Overview

The Department of Sociology at Emory University is a vigorous intellectual community that offers a graduate program designed to prepare students for academic and research careers. Our graduate program provides rigorous training in theory, research design, and statistics.

While our faculty cover a wide range of topics in their research and teaching, our collective interests cohere around the following four topics:

• Culture: collective memory; cultural foundations of inequality; gender and racial ideologies; media production and consumption; textual analysis; etc.
• Health: social determinants of health; health inequalities; mental health and illness; religion and public health; etc.
• Social Inequality: race, class, and ethnicity; inequality as related to education, health, work and occupations; etc.
• Social Psychology: interpersonal and group processes; social structure and personality; status and power; justice; racial attitudes; legitimacy; identity formation; emotions; etc.

As part of our graduate program, we ask that our graduate students work at the overlap of two of those topics. Doing so provides not only breadth and connection to the broader discipline, it also allows our graduate students to build synergistically on the insights contained by scholars working across these topics. 

Our graduate program has the following salient features:

• Preparation for careers within and beyond academia
• Five years of Graduate School funding supplemented by Professional Development Support funds
• Extensive teacher training as part of the Laney Graduate School TATTO program, including a special departmental seminar ("Teaching Sociology") and independent teaching opportunities
• A strong tradition of faculty mentoring / collaboration and a low student-faculty ratio
• An active and supportive graduate student culture, which includes the Coalition of Graduate Sociologists (COGS)
• High-level student scholarship, reflected in publications in top generalist and specialist journals
• A new dual degree program in Sociology and Public Health

By virtue of our location, Emory Sociology graduate students are able to draw on a range of resources within the University and across the Atlanta area, including: 

• African American Studies 
• Candler School of Theology
• The Carter Center
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) 
• Goizueta Business School 
• The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference 
• The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change
• National Center for Civil and Human Rights
• Rollins School of Public Health
• Quantitative Theory and Methods 
• Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies