Colloquium and Events

Please save the dates of our upcoming departmental colloquia and events.
Colloquium
We're pleased to welcome the following scholars to share their work at our department colloquium. All talks will take place in Albion Small (SSRB 305) on Wednesdays from 12:30pm to 1:50pm CT unless otherwise noted. Additional colloquia and talk titles will be added in the following weeks.

Spring 2026

Wednesday, March 25th (Special PhD admit Visit Day Colloquium - Tea Room, SSRB 201):
Title: Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning
Georg Rilinger (MIT)

Wednesday, April 15th
Title: TBA
Moon Duchin (University of Chicago/Data Science)

Wednesday, April 22nd:
Title: The Revolution Will Be Financialized: Right-Wing Populism and the Evolution of the U.S. Parallel Economy Movement, 2021-2025
Mahesh Somashekhar (UIC)

Wednesday, May 6th:
Title: TBA
Tony Cheng (Duke University)

Wednesday, May 20th:
Title: TBA
David Smilde (Tulane University)
 

Winter 2026

Wednesday, February 4th:

Title: Enduring Empire: U.S. Statecraft and Race-Making in the Philippines

katrina quisumbing king (Northwestern University)

Wednesday, February 18th:

Title: Contrapuntal Sociology: Operationalizing Edward Said as Relationalist Method in a Neo-Imperial 21st
Century

Jonathan Wyrtzen (Yale University)

Wednesday, February 25th:

Title: Religious Change in China After Mao: Toward a New Sociology of Religion

Yanfei Sun (Zhejiang University)

Fall 2025

Wednesday, October 15th: 

Title: Surveillance, Policing, and Big Tech: Lessons from Baltimore

Benjamin H. Snyder (Williams College)

Wednesday, October 22nd: 

Title: Working for Debt. Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States

Simon Bittmann (University of Chicago and University of Strasbourg)

Wednesday, November 5th: 

Title: Organizational and economic foundations of authoritarian resilience: A political articulation approach

Cihan Tuğal (UC Berkeley)

Wednesday, November 19th: 

Title: Events and intergroup relations

Nicolo Cavalli (Bocconi University)