The Department of Sociology is a robust intellectual community where faculty and students work across traditional disciplinary lines. The graduate program is organized loosely within seven different areas, although most faculty and students identify with two or three different areas. In addition, the University of Michigan is an institution that supports inter-disciplinarity at its very core. There are no barriers for faculty and students to work with colleagues in other department or schools. Nearly 13 of our students are in joint degree programs - both formal programs and individually designed. Many of our areas also run a bi-weekly workshop, where faculty and students share their works in progress, provide cross-cohort mentorship, and invite outside speakers for research talks. In addition to the workshops organized by area, there are workshops that bring together students and faculty interested in a particular methodological approach to their research. Power, History, and Social Change Area: This program focuses on transformation of power, resources, and major societal institutions in comparative and historical perspective. Some of the program’s major emphases include social movements and revolutions and large-scale social transformations signaled by terms such as colonialismimperialism; class and state formation; development, the rise of capitalism and the modern corporation; and modernitypostmodernity. Cultural, social and political-economic change are all central to the program’s mission and the study of changes in class, race, nationalism, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, and other forms of power, inequality and identity. The program emphasizes the department’s unusual strength in the study of global transformations, both historical and contemporary. Program faculty includes specialists on Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. The process of change within American society may also be a focus when viewed in a historical and comparative light. No other sociology department in the United States offers this degree and range of geographic and historical coverage. Program faculty use historical, narrative, ethnographic and quantitative methods and data in their work; but all emphasize historical time and comparison, either explicit or implicit. Many program faculty have strong interests in neo-Weberian, feminist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist, post–structuralist, new institutionalist and other macrosociologial theories. Students wishing to specialize in political sociology, social movements, comparative structure, international political economy, and the sociology of development should enroll in the Power, History and Social Change program.
