Research Interests:: Animals and Society, Social Psychology, Interpretive Sociology, Sociology of Emotions, Gender, and Qualitative Methods. 

I like to say that I am interested in how people put together meaningful lives. Put another way, I am interested in the social construction of human identity. I am fascinated by the various resources that society and culture offers us for creating and revising a sense of self. Relationships, animals, work, nature, religion, the arts--all these (and more) allow us to create meaning out of what is, to start with, a meaningless experience. You guessed right: I am an existentialist. I came to sociology from the humanities (I have a BA in Art History), and I arrived with a fair amount of training in philosophy, art, and history. When I was working on my BA, I was interested in the quality of aesthetic experience, or what it is that happens when we feel pleasure before a work of art. Although I do not currently study visual art, those interests endure for me in the form of the sociology of emotions. I also explore various forms of aesthetic experience in my research on people’s relationships with animals. For more on this, see my recent book, If You Tame Me, below, and click on the Research link.

Here at CU, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Sociological Theory and Social Psychology. I also teach The Self in Modern Society. In Fall 2005, will teach Animals and Society for the first time. For more on these, see the Courses link above.