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Welcome to Berkeley Sociology

Berkeley’s Sociology Department is known around the world for its excellence in research and teaching. Our faculty advance cutting edge research and teach in most sociological specialities. Our PhDs are leaders in universities and research centers across the US and in many other countries. And our BAs populate the ranks of innumerable professions, bringing with them the skills and special perspective of Berkeley sociology. 

We are proud to make these contributions from the world’s leading public university. At Berkeley, we combine intellectual rigor with a commitment to public service through our research, teaching, and service on campus and beyond. 

For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.

Faculty Spotlight
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz
Associate Professor
Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Knowledge and Culture, Latinx Politics and Identity, Political Sociology, Du Boisian Sociology, Ethnographic and Qualitative Methods
Daniel Aldana Cohen
Assistant Professor of Sociology
climate emergency; political economy; eco-apartheid; inequalities of race and class; urban studies; political sociology
Loïc Wacquant
Embodiment, penal state, comparative urban inequality and marginality, racial domination, politics of reason, social epistemology, social theory.
In Memoriam
Albert Einstein (1941)
Albert Einstein (1941)
EMERITUS PROFESSOR

Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…

Faculty Publishing
While attention has been focused on high-level struggles over control of giant enterprises in China and the former Soviet bloc, a remarkable but underreported revolution has been occurrin...

The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China

While attention has been focused on high-level struggles over control of giant enterprises in China and the former Soviet bloc, a remarkable but underreported revolution has been occurring at the ground level. This volume examines the profiles of entrepreneurs and the patterns of business development in the transitioning countries. Bringing together the perspectives of all the social science disciplines, from economics and political science to sociology and anthropology, the contributors identify the criteria for survival and success of independent bu...
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Departmental Colloquium Series

Michaela Appeltova, “Embodied Socialism? Gendered Bodies and Medical Expertise across the Iron Curtain”

Monday, October 16th, 2023 at 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom

Abstract: This talk focuses on the key role of medical experts in changing ideas about gender and the body in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the political upheaval of the 1960s. The fashioning of one’s body and its cultivation, criticized as a bourgeois holdover in the Stalinist 1950s, came to be demanded from below and promoted from above as part of socialist lifestyle in the 1970s. Embedded in a transnational circulation of discourses and practices – bodily health, fitness as well as aesthetics - medical experts in socialist Czechoslovakia helped facilitate the emergence of new conceptions of femininity and masculinity, and increasingly promoted the link between the body and individual self-realization. As the talk shows, processes generally associated with the post-1989 transformations emerged already in the late socialist period.