The Berkeley Sociology Department is the world’s top-ranked center for sociological research, training, and teaching. It has been at the forefront of professional sociology since its early years in the 1950s and continues to mold the discipline and educate its leading practitioners.

For the past six decades, Berkeley’s faculty has included sociology’s most influential leaders and public intellectuals. Major and intellectually varied scholars such as Reinhardt Bendix, Herbert Blumer, John Clausen, Kingsley Davis, Erving Goffman, and Seymour Martin Lipset set the Department’s traditions in the 1950s and 1960s. A subsequent generation of Berkeley sociologists included Robert Blauner, David Matza, William Kornhauser, Robert Bellah, Nancy Chodorow, and Arlie Hochschild. Today’s faculty includes four members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two members of the National Academy of Sciences, two members of the American Philosophical Society, nine Guggenheim winners, one MacArthur Fellow, and two recent presidents of the American Sociological Association. The work of Berkeley’s faculty is found in the leading professional journals as well as in prize-winning books. Please see our Department Highlights to read about our latest work.

Our scholarship ranges from the latest statistical models to cutting-edge ethnographic research, from historical inquiry to survey analysis. We are reputed for studies of states, institutions, organizations, stratification, markets, culture, gender, poverty, immigration, labor and women's movements, economic and political development, race, schooling, sexuality, intellectuals, urban gangs, children, prisons, and churches. Our scholarship covers all regions of the globe - from East and South Asia to the former Soviet Union, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as North America. This breadth and depth is recognized in the most recent rankings by U.S. News and World Report where the Department is ranked number one overall in the nation. The Department was ranked first in the subfields of economic sociology and gender and second in the subfields of culture, historical sociology, social stratification, and population.

Berkeley Sociology is, however, more than an aggregation of individual faculty or subfields. It is a scholarly community in which debate, dialogue, and collaboration enhance the productivity of its individual faculty and graduate students. Berkeley sociology is famed across the discipline for the dynamism of its collective life, which in turn elevates both the quality of our graduate training and of our undergraduate curriculum. Compared to any other sociology department, our graduate students regularly receive more National Science Foundation Fellowships, more frequently win the annual prize for the best sociology dissertation, and they gain a higher percentage of jobs in the top sociology departments. More information can be found on the graduate program page on this site.

We welcome visitors to this site to review the publications, research projects, and courses taught by our faculty and doctoral students.

Trond Petersen, Chair