Featured Faculty

Lori Peek

Lori Peek is professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center and at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on socially marginalized populations in disaster, and she leads several efforts to move social science research into policy and practice. Peek is co-author of Children of Katrina, author of Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, and co-editor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora. She also helped write Safer, Stronger, Smarter: A Guide to Improving School Natural Hazard Safety—which is the first comprehensive natural hazards-focused school safety guidance for the nation. Peek is the principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported CONVERGE facility, the Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network, and the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Extreme Events Research (ISEEER) network.

Jill Harrison

Jill Lindsey Harrison’s research identifies cultural relations and political economic processes that disproportionately situate members of racially marginalized, Indigenous, and working-class communities in dangerous spaces and precarious conditions that contribute to inequalities in life opportunity, illness, and death. She also identifies ways the state, social movements, and other institutions can more effectively redress those inequalities. She has done so through various cases of environmental and workplace inequality in the contemporary United States; her current work focuses on government agencies’ environmental justice reform efforts. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she published Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2011), which won book awards from the Rural Sociological Society and the Association of Humanist Sociology, and From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies (MIT Press, 2019), which received Honorable Mention for the 2020 Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology. You can read about her research in these articles in Salon and The Coloradoan.

Graduate Student Spotlights

Jocelyn West Awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Melissa Villareal received the ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG)

Bertha Bermúdez Tapia awarded the Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Bertha Bermúdez Tapia’s important work at the U.S.-Mexico border was highlighted in A&S Magazine!

The University of Colorado Boulder Department of Sociology emphasizes the importance of diverse voices and experiences for strengthening our teaching, research, and service to broader communities. As a department committed to justice and equity, our goal is to create an environment that welcomes and supports everyone. We are a member of the American Sociological Association, abide by its Code of Ethics, and expect our faculty, students, and staff to adhere to its code.

Here is the department of sociology's inclusive excellence plan.  

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