Welcome to Georgetown's Sociology Department
Welcome to Georgetown's Sociology Department website. A leader in scholarship and research, the department is home to important players in the academic world whose work is fresh, exciting, and innovative, and who are dedicated to bringing that same intellectual spirit into the classroom.
A Message from the Chair: Many Welcomes and New Options
In early January, with much help from partner-colleagues across the university – special commendations to Jodi Ernst and Jennifer Alldredge -- our physical possessions and ourselves were moved over to the Car Barn, into Suite 209, which in part overlooks the Potomac. Our new office spaces offer a tradeoff relative to the ICC area: further from the pleasant hustle and bustle of center campus, but brighter, airier, more spacious, and, if possible, more welcoming to us and our guests. Please come visit us in our new “digs”: you are welcome now just as you were when we lived in the ICC. You should also be aware that, in these last few years, the Department of Sociology has sustained its years-long record of increasing student interest in what we have to offer. With the skills and energies offered by “only” 6 to 9 members of the ordinary faculty, plus 3 full-time visiting faculty members, and several other colleagues, we now enroll on average over 900 students per semester in our courses, and all of those students are taught only by the faculty, not by teaching assistants. Georgetown College’s students probably have figured out that in our major and minor they will receive focused and detailed training in the field, and learn how to think rigorously about the study of socially important matters. Thus they have swelled the ranks of our majors and minors: we now have the 4th highest number of majors in the College of Arts and Sciences, numbers surpassed only by departments with triple and even quadruple our numbers of faculty members. Given impressive numbers of majors and also minors, along with the rigor of our required courses, we will be changing a decades-long pattern of junior-year course-offerings. As of Fall 2011, we will be offering each of our required courses in Methods (SOCI 201), Theory (202), and Social Statistics (203) in both the Fall terms and the Spring terms. One instant reward: smaller class-sections of those courses. Moreover, those of you wishing to do a junior-year semester of study abroad will no longer be sharply inconvenienced. And more of us will get the chance to teach you those core courses on a recurring basis. And there is yet more to welcome: Professor Brian McCabe (SFS '02) returns to Georgetown to join the Sociology Department, to teach courses such as The Contemporary City and Project D.C. But wait, there’s more! We will also be joined by yet one other colleague come the Fall, who will help us to teach Theory and other courses, who as yet remains undecided (a draft choice to be named later?).
We wish you well in this Spring term, especially all (NB) of our seniors crafting the senior theses required of all Sociology majors. So take some time this Spring to join myself and Professors Hall, McDonald, McNamara, Casanova, Dyson, Hinkson, Daddio, Mashayekhi, Schiwietz, Stiles, Imamura, Dahl, Bandarage, and Bienenstock for adventures in Sociology.
Have a great year.
Timothy Wickham-Crowley,
Associate Professor and Chair, Sociology
