Scott Brooks studies gender naturalistically, through fieldwork and participant observation. Professor Brooks is currently engaged in making sense of the role and use of basketball for young men in urban settings and the role of adult males in the lives of young basketball players. Moreover, Professor Brooks is interested in how individuals play and use gender roles via interaction to define themselves and others.

Katja M. Guenther (PhD, University of Minnesota, 2006) conducts research on gender, social movements, and the state in comparative perspective. She is especially interested in how gender and opportunities for feminist resistance vary across places and scales of governance. Her primary research project focuses on the development of local feminist movements in eastern Germany since the collapse of state socialism there. A secondary branch of her research program examines interactions between the gender policies of the European Union (EU) and the gender policies of the EU’s member states. She employs feminist methods and epistemologies in her fieldwork. She has published papers in edited anthologies and the journal Social Politics: International Journal on Gender, State, and Society, and has papers forthcoming in Politics & Gender and Qualitative Research.

Alfredo Mirandé (PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1967) has published two books and a number of articles that focus on gender. La Chicana: The Mexican American Woman, co-authored with Evangelina Enriquez, was the first work on Chicanas published by a major press (University of Chicago). Mirandé is also the author of Hombres y Machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture, Westview Press. Mirandé has published a number of articles focusing on the intersection of race, class, gender, and law, and teaches graduate and undergraduate in these areas.

Karen Pyke (PhD, University of California, Irvine, 1993) studies the gendered and racial experiences of second generation Asian Americans, “parachute” children from Asia who live in the U.S. apart from their parents, and multiracial and biracial Asian Americans. She is especially interested in gendered racism, internalized oppression and the reproduction of inequality, and the co-construction of gender and ethnic identity. Pyke has also done research on gender, class, and power dynamics in marriage. She has published research in Gender & Society, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Family Issues, and Qualitative Sociology.

Ellen Reese (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998) examines the politics of welfare in the United States, past and present. She is currently writing a book comparing the 1950s welfare backlash with the present one. Her book focuses on how race, class, and gender interests conspired to limit poor mother’s welfare rights in both periods, and why welfare retrenchment has worsened in recent years. Her latest research project examines contemporary women’s mobilization to improve their welfare rights and public childcare policies. Her research has been published in Gender & Society, Work and Occupations, Social Politics: International Journal on Gender, State, and Society, Journal of Poverty, and Race, Gender, and Class.

Jan Stets (PhD, Indiana University, 1987) works in the area of the social psychology of gender. She examines male/female self-conceptions, gender identity, gender differences in emotion, gender interaction patterns, and gender socialization. In general, her research attempts to show how gendered social structural conditions (that are often inequitable) infiltrate interaction and actors' self-views, and how actors' self-views and interaction patterns operate to sustain gendered structural arrangements. Her research has appeared in Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Science Research, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Family Issues, and Sociological Perspectives.

The Department of Sociology has slated its next available faculty position to be for a specialist in the area of Gender and Criminology.