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Department of Sociology
University of British Columbia
Office: AnSo 3125
Phone: (604) 827-5511
Fax: (604) 822-6161
Email: ngross(at)interchange.ubc.ca
Neil Gross taught at the University of Southern California and Harvard University before joining the UBC faculty in 2008. Trained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D., 2002), and holding a BA in Legal Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (1992), Gross has special interests in sociological theory, politics, the sociology of ideas and academic life, and the sociology of culture.
He is the editor of Sociological Theory, a quarterly journal of the American Sociological Association.
Gross’s first book, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 2008), was reviewed in The Economist, The American Prospect, the San Francisco Chronicle, n+1, the New York Observer, the Times Higher Education Supplement (UK), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Germany), NRC Boeken (The Netherlands), Library Journal, Choice, and Publishers Weekly. Academic reviews appeared in Contemporary Sociology, Canadian Journal of Sociology, Critical Sociology, Revue francaise de science politique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Krisis, Metapsychology, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, the Journal of American Studies, and the Journal of American History. A Spanish-language edition was published in 2010 by the University of Valencia Press.
His new book is Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, published by Harvard University Press. Click to download supplementary tables for the book and Stata .do files.
With Charles Camic and Michele Lamont, Gross is co-editor of Social Knowledge in the Making, published by the University of Chicago Press (2011).
He is also co-editor and co-translator, with Robert Alun Jones, of Durkheim’s Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883-4 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and is working on an edited volume on professors and their politics (with Solon Simmons).
Gross’s research has been profiled in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other newspapers and magazines.
SELECTED ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
2012. "Why Are Professors Liberal?" (with Ethan Fosse). Theory & Society 41:127-168.
2011. "Academic Conferences and the Making of Philosophical Knowledge" (with Crystal Fleming). Pp. 151-79 in Social Knowledge in the Making, edited by Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michele Lamont. University of Chicago Press.
2011. “Explaining Professors’ Politics: Is It a Matter of Self-Selection?” (With Catherine Cheng.) In Diversity in American Higher Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach, edited by Lisa Stulberg and Sharon Weinberg. Routledge.
2011. "The Contemporary American Conservative Movement" (with Tom Medvetz and Rupert Russell). Annual Review of Sociology 37:325-54.
2011. "American Academe and the Knowledge-Politics Problem." Pp. 111-141 in The American Academic Profession: Changing Forms and Functions, edited by Joseph Hermanowicz. Johns Hopkins University Press.
2011. “Replies.” Replies to critical essays about Richard Rorty for a special issue of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47:46-61. (Essays by Joseph Bryant, Jim Good, Bruce Kuklick, and Alan Sica.)
2010. "Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism." The American Sociologist 41:337-357.
2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74:358-79.
2009. “The Religiosity of American College and University Professors” (with Solon Simmons.) Sociology of Religion 70:101-129.
2007. “Pragmatism and Phenomenology in 20th-Century American Sociology.” In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig Calhoun. University of Chicago Press.
2005. “A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements” (with Scott Frickel.) American Sociological Review 70:204-232.
2005. “The Detraditionalization of Intimacy Reconsidered.” Sociological Theory 23:286-311.
2003. “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Ideas.” Theory & Society 32:93-148.
2002. “Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher: Status, Self-Concept, and Intellectual Choice.” American Sociological Review 67:52-76.