies. These interdisciplinary networks provide students with opportunities to develop innovative research designs on the cutting edge of scholarship.

As a result, our graduate students have been extremely successful at attracting external support for their research. They have sought and received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, in addition to Dissertation Completion Grants from the University to support their graduate work. In fact, Cheng-Heng Chang has just received an SSRC fellowship -- congratulations Cheng-Heng!!

So we're looking forward to meeting our prospective students and introducing them to the expansive opportunities for pursuing a Ph.D. in the Sociology Department at Illinois.